Rambling prose: Can Facebook save us?

Rambling prose: Can Facebook save us?

Can Facebook save us?

We, as a people, have deceived ourselves.  We’re convinced that because we can send men into outer space, tame rivers, build skyscrapers, split the atom, talk with each other from thousands of miles away through a gadget smaller than our hand and even watch television on it, that we have evolved beyond 'Homo erectus.'  I’m of the opinion that we have devolved into a viral plague, and like a virus we invade our host and destroy it from within.  I am a true believer in science.  I have always believed that it represents the highest and purest manifestation of the one characteristic that sets us apart from all other life as we know it, sentience.  Self awareness, that state of being that allows 'Homo sapiens' to look into the heavens and understand that it is not eternity, not God, but only our imperfect perception of the laws of physics.  It is also what allows me to look into myself and write this essay.  But I am beginning to see science as no different from religion, just tools of this virus, not much different from the protein and nucleic acids of all viruses.   They fool the superorganism, this world we live in, into thinking we are just one of its own cells.  But when we gain entry they take over the host’s own machinery to make more virus, eventually destroying it from within.  Religion and science are our tools of viral insinuation, replication and destruction.

I don’t know when it began, how this 'Homo virus' evolved from 'Homo sapiens.'  We were always a violent species.  It is possible the fault, if there is such a concept in evolution, lies in our limbic system, that ancient part of our brain which controls our emotions and our survival mechanisms.  Konrad Lorenz said it 50 years ago:

"All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding
of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical
progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead

to favor humanity's destruction"  

We are lions in sheep’s clothing.  Our bodies, designed like those of peaceful herbivores, have no fangs like the sabretooth tigers, no speed like the cheetah, or stealth like the cobra.  From the neck down, we are lumbering sloths and should have become extinct long before now.  Something in our limbic system got programmed to make us hunters and a hunter with no weapon is sure to be killed.  That could have been the end of this story right there.  Evolution has made many wrong turns but we rarely learn the results because there are none.  A limbic system designed for a lion in the body of a lamb.  What a joke.  But in one evolutionary ‘Hail Mary’, we survived.  We learned to use tools.  That moment, for surely it was a moment, maybe no different from a child taking its first step, but one that had not been taken by the species for thousands of years until then, saved us.  That one defining moment is most wonderfully captured by Stanly Kubrik in the movie “2001: A space odyssey.”  In this scene a group of apes are vying for access to a small watering hole.  They behave like any group of apes behave when trying to be aggressive.  They make threatening sounds and hand gestures.  But that’s all they can do until one group gets tired or intimidated and leaves.  That is, until one ape picks up the leg bone of a dead animal and slaps it into his hand.  In that moment he understands that he is not limited to grunts and gestures.  That that bone can break other bones, smash heads and kill animals.  The leap may have taken thousands of years, with baby steps along the way.  But slowly, our ancestors learned they could survive with tools and weapons.  The evolutionary step that prevented our extinction became the means of our own future destruction, and unfortunately that of many more living beings besides ourselves.

But though our limbus may have made us hunters, it is religion and science that are our weapons.  Hunters are biologically programmed to kill prey but not themselves.  Predatory behavior towards other species is crucial to survival but intraspecies combativeness rarely leads to death.  There is a switch, especially in animals equipped to kill easily, that stops the aggressor from delivering the ‘coup de grace’.  Bared teeth around a jugular vein signal the end of the fight, establishing a winner and a loser left alive to fight another day. (Don't get me started on animals bred specifically to kill each other for sport by their human trainers.)  But that impulse for self preservation is less ingrained in more peaceful species, those animals not dependent on killing for their food.  And so it is that humans have less inhibitions toward killing each other than any predatory animal should.  That is where religion and science take over.  With our teeth around the jugular vein of our enemy, religion fools our brain into thinking different people with different beliefs are really different species.  But it is science that gives us the tools to accomplish mass murder, extinctions of entire species of beings and eventually ourselves.

The process that has led us here to this time and this place, possibly the ultimate time and place, has been in the works for thousands of years.  It may be our privilege and our curse that we get to say we were the last of our species.  But whether it is now, next year, next generation or ten generations from then, we are sliding inevitably towards the abyss.  Our cerebral cortex, that wonder of evolutionary adaptation, that mutation which serendipitously saved our skin, has taken over and will be our deathnell in the end. 

If there is a positive note in all this it may come from our cerebral cortex.  I used to believe humans could work out any problem with technology.  If we could send a man to the moon or increase food production by a factor of a thousand, then with enough cooperation we could repair the ozone hole or solve the energy problem.  But our limbus keeps getting in the way.  Agression trumps innovation.  Thus my cynicism.

Now my hope.  Stuart Kauffman has proposed a theory of life.  In short he suggested that there is a realm in any complex system between order and chaos.  Start with a few light bulbs and connect two of them with wire.  Repeat the process and eventually you will end up connecting three and then these will connect with three more and so on.  Eventually the result is a vast network of randomly connected light bulbs.  Turn on the juice and some interesting things can happen.  With no regulation on how the juice flows there is just chaos.  With too many rules there is just repetitive blinking.  But tweak the system just a little, put in some loose controls and gradually, in some bizarre way, we begin to see order emerge just at the edge of chaos.  This may be how life began on earth, how the cerebral cortex developed sentience and how we may dig ourselves out of the mess we have wrought.

Facebook has created a network with over 500,000,000 nodes, each humming along with its own random input.  Maybe, just maybe, as long as we leave it alone, there will someday occur a unifying factor,  an organizing rule, say a movement to foster peace, or to save the environment, or to feed the hungry.  It might not take too much to make this superorganism develop a superconsciousness just at the edge of chaos that will keep us from sliding down the slippery slope to an otherwise inevitable puddle of ‘gray goo.’       

The earth is bleeding

Is it possible that in the grand scheme of things the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a good thing?  Sometimes we need to be hit over the head to wake up.  This oil spill, as awful as it is, and I think it's the worst thing to happen to North America in my lifetime, still represents only a fraction of the destruction of our environment perpetrated by oil companies.  They have been destroying the earth by bits and pieces for 75 years, drilling in places where the indigenous people have no say in what happens, no voice to cry out when their lives are destroyed by pollution and loss of their livelihood.  The Nigerian delta, once one of the most biodiverse regions on earth is now a tar pit.  Fishing is gone, disease is rampant and the oil companies are in partnership with a corrupt dictatorship that sells the birthrights of its people to feed themselves.  Will we wake up now?  Now that they have dirtied our own back yard, polluted our own fishing grounds.  Will we begin to realize what has been happening in South America for decades?  Oil is the root of all modern evil.  It spawns multinational companies that hide behind free enterprise to mask a total lack of conscience about the raping of our planet.  They are responsible for the destruction of our rain forests, where we lose areas the size of Connecticut each year.  They construct roads into the forests to gain access to areas they know will yield only meager amounts of oil but will attract multitudes of poor people eager for farming land, clearing the trees like army ants devouring everything in their wake.  They conspire with corrupt politicians to thwart populist uprisings that might inhibit their lust for more and sometimes they are complicit in crimes including murder to further their goals.  In 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa, a vocal and popular environmentalist was executed in Nigeria for speaking out against the raping and devastation of his homeland.  There are serious allegations that some oil companies, specifically Chevron and Shell, were complicit in helping the corrupt government to quell uprisings and execute Saro-Wiwa.
So is our oil spill a good thing?  British Petrolium may go bankrupt.  It's stock is falling like a shooting star and if it get's hit with enough penalties, even this multibillion dollar blood-sucker may go bust.  But what then?  Will they no longer be responsible for paying their debts?  Will the executives exercise golden parachutes and slink away into the ether while BP assets get bought up by Chevron and Shell for pennies on the dollar?  And then who will clean up the mess.
Oil is a curse.  Those who were screaming "drill, baby drill," only a year ago are now screaming at the government for "letting this happen."  They let it happen.  They caused it to happen.  They enable these blood thirsty corporations to feed on us and to destroy things in weeks that took millenia to create.  I fear that oil will spawn war as it diminishes in availability.  China will want their share and one day their government will trade weapons for oil to governments that just want to kill.  The west will want it's share and their people will not tolerate higher prices, inflation and long lines.  They will encourage more drilling, more imperialism and rape of underdeveloped countries.
There really is only one answer.  We MUST find a way to replace oil as our source of energy.  It is a human imperative if our species is to survive.  As I see it, the only answer is to develop 'fusion energy' as impossible as that may seem.  We should create a multinational consortium of scientists, fund it with a %10 oil tax on every oil company in the world, and develop an alternative.  If we don't, as the oil runs out, so will our societies and our cultures and our humanity.   

Do the right thing

Why is it so difficult for us to do the right thing?  When I was young I once went to a store to buy some plants and when I came out I realized that the teller had failed to charge me for one of the items.  I started to go back to pay for it, $3,  and the person with me couldn't believe I would do that.  I'd gotten away without paying and it was a big store anyway so why not take the money and run?  How many times have we all done something like that?  Myself included.  It's so easy to take the money and run, and so hard to do the right right thing.  It starts young and it pervades our lives.  My daughter told me that she recently went to a community pool with one of her children.  The other two boys were playing ball at the adjacent field and when they were done she opened the back gate to let them in.  My grandson said "mommy, we didn't pay" and she went out and did, thank God (or maybe me.)  She told me her first reaction was to say  "Shh, nobody will know."  That's what they said at Enron.  That's what they said at Goldmann Sachs.  That's what Nixon said.  That's what we say to ourselves when we cheat on our taxes.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young once wrote "Teach your children well..."  And so we must, or sneaking in back doors will enable them to sneak through life without taking responsibility for having integrity.  
Why is it so difficult to do the right thing?  Businessmen with more money than they know how to spend commit fraud and abuse to further their business.  And even when it's not abuse they make decisions based on money instead of doing the right thing.  Politicians who've reached the pinnacle of their careers still take money from lobbyists and vote against their conscience or lose their conscience all together.  They've just forgotten how to do the right thing.
We have recently witnessed the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, a disaster of unsurpassed proportion (the subject of a future blog.)  It is not so terribly surprising to me.  The incentive to make more money forces us to increasingly push the bubble in every endeavor we undertake, without the proper safeguards.  It would serve everyone well to constantly remember that a history of past performance does not insure future rewards.  So now everyone is screaming that drilling 1 mile under the ocean requires more oversight and this terrible environmental disaster should have been foreseen and prevented.  And yet, many of those people screaming the loudest were shouting "Drill, baby, drill" only a few months ago.  More importantly, oil companies know that they continually pollute our environment in rain forests and in oceans.  They know that what they do is bad but are incapable of doing the right thing.  Maybe we should begin to look at preventative measures before the disaster.  Maybe we should look at existing nuclear reactors to see if they're safe enough, or the food industry or coal mining or...You get the point.  It would take more money, drive profits down but it would be the right thing to do.    For whatever reason we have no integrity as a human race.  Let's wake up and understand that doing the right thing is a must.  If we don't teach our children to pay for the $1 toy instead of stealing it, we will never stop the abuse in government and business, the pollution of our planet the murder of innocent victims in third world countries...the very end of the human race.     

Hubris and humility

Hubris and humility.  I've always loved the sound of those two words.  They come from deep inside you, on the back of a breath, as if you were exhaling them from your soul.  And maybe they represent, each in its own way, the essence of who we are.  But they are so different, so antithetical, that if in fact they describe us, then we must choose sides, choose how we wish to be known.  Hubris, the unquestionable belief in our rightness, is often a characteristic of our greatest heroes.  How else would we have become a country, if not for the hubris of John Adams or Ben Franklin?  Where would we be if Christopher Columbus began to question his belief that India was just around the corner?  Isn't that what has driven us to ever greater heights, the confidence of our convictions, the courage to charge on, whether what we did was popular or not?  The greatest athletes believe they're great, that they can win, that they will win, and it is within their power to turn the tide and garner victory from defeat.  So what is it that makes hubris so distasteful?  Why do we dislike arrogance so much?  Is it based on a false belief that we could do what they do...if only?  Maybe some people are just better than the rest of us and deserve to think of themselves that way.  Maybe.  But here's the rub.  Arrogance breeds discord.  Two people on opposite sides of an issue cannot believe themselves absolutely right and not feel the urge to fight.  Righteousness is the mother of contention and the father of war.
In my view the world would be a better place if humans valued humility above hubris.  We would be a better place inhabited by Buddhist monks than Chinese warlords.  We would be better to believe that man is not the brainchild of God, but only a curious development in the vast bush of life.
I have noticed that there are people I have known who seem incapable of having enemies.  People who I can tell are "nice" after five minutes of conversation.  They are soft and gentle and though I don't know what resides in their private mind, I know they are never arrogant and usually humble.  In general women have less hubris then men so I wonder if there is a gene for humility that we lack.  I would like to say that if women ruled the world, there would be no war.  But women who rise to high levels of power seem as corruptable by hubris as their genetic partners, sometimes more-so.  I like to think I am a humble man, but I have this need to project my disdain for poor workmanship as well as arrogant people.  So where does that leave me.  I feel like a snake swallowing its tail, round and round, inside and out.  Bottom line is that hubris beats humility, and the human race (another soulful sound) is destined eventually to be hoist on its own petard of arrogance unless we teach humility to all our children.      

The last bastion of ethics in an unethical world

Tiger Woods cheated on his wife. Why are we so appalled? It could have been worse.

It has become a matter of mundane observation that seemingly every group in modern society is rife with unethical behavior. Whether it is priests molesting children, doctors ripping off Medicare or lawyers chasing ambulances, the news of our day is most often about the wayward nature of our institutions and professions. To be sure there are always the standout heroes, the caregivers, the volunteers, the philanthropes, but they seem to garner our attention for their uniqueness rather than their representation of the whole. Historical perspective seems to give us a sense of “better times” when people played fair, when Platonic ideals were the rule of the day and not the “dog-eat-dog” philosophy we seem to live by. Admittedly every age has had its scandals, from Teapot Dome to Boss Tweed, from Piltdown Man to the frontal lobotomy. Politicians, scientists, businessmen and teachers, builders and reporters, almost every group imaginable seem to have succumbed to the basest instincts of our nature to cheat and lie. But it does seem the past was simpler, slower, less frenetic and fraught with danger. Even I remember the days when my neighbors left their doors open, when I could stroll to my elementary school alone and my mother didn’t worry about me being molested and murdered. Those times, alas, seem to be gone and it will be a Herculean task to prevent them being gone forever.

The answer will not come in the form of more preaching or more legislation. That has clearly not worked. When government tries to incentivize ethics it inevitably foments fraud. Medicare rip-offs are estimated to be on the order of 60 billion dollars a year! But lest we blame doctors for leading the way down this path of corruption, let us not forget the lawyers, who codify kickbacks by calling them referral fees, or politicians who excuse their golf junkets as fund-raisers and rail against sinners while they themselves are the most egregious examples of sin.

In 1998 the biggest story of the day was not war, or famine or genocide. The world was relatively peaceful and the government had a 2 billion dollar surplus. But it was discovered that our president had had extramarital sex with a younger woman. Congress was ready to impeach for high crimes and misdemeanors, and half the country was incensed at his behavior. Never mind that extramarital sex in the White House from Roosevelt to Kennedy, among others, was common knowledge even to school children. Interestingly, the republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, a leader of the impeachment proceedings had been overwhelmingly sanctioned by the House just two years earlier on ethics violations. And representative Bob Livingston who succeeded Gingrich as Speaker-designate to lead the charge, stepped down when he was discovered himself to be having an extramarital affair. A new political sex scandal seems to crop up every year, sometimes every month.

And don’t look to our clergy or our press. The ‘holier than thous’ became the ‘hornier than thees’ and stole the innocence of generations. Not so surprising when organized religion has been responsible for more death and torture in the holy name of salvation than Genghis Kahn, Atilla the Hun, Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung all rolled into one. And when the muckrakers got down into the dirt to bring revelation to the masses it merely spawned the yellow journalists who traffic in rumor, scandal, sensationalism and lies.

Is there any group that is exempt from this pattern? Are accountants so corruptible? Ask the employees and shareholders of Enron and Arthur Anderson. How about engineers? Ask the project managers for the space shuttle Challenger. And what of the soldiers? Each side in every conflict will point to a whole segment of society guilty of the crime of being wrong. Is there an ethical ideal to which they hold other than the great cop out of doing what they’re told?

Well what of sport? That has to be pure. It is the embodiment of the human ideal, the pursuit of excellence and the use of nonviolent competition to satisfy our inherent desire for combat. Yet, no one is unaware of the abuse of enhancement performing drugs in all of sport, from professional football to Olympic swimming. Baseball, the ‘American past-time’, the enjoyment of which is in large part predicated on the comparison to past greats, must now put asterisks next to its players names. Records are no longer really records, just performance enhanced numbers.

And that brings me to the subject of my rantings, because there is yet one true bastion of ethical behavior in our society. In 1925, while competing for the U.S. Open, Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself when his ball moved ‘ever so slightly’, unnoticed by anyone but himself. He went on to lose the tournament in a playoff. When complimented for his sportsmanship he said ‘You might as well praise me for not robbing banks.’ In 2007 Mark Wilson was competing for his first win as a PGA professional. His caddy inadvertently called out the loft of his club on a par 3 and Wilson realized, as they walked to the green, that he may have been in violation of rule 8-1, ‘giving advice to another player.’ He called over a rules official, was awarded a two stroke penalty and lost the outright lead. He prevailed in a sudden death playoff. It is hard to find a single instance of cheating in professional golf and yet the tale is replete with accounts of self- imposed penalties. In 1983 Hale Irwin wiffed a 3 inch putt in the final round of the British Open. It wasn’t a penalty, and could have been excused as a practice stroke but he counted it and missed out of the finals by one shot. The number of stories of self imposed punishments that meant the difference between winning and losing, fame and obscurity, fortune and hardship in the annals of amateur and professional golf would fill many books. In 1986 Ray Floyd lost the lead in the second round of a tournament when he told his playing competitor that his ball had moved right before his putt, and to give him a 5 for the hole.

For sure there are the cheaters who don’t count their strokes, inflate their handicap for the member guest tournament, take mulligans and replace lost balls like police throwing down unmarked weapons at a crime scene. But there has been something existentially pure and moral about the upper echelons of competitive golf. And I, for one, choose to believe it defines the sport itself, or maybe it’s the other way around. Golf won’t make you more ethical if you’re not and if you don’t cheat at golf it doesn’t necessarily hold you’ll be an honest doctor or a faithful husband. But we will only ever regain our innocence and our ideals by teaching our young ones to ‘play nice. And there is no greater landscape to do that on than a beautiful stretch of green grass, pockmarked with pitfalls of quicksand and bottomless wells, to teach us that life may not always be fair but it is best played fairly.

Go ahead and pass new laws to help the sick and the poor, to put restraints on the greedy on Wall Street, to watch over our police lest they go too far in their pursuit of the bad guy, and to monitor the monogamy of our civic leaders. But we will only persevere in regaining the moral high ground if we resolve to reestablish our ethical compass. Instead of teaching business management to new doctors, we would be better off teaching them to memorize the Hippocratic oath. Instead of turning out more lawyers to sue each other, we would be better off making referral fees a violation of ethics. Instead of congressmen making speeches about why they support a bill that benefits their constituents, let them make lobbying illegal. Or let us take our toddlers to the park and teach them the rules of golf.

So Tiger cheated on his wife. Welcome to the world where 50% of us cheat on our spouse and to the world of the rich and famous where that number is probably 80% or higher. (Fame, like extramarital sex…be careful what you wish for.) It’s not an excuse and though there may be an explanation, it’s the equivalent of moving your ball in the rough. You just shouldn’t do it. But it could have been worse. He could have cheated at golf. And though he has confessed his marital sins let us hope and pray that we never see a day when a Mark McGwire or an Alex Rogriquez of golf gets up to say he’s sorry he ever used drugs. Golf will recover from Tiger’s infidelity but, at least for now, it remains the last bastion of ethics in an unethical world.