Beliefs at Age 20 and Age 40

If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.

This famous saying is attributed to Winston Churchill (although it may predate him).

I saw this quoted recently on an online forum, in a discussion about changing one’s mind. I could only think of a few examples of major issues on which I have changed my mind. But there were a lot of examples in which I had come to appreciate the nuances of an argument and realized that my earlier position had been one-dimensional.

This realization inspired my version of the 20/40 aphorism:

At 20 I believed in simplistic answers and held firm convictions, at 40 I understood nuance and was more willing to listen to multiple sides of any position.

May need a little work to make it a snappy quote, but I like it. 

Karl Marx is Back in Style

For the last few decades, and particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Karl Marx was out of fashion. You couldn’t mention him without people sneering at how out of touch you were. This was the era of triumphalism about capitalism’s victory over communism marked by the publication of The End of History.

I knew this was just temporary, because so much of the prejudice was based on a misunderstanding of what Marx had written. Now that we can’t seem to recover from the Great Recession, and more and more people are aware of increasing income inequality in the U.S., things are changing.

Robert Heilbroner, in his classic book on economics The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), writes that Marx’s analysis of capitalism was superb and accurately forecast many things that have since emerged but were not obvious in his day: “But for all its shortcomings—and it is far from infallible, as we shall see—the Marxist model of how capitalism worked was extraordinarily prophetic.”

Just recently I saw an online essay called Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx was Right. It’s a short article and worth the read.

Here’s a quick summary of five of Marx’s predictions that have come true:

1. Capitalism’s chaotic nature; illustrated by the regular cycles of boom and bust. 

2. Capitalism creates imaginary appetites to artificially inflate spending.  The article illustrates this with the iPhone—do we really need a new one every year? 

3. Globalization. Obvious. 

4. Monopoly—WalMart, Google, Microsoft, Amazon… 

5. Low wages mean big profits.

Heilbroner discussed Marx’s analysis of these issues, including the last point of the value of a laborer:

 [T]he laborer, like the capitalist, sells his product for exactly what it is worth—for its value. And its value, like the value of everything else that is sold, is the amount of labor that goes into it—in this case, the amount of labor it takes to ‘make’ labor-power. In other words, a laborer’s salable energies are worth the amount of socially necessary labor it takes to keep that laborer alive. [Economists Adam] Smith and [David] Ricardo would have agreed entirely: the true value of a workman is the wage he needs in order to exist. It is his subsistence wage.

In other words, capitalism’s measure of the correct wage to pay a worker is that which is just enough to keep him/her alive.

Heilbroner concludes:

In the end the figure who must be proven wrong is Marx the Economist, Marx the finicky scholar who laboriously sought to prove, through the welter of surface distractions, that the essence of capitalism is self-destruction. The answer to Marx lies not so much in pointing out the injustices of communism as in demonstrating that in a social atmosphere of which Marx never dreamed, capitalism can continue to evolve and to adapt its institutions to the never-satisfied demands of social justice.

We could add a sixth point to the list above: unsustainability. Capitalism needs constant growth in order to work; it is not a sustainable system. This is why Marx said it would self-destruct.

As just one example, how much evidence will need to accumulate that global climate change is happening before we question the right of capitalists to keep digging up more carbon-based fuel?  Marx predicted that the system of capitalism would self-destruct; it’s getting to the point where we need to start worrying whether it will take the human race with it.

Helen Keller and Consciousness

Is language required for human consciousness, by which I mean self-awareness?

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.

With these words Helen Keller began an essay in her book entitled The World I Live In (Essay 11: “Before the Soul Dawn”). She continues,

I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

Ms. Keller describes that famous moment when she realized that the finger-movements in her hand meant “water” in this way:

That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song. Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought.

After reading this book of essays I got Ms. Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life. Here she gives a more thorough account of that auspicious day. Ms. Sullivan, her teacher, had been with her for several weeks at this point, and taught her lots of words, but she had no comprehension that this was anything more than a game. One morning the two were spelling “doll” while holding an actual doll. Ms. Keller got exasperated and threw the doll on the floor, breaking it.

Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.

The two went outside and ended up at the well-house where the profound moment happened; when the understanding that words have meanings swept through Ms. Keller’s consciousness. As they went back into the house,

I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow. 

I was very moved by this passage. The first experience Ms. Keller had after her breakthrough, other than the desire to learn as much as possible, was the complex human emotion of remorse. Somehow the use of language connected her in a profound way to the people and larger world around her. Is language the key to what makes us human?

I had never read these books before, and I recommend them to everyone as a way to gain a deeper appreciation of what it is to be human. The first impression you get is of the beautiful soul that inhabited the body of Helen Keller.

Second, you recognize that the human spirit can overcome all obstacles. What astounded me was her ability to visualize! She makes it clear that there is a physical world of vision, and a mental world of vision, and I bet that when you read her rhapsodies you’ll think as I did that the world of the mind is more beautiful and full than that of the physical. Through a lot of The World I Live In she is defensive about her ability to use words like “I see,” (clearly she was criticized for using such words), but reading her essays it is clear that she did see, and deeply.

Guaranteed Annual Income Update

Last month I wrote a blog post about the concept of a guaranteed annual income (GAI). There is a referendum on the ballot in Switzerland this spring that, if enacted, would mean every Swiss citizen would receive about $2800 a month.

The idea of guaranteeing a basic minimum income to all citizens was studied in the United States and Canada in the 1960s and 70s, with favorable results, but then in the 1980s the Reagan era brought a conservative turn away from social programs and all of that was forgotten.

However, the New York Times recently reported that the Cherokee Indians of North Carolina are showing that a GAI is not only an effective anti-poverty measure, but creates such positive results that it is cost-effective in the long-run.

In 1996 the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians opened a casino, and elected to distribute some of the profits equally to all the tribe’s members. Jane Costello, an epidemiologist at Duke University Medical School,

had already been following 1,420 rural children in the area, a quarter of whom were Cherokee, for four years. That gave her a solid baseline measure. Roughly one-fifth of the rural non-Indians in her study lived in poverty, compared with more than half of the Cherokee. By 2001, when casino profits amounted to $6,000 per person yearly, the number of Cherokee living below the poverty line had declined by half. 

The poorest children tended to have the greatest risk of psychiatric disorders, including emotional and behavioral problems. But just four years after the supplements began, Professor Costello observed marked improvements among those who moved out of poverty. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Already well-off Cherokee children, on the other hand, showed no improvement. The supplements seemed to benefit the poorest children most dramatically.

As the years passed Dr. Costello continued the study and found:

Minor crimes committed by Cherokee youth declined. On-time high school graduation rates improved. And by 2006, when the supplements had grown to about $9,000 yearly per member, Professor Costello could make another observation: The earlier the supplements arrived in a child’s life, the better that child’s mental health in early adulthood.

Dr. Costello argues that a major factor in the improvements she measured was the reduction in parental stress due to an assured basic income. Other studies have also shown this, including the GAI experiments I mentioned earlier.

A nonprofit organization called The Families and Work Institute conducted a study in the 1990s called “Ask the Children.” One of the questions was, "If you were granted one wish, and you only have one wish that could change the way your mother’s or your father’s work affects your life, what would that wish be?" The largest response was, “I wish my parents were less stressed and tired.”

The surprising finding from the Cherokee experiment is that society can actually save money with GAI (continuing from the New York Times article):

Randall Akee, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator of Professor Costello’s, argues that the supplements actually save money in the long run. He calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs — the payments to parents while the children were minors. That’s a conservative estimate, he says, based on reduced criminality, a reduced need for psychiatric care and savings gained from not repeating grades. (The full analysis is not yet published.)

This cost-benefit analysis is why some conservatives are in favor of a GAI. The most well known advocate was Milton Friedman who championed the idea in Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Today, Charles Murray, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, argues that a lot of government bureaucracy can be eliminated with a minimum income—food stamps, aid to dependent children, disability, unemployment, social security, etc. (Book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State).

I think the guaranteed minimum income is an idea whose time has (almost) come.

We Need A New Economic System

According to Time magazine, “the world’s 85 richest individuals now own as much as the poorest half of the 7 billion global population, according to a report released by Oxfam” last week.

Just contemplate that statistic for a moment. Eighty-five people. Own more than 3,500,000,000 people put together.

Imagine what a gathering of 85 people would look like. Eighty-five people wouldn’t even fill up the small music club I frequent; it’s an intimate club and it holds 225 people.

Now imagine a gathering of 3.5 billion (a little harder to do!). The two groups have the same amount of wealth.

Is it just me or is there something seriously wrong with this picture?!

The Time magazine article goes on to say, “The report calls on governments to crackdown on international tax dodgers and invest in public institutions such as healthcare, as well as implement progressive taxes and eradicate opaque political structures that encourage corruption.”

I think we need to go a lot farther than that. I think we need to rethink our economic system completely. Tom Toles, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, is a utopian dreamer like me. In his blog post today he wrote:

I know economics is really resistant to efforts to make it more equitable and fair and satisfying, but we’re going to have to take another run at it anyway. Marxism was an attempt to do it with a very blunt instrument, all cast iron gears and belching steam and hammers and sickles. It was a colossal mess. But we’re smarter now. Everything else works better, so why not a more sophisticated model of redistributed economic benefits? What would that look like? 

It would look like a conscious dedicated plan and effort to get all that grunt work [of labor] into the newly capable hands of computer-guided robot slaves. And distribute some of the profits from that endeavor and some of the Do What You Love (DWYL) opportunities to everyone. We can Do It If We Want To. (DIIWWT)

Here’s Mr. Toles’ cartoon today, in the same theme:

Spinning a Web of Self

I am digitizing the text of the metaphysics my husband Arthur and I wrote twenty years ago, The Game of God, in preparation for publishing it as an ebook. It’s been many years since I read it, so it’s an interesting experience.

As I typed in the chapter on the evolution of human consciousness, I was reminded of Daniel Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained [which I quoted in an earlier post, Intelligent Plants], which was published about the same time as our book. In particular I was struck by a similarity in the discussion of the self: both books asserted that the self is constructed as a survival strategy.

This has made me realize that I have been taking the self (ego) way too seriously. That is, I’ve thought of the self as some entity that is as real and solid as my physical body that I am stuck with. Maybe I can exercise it and keep it toned, but the basic elements are cast in stone. The confusing advice of many spiritual teachers and books (including my own, The Game of God) is we’re ego-dominated and we need to escape it (somehow). It’s a formidable opponent that we have to battle.

But the concept of self as survival strategy has shifted my perspective in a way I find liberating.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - a first look

I’m reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, (TOOC) by Julian Jaynes while typing in my and my husband's book The Game of God (in preparation for releasing it as an ebook), which is an interesting experience, and gratifying because the section on the development of the mind in TGOG is not contradictory to Jaynes’ classic.

TOOC is fascinating. It looks at the same period of human history as Ken Wilber’s Up from Eden (which I have described as a frame-changing book for me), but from a completely different perspective. One difference, which I was relieved to find, is that he basically ignores the details of mythology. Both Up From Eden and the similar book Cosmic Consciousness were filled with the names of Gods and it was easy to get overwhelmed. But Jaynes sees all those various Gods as irrelevant details of the larger picture.

Jayne's theory is that humans didn't possess "meta-consciousness," that is, the awareness of being conscious, until about 2500 years ago. Jaynes estimate the use of language developed around 70,000 years ago. Then about 10,000 years ago a new development occurred—hearing a voice in the mind. This was the emergence of the bicameral mind. By “bicameral” he means the two brain hemispheres were split, and the interior voice, a function of the right hemisphere, was interpreted as the voice of a God or King. There was no conception of “self.”

Then about 2500 years ago a breakdown occurred, which was actually an integration of the interior mind as part of a new conception, the self. The gods retreated and quit speaking.

Jaynes provides evidence in many different writings of 2000-3000 years ago. His main texts are the two works attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad has no terms for self, or thought, or reflection. Everything is directed by the Gods. But the Odyssey is different: all of a sudden there is a hero, an  individual who has thoughts and wishes.

He also uses the Old Testament, and in particular suggests the reader compare Amos with Ecclesiastes, which I did. Amos is almost completely the ravings of God against various peoples, with a very short section about Amos, and none of that has any reference to what Amos thought. In contrast, Ecclesiastes feels like the first self-help book, an advice manual full of the wisdom accumulated by a thinking human being. The author repeatedly says “I thought to myself” or “I applied my mind.”

I think the difference between Wilber and Jaynes is that Wilber believes in God and Jaynes doesn’t. Wilber suggested that those mythical Gods were visions of the actual Underlying Ground of Being, distorted by the level of consciousness of the most advanced people of the time, but real nonetheless. Jaynes calls the Gods “hallucinations.”

This is just a first impressionistic post on the book, I’ll be writing more soon.