DemocratDad

The Values of Science

Telling the truth. Relying on evidence whenever possible. Parsimony (beautiful word!), i.e., going with the most simple explanation when given a choice. Always, always, turning to others to verify results.

And above all, the rejection of certainty and a corresponding commitment to revising one's thinking when faced with new facts.

Don't let anyone ever tell you that science does not have values.

I found this clip very moving. It's worth watching to the end.

 

Political Labels and Political Philosophies: Take the Test

See where you come down on the electoral compass. It's a great way to test your political self-image against the actual policy positions of the candidates in this election year.

I fall squarely in the upper left quadrant, and my answers are closest to John Edwards and, after him, Barack Obama. So I guess I am an unabashed lefty after all...

What's curious about my electoral compass-point, though, is that in terms of my political philosophy I am actually a conservative -- in the sense that I believe in anti-Utopian, gradualist change, and lower-case meaning derived from contingent cultural traditions.

But I happened to be raised in Berkeley, so the values that I want to conserve are lefty values, emphasizing freedom of expression and equal opportunity for all, instead of religious authoritarianism or private property absolutism. Other people come to liberalism through a different path -- they break away from their upbringing and embrace a transformative, radical position in support of abstract human rights or the rejection of the Powers That Be. I come to my liberalism the way that 18th century "liberals" like Jefferson did: because it seems to me that it allows the maximum of human flourishing, while responding to our deep down sense of fairness. I do not need to believe that it will ever create a Perfect Union, only that we are always striving together, as the Constitution has it, towards "a more perfect Union."

Where do you fall on the electoral compass? What is the political philosophy that lurks behind your specific policy preferences?

The Big Lie that Religious People Tell One Another

The big lie that religious people tell one another is not that God exists.

That is the small lie.

Any claim which goes unsupported by evidence -- and moreover, does not even consider evidence (except reports of "miracles") to be necessary -- can only be described as small, since it is insubstantial, no more than a hunch really.

Sure, this little lie about God can get elaborated into something solemn and serious enough to command the adherence of wonderful, well-meaning people all over the world... But it's really just -- what shall we call it? -- a goof, a conjecture, a stab in the dark.

We all know people who believe that it is "Our Father Who Art in Heaven" who exists (some may be reading this post -- hello!). Others say it is Allah; others Vishnu. Others the Flying Spaghetti Monster (a site I recommend, if for nothing else than for its impressive control of tone).

For the nonbeliever, these lies are perhaps amusing, sometimes engaging, sometimes even deadly, but little lies. No more.

The big lie that religious people tell is that a world without God is a world without hope or meaning.

On the last day of November, Pope Benedict XVI issued an encyclical which parroted this lie.

The New York Times, true to form on the topic of atheism, then echoed this lie uncritically in an article entitled, "In Pope's Latest Teaching, an Argument for Hope, Not Atheism, in the Face of Struggle." (For the internet edition the title was shortened to "Pope Stresses Hope in Latest Teaching." If I were an editor at the Times, simply as a matter of saving space, I would just go with "Pope Stresses" -- and lose the rest. It works!)

Here's the letter which I wrote to the New York Times after seeing that article (it went unpublished -- no surprise):

Re: "In Pope's Latest Teaching, an Argument for Hope, Not Atheism, in the Face of Struggle," December 1, 2007.

As an atheist, I recognize that, for many religious people, their faith brings them great hope for the future (the "ocean of infinite love" that Pope Benedict XVI describes, as well as other rewards in this life).

I would only ask that religious people stop insisting that my outlook on life is correspondingly hopeless and meaningless. On the contrary, my atheism gives me great hope; it renews my commitment to creating, with others, a world filled with love, fairness, empathy, and other good things, since, in all likelihood, this is it folks!

Yes, we nonbelievers must avoid utopian dreams of forever changing the human condition (e.g. the New Socialist Man or the Fourth Reich). But a belief that this life is all we have has a marvelous way of concentrating the mind on the need to listen to, and work with, other people. It gives you hope in humanity. It gives you hope that together we can make of our lives something worthwhile and beautiful.

This is my plea:

Please, my dear religious fellow-citizens of this country and the world, please stop telling the rest of us that our lives have no meaning. Our lives have meaning, I assure you. And you are part of it.

Even you, Pope Benedict XVI. Even you are part of the meaning of my family and my life.

*

For an enlightening discussion of faith and meaning by four great thinkers of our time -- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, the "Four Horsemen" together at last -- click here.

The Secular End of Days: How Good People Get Greedy

Al Gore gave a stirring speech in Oslo on Monday, upon his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize.

As you might have expected, he made the case that people all over the world are burying their heads in the sand when it comes to global warming. With his unique tone (mixing, as it always does, self-consciousness and high-mindedness), Gore urged that we all need to pull our heads out of the sand and open our eyes. As he put it:

"'[W]hen large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: 'Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield'."

When reading this part of Gore's speech, I experienced an epiphany. A goddamned epipany. And it wasn't just about global warming.

Here's what hit me: Gore is wrong on one crucial point. People are not ignoring the inconvenient truths of our time, such as the rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the extreme disparities in wealth in the world. On the contrary, despite their uncertainty as to specifics, people are very aware of these issues. Innundated by images and data from the internet and the media, people know what is going on.

I am not saying that people know the finepoints of the science or how to analyze the numbers. But we are not "imprisoned by a dangerous illusion," as Gore suggests; we do not need to awaken to a new "truth force"; we are not looking to be "steered by the stars". We get it.

It's how we're dealing with it that's the problem.

I would go so far as to say that, increasingly in the last 20 years or so, the central orienting position in people's minds in the developed world is that the good times are not going to last much longer.

So Gore is speaking to his audience of solutions and readiness, "a bright and hopeful future." He ends: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."

But people have already heard the news. And they are not rising to the purpose he's got in mind. They are acting more and more out of a sense of scarcity -- they are digging in, battening down the windows, putting up higher, automated gates and fences, enjoying the holidays within their own small circle, shutting the world out.

Why do I say this?

Take a look at our political landscape. The health care debate, for example. Last night I saw Michael Moore's Sicko. In the film he points to the mystery of why, in a country of so many good, kind, charitable people, we do not consider it important to provide health care for all citizens. Well, guess why, Michael? It's because people have a sense that this ship is sinking anyway, and they better take care of their own family first. They have lost confidence in the idea of making a difference. At least, they reflect, they have their own private insurance plan, however unreliable. The idea of risking that for the larger community is suspect.

Or take our national debt and the growing debt for American households. What explains the conspicuous consumption of the superrich in this country? And the apparent lust felt by the consuming masses when they see the TV shows and the magazine spreads on this conspicuous consumption? What explains the desire of the many to imitate the luxury lifestyle of the few, even when it means falling into debt? The attitude, again, is: You better enjoy it now. It ain't gonna last.

Or take the so-called "hotbutton" issues in today's politics. The heat is the result of people's fear that America is in its end of days -- and the things we hold most dear are going to be snatched away soon. Immigration? What your hear on the Right is that the Mexicans are stealing our opportunities and want the land back (the myth of the "Reconquesta"!). The environment? The market-driven ads suggest that you better drive your yellow Humvee fast, while you can, before the oil supplies run out. Religion and politics? The impulse seems to be: if the end is coming, my values are my last defense -- and so I need to see them enshrined in law.

The global awareness brought on by the arrival of the information age has changed domestic priorities.

This is the secular end of days.

This is how good people get greedy.

*

What can I add from the perspective of a parent?

Well, let's bring it home.

It's like when you shouldn't eat those two remaining Christmas cookies on the plate left over from the party... but then again, if you just take them both then they will be gone and the anxiety you feel will be over. So you reach out and begin the binge that will herald the end. I don't mean to trivialize it, but ours is the left-over Christmas cookie era.

So how do we stop it? How do we reverse course? How do good people get un-greedy?

That is the true challenge ahead. It's not a question of ridding ourselves of ignorance; it's a question of ridding ourselves of our sense of coming loss.

As a parent, I try to emphazise to my children that they can have a cookie later. Or there will be some other treat after their nap. I emphasize that this is not their last great idea.

It strikes me that the environmental movement to end carbon emissions and reverse global warming will only work effectively when people have a vision of a treat on the other side of it. We have to develop a vision of a society which functions without carbon emissions, and with a more equal distribution of resources between and within nations.

But Communism is discredited. "Socialism" is vague. Green has become another political slogan. A widescale return to small, aboriginal communities is impractical. So what's the vision? What is the secular and nonreligious vision of the Second Coming? We need it more than we would like to admit.

And as Gore says, we may not have long. We have to learn to dream again.

Is Violence Ever Funny?

As every parent knows, children hit. And push. And kick. And bite.

"No hitting!" you say in a stern voice. Your child looks at you impassively... and then clobbers you again, knocking your glasses clear off your face.

"NO!" you say, and put him or her down.

At which point, the floor presents itself to your child's fists. And it takes a beating which, much to your surprise (didn't everybody always tell you that parenting would be full of surprises?), makes you feel sorry for the floor.

Where does this violence come from? You haven't ever hit your child. As far as you know, he or she has never even seen anyone hit anyone else.

But it seems to come naturally.

And when it comes it does so with an army of other aggressive behaviors. In our house they range from shouting the single word "Mine!" in a short, clipped manner (regardless of whether the information conveyed remains relevant) to getting into viscious, winner-take-all tug-of-war matches over permanant marker pens. Certain among us (who will go unnamed) have even been known to throw driveway gravel directly at the faces of our younger brother... just to see what would result.

The list goes on. This army of violent and aggressive behaviors within each of us is, apparently, a standing army. We seem to establish it, by some trick of neurological development, sometime in our first year, and we then proceed to fund it throughout our lives. (Apparently the brain is not so different from the majority Democratic Congress when it comes to authorizing spending on the army!)

So what is the best way to channel this potential for violence in our children? How do we deal with it as parents? Do we try to suppress it? Ignore it? How do we want our kids to feel about violence? How do we feel about it?

I have realized that this whole debate boils down to a single question:

Is violence ever funny?

I raise this issue because, like many parents, ever since my first-born arrived I have been desperately trying shield him, and then my other two children, from exposure to violence. Which... I find hard to do.

Recently I searched for "Popeye the Sailor Man" on YouTube with my boys, and I quickly became uneasy when I saw the casually sadistic way that he does damage to Brutus. So much for my happy memories of Popeye and his spinich.

Even Tintin finds himself obligated to draw a gun on occasion.

And let's not even talk about the acrobatic thrashing that Batman and Robin give to Catwoman's henchmen "the Kittens" (shield your kid's eyes, and let's watch it instead):

Of course it is so much worse than these examples suggest. Some critics of popular culture trace the trend back to Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, just as the Vietnam War began to infect the national psyche. Many people noticed a new style of giddy, extreme violence with the arrival of Quentin Tarantino's Resevoir Dogs in 1992. ("Cinema as fast-food," quipped Anthony Lane.) Now there seems to be a new genre of violence launched every spring in the film festivals, with the most recent going by the name "torture porn."

Controversies have erupted in the news media too, as regards the use of photographs of dead people, or images containing or encouraging violent acts (most recently in the case of NBC's decision to air the videotaped messages of the Virginia Tech student who killed 32 people).

On the one side, we all acknowledge that popular culture in this country is rife with violence. On the other side, it is our intention as parents to limit our children's exposure to it.

Something's got to give.

Again, I ask: Is violence ever funny?

In trying to work out where I stand on this urgent question in terms of my children, I believe that I have to start with my own relationship to violence. I simply have to get clear myself.

Okay. Here goes... See if you can relate.

I certainly value experiences -- and works of entertainment or art -- which avoid violence more than I do those which include it. When I see a film such as The Wind Will Carry Us by Abbas Kiarostami, set in a small village in Iran, dealing with issues of small human foibles and confusion, I feel more enriched, and yes, happier, than when I see a film such as -- to name an action film at random -- The Bourne Supremacy. Likewise, when I get back from a walk with my children, and we spent an hour watching leaves race down the rainwater along the sides of streets, I feel qualitatively better than when I have, for example, just poured vinegar on a trail of ants in the kitchen.

But then, do I want to banish all representations of violence from my life? That seems absurd. We obviously learn from watching violence, and sometimes it seems fun to watch. After all, I do watch movies like those in the Bourne series. And I do sometimes thrill, if not at the violence itself, then at the craft with which it is presented (the color, the movement, the alternations of suspense and relief).

So my own relationship with violence seems frought with ambivalance. I don't like it so much. But I choose to watch it sometimes. It is part of my life, and I keep it that way intentionally.

Okay, now let's turn to the question at hand.

Is it funny? More broadly, does it entertain?

My answer, which surprises me by its directness, is no.

If I really think about it, the only reason why I watch acts of violence in films or other media is because of a sense that I may be learning from them. I get no pleasure from the violence itself. I would happily watch movies and read books where, as in Greek tragedy, the violence occurs ob-scene, that is, off-stage.

Even when my beloved Chaplin is hit by a frying pan, although I enjoy the odd, twitchy dance that it provokes, I think I would enjoy it more if it were provoked by some other occurance (chasing a butterfly or something?).

I know I'm in a minority in American culture here. I'm out on a limb. But that's my true preference if I'm really honest about it. Call me squeamish.

So if I dig down a bit further here, then I have to conclude that I don't get any entertainment value out of watching violence -- only educational value. It is never funny. The circumstances around it may be, but not the act itself.

And this gives me a starting-point for dealing with the omnipresence of violence in our culture when it comes to my kids.

I am not going to get fanatical about blocking all images of violence from them. That would: a) be impossible; b) cause them to conclude that Dad was hiding something, which must be interesting, and c) deprive them of important facts about the world.

But I am going to resist the pressure in our society to (pretend to?) enjoy violence. I will, without being too worried about overprotectiveness, express my opinion that this image or that TV show or that book is depressing, and sometimes even insist that we do something else. I will stand my ground on things like shoot-em-up video games -- sorry, not allowed in our home. And I will never laugh at a violent act, no matter what the studio audience and supplemental laugh track does.

Question: Is Violence Ever Funny?
Answer: No.

Romney the Weatherman, Huckabee the Weather

It's a pattern, isn't it?

Mitt Romney, whose succesful career with Bain Capital essentially thrived on his talent as a salesman, aims above all to please.

When asked about interrogating terror suspects in a Fox debate in May he answered, outside of any considerations of practical need, that he would "double Guantanamo." When asked about immigration in the more recent CNN/YouTube debate he insisted that, unlike Giuliani, he would not condone any exceptions for illegals to report crimes or go to school -- lest we create sanctuary cities, sanctuary states, a sanctuary nation. He also claimed on that evening that he believes every word of the Bible -- "Yes!" he said to Anderson Cooper's direct question -- despite the position of his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which holds that it contains a multitude of errors, corrected in the Book of Mormon.

When Romney goes there, he goes there. Until he goes somewhere else. What we have here is a candidate whose strength is in his cheerful accomodation to almost anyone -- any potential customers, in the broad sense of the word -- who will advance his interests.

He is the "weatherman" that Bob Dylan sings about in Subterranean Homesick Blues (the one that "you don't need...to know which way the wind blows").

That's what is perhaps most troubling about Romney's speech yesterday. He is merely the weatherman, but the actual weather is coming our way.

I first noticed the barometer dropping when the Democratic candidates sat for a "Forum on Faith" in June and answered questions from Soledad O'Brien about their private religious views. Hillary spoke of "prayer warriors." Hmm. I didn't know about prayer warriors. Edwards insisted that "we are all sinners."

Oh, I thought. Thank you. Glad to be informed of that.

Then I thought I might have felt a first raindrop fall when, in a September debate on MSNBC, the Democratic candidates were asked their favorite Bible verse. No one flinched at the inappropriateness of this question, even though, to my ears at least, it verged on religious test for office. Think about it: Could you, if so inclined, actually decline to answer this? Would Tim Russert simply nod and go to the next candidate? Of course not. The next question would have been: Why? Are you not a believer? And that's getting pretty close to a religious test.

Obama helpfully mentioned Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. ("Love your enemy," I guess -- he's still rubbing it in that he will meet directly with the heads of state of North Korea and Iran where Hillary would dither).

Now I know it is not news that the candidates for President, on both sides, have religious convictions. But what is news is that their convictions are being foregrounded in their campaigns. Would it be such a stretch, even in this campaign, to imagine a candidate sporting a "cross pin" or a "crucifix pin" on the opposite side of his coat from the obligatory post 9-11 American flag pin? (You can imagine the... shall we say, disapprobrium, that would follow on Fox News if Obama, or any other candidate, suggested that he need not wear a cross on his lapel to prove his faith. Go at 'em Sean Hannity.)

The climate is indeed a-changing, and in more ways that one. Essentially what we saw yesterday was Romney announcing the weather -- a gathering storm of faith -- on TV.

And Huckabee? Huckabee is the weather.

Yesterday he claimed that his rise in the polls is the direct result of "thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much." (Watch the video here.) Their prayers -- and God's resulting attentiveness to caucus-goers in Iowa -- are lifting Huckabee up, in what can only be described as a sacred updraft, to the highest seat of finite power in this world.

An Atheist Reponds to Mitt Romney's Speech on Religion

You can read Romney's full speech here or watch it on his website here.

As an atheist and a father of three young children, the speech Mitt Romney delivered at the George H. W. Bush presidential library today shocked me to my core.

If this is the drift of this country, towards a politics that explicitly excludes my standing as a worthy citizen because I do not believe in one of the major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism or Islam, then I seriously do not know what I will do to sustain for myself, and instill in my children, the strong sense of belonging that I currently feel as a citizen.

I cherish my country; I cherish our history, our laws and our principles, including the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. As a non-believer who believes that it is this life which matters, my sense of morality is inextricably tied to my sense of belonging as a citizen.

Indeed, this sense of belonging runs deep. I consider myself to be unavoidably emeshed in the concerns of my fellow-citizens (as well as, more broadly, the concerns of all of the people on this planet). That is my challenge and my inspiration as I try to live my life well, and guide my children to do the same.

In the speech he gave today, Romney threatened to take part of my core identity away from me.

This is a direct quotation from his speech:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

Although he addressed the speech to all Americans, he was not talking to me when he gave this speech. Romney made it perfectly clear that as President he would represent non-believers like me with reluctance at best. We do not fit into his idea of Americans; we are an after-thought.

If the two political parties in this country are headed towards the conclusion that, as an atheist, I am not a true American, then my family and I will, in effect, be sent into political exile. For me (as for the ancient Athenians, who also valued political partipation as a part of the core of a person's identity), exile robs life of its meaning.

Romney, unwittingly or not, for reasons of political expediency or not, threatened me with political -- and therefore, for a non-believer, spiritual -- exile in his speech today.

My first reaction, upon reading the words of the speech, was to feel my heart beating faster, as if I was facing a threat to the safety of my family. It's strange how our bodys' survival instincts, buried deep in our brains, warn us before we even have time to reflect on why.

My second reaction is to redouble my commitment to working for a future where, some day, Romney's view on the central place of religion in American life is considered a relic of a time when a great country, founded on the basis of equal consideration for all people, was held in thrall to a destructive, exclusionary myth called "faith."

The Earth Is Hard

I watched the documentary No End In Sight yesterday, and I felt utterly devastated by its depiction of what we have done -- and are doing -- to the people of Iraq by invading their country preemptively.

There is a scene in the movie which shows an Iraqi man crying openly, telling anyone who will listen about what he just witnessed. Apparently, a car drove up, parked, men came out, grabbed four young children from a shop across the street, and then drove away.

The Iraqi man shown in the film (the children's father?), sobbing uncontrollably, shouts to anyone who will listen that he has already gone to the Mahdi Army, and they have denied any knowledge of the children.

I couldn't believe what I was watching. Because as I watched I felt as if I was that man.

This UNICEF report on the humanitarian plight of Iraqi children from May, 2007, puts the number of children who are refugees from that country at nearly 2 million. This report from the United Nations suggests that in the past two years alone tens of thousands of women and children have been kidnapped for ransom -- a number growing, in painful, personal circumstances like those just described, every day.

When you watch, back to back, Donald Rumsfeld's laughing, proud-as-a-peacock, too-clever-by-half style in his Defense Department press briefings, and then the destruction of people's lives on the ground in Iraq, your heart does more than sink. It feels like something inside you is being bruised.

Or when you see Paul Wolfowitz (who of course, like most of the other decision-makers in Bush's cabinet, including Cheney, has had absolutely no experience in the military) talking nonsense about how he can't "imagine" that it could take more troops to occupy a country than to invade it -- which is so basic a point that it is simply assumed in military planning -- you begin to feel a little crazy in the head.

You also feel ashamed for what your country has inflicted on people on the other side of the world: as if, intentionally or not, we have reached out to touch them with a poisonous tendril from some overgrown hothouse here at home.

But that last image is too poetic. The truth is more plain.

What we see in the faces of these architects of the Iraq War is simply a mix of ignorance and arrogance, common the world over. The difference is that here they hold positions of power which allow them to cause disruptions in the lives of others on an unprecedented scale.

Goddamn it! How do we warn our children about what the world can do to people?

How do we break it to them that the world is not cushioned and forgiving and warm? That this cushioning which most of us feel is a temporary condition, a stroke of luck, a perk, not unlike an unexpected upgrade to first class on a long flight... Champagne, anyone?

But lucky streaks end. The flight will end. The plane has to land.

And the hard earth is still there.

What I must somehow tell my children, but I do not want to, is that the earth is not as soft as we like to think it is. Its verdant valleys, cool bodies of water, and fields of flowers are just a thin, top layer. Underneath it is hard. It is made of iron.

And sometimes, without warning and without meaning, it reaches up and hits people, crushes them, and it has no remorse.

Our fellow citizens sometimes seem to have no remorse either. You watch the Republican debate last night on CNN, and you hear and see the crowd cheer when the candidates say that the best way to reach the Muslim world is to "remain on offense" (Giuliani) and "continue this surge" (McCain). When the candidates take turns boasting about their private gun collections or make a joke that "Hillary could be on the first rocket to Mars" (Huckabee), they get more clapping.

Except for Ron Paul (who is booed loudly by the audience on a number of occasions), nobody talks with sadness about the loss of life or suffering caused by the war. Nobody talks about the difficulties faced by most people in the world. On the contrary, Representative Duncan Hunter gets a huge wave of applause for explicitly refusing ambivalence: "I will never apologize for the United States of America."

Never. For nothing. We are preemptively right about everything. Always. Cue applause.

*

This is not a new story.

The hills of Berkeley, where I live, are the sites of hundreds, even thousands of murders of the local Ohlone Indians by Spanish and Anglo-American settlers, roughly between the years 1820 through 1880. Vigilante groups formed with the stated goal of removing the entire population of Indians.

This passage from a book I am currently reading, a brilliant book, Ishi: Two Worlds, makes that abstraction more real. The few surviving Yahi, once thriving in the hills of Northern California near Chico, were finished off as a tribe on a single day in 1870:

"In this remote and seemingly safe spot were gathered more than thirty Yahi including young children and babies, well supplied with food, even to fresh and dried meat. They were helpless against the four armed men who forthwith killed them all. Norman Kingsley, as he explained afterwards, changed guns during the slaughter, exchanging his .56-caliber Spencer rifle for a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, because the rifle "tore them up so bad," particularly the babies. There is today a Kingsley Cave, only about two trail miles from Wild Horse Corral. This is presumably the cave of the last massacre."

When I walk with my family on the paths winding through Tilden Park, which runs along the top of the Berkeley hills, I know with certainty that we walk past once bloody caves, and that we kick up dust made up of particles of the whitened bones of some of those who walked there before us. It was not so long ago, during the life of my great great grandfather, when these people lived here.

The bullets and knives which did the killing were hard. They were made of metals pulled from the earth. They returned to it.

The earth is hard. And we should never forget that when we find it soft.

The Grinch, the Pleasure of Power, and the Uncensored Rudy Giuliani

My 3-year-old George went to school today saying that he was "the Grinch."

We watched the Dr. Seuss animated movie a few nights ago. He seemed impressed with the way the Grinch had discovered love and compassion -- and grown his heart by 3 sizes -- at the end. He particularly liked that the Grinch had joined the Whos of Whoville for their Christmas meal.

But by this morning, George's thoughts at turned to the first incarnation of the Grinch, the one with a heart the size of a walnut, the one who "keeps swinging his dog around," as George fondly remembers it.

The first clue that George had gone retrograde on the Grinch was when he was putting his socks on. From the hallway where I was wrestling with his brother Cole, I heard a low, gravely voice coming from George's room: "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch!" came the hair-raising refrain.

By the time we were loading him into the car, he announced with a roar that he was indeed the Grinch. He raised his hands in the air and wiggled his fingers, roaring again in case we missed it the first time. I said that the Grinch should be the "nice" Grinch at school. He gave me a look as if to say I was a fool...

"I am the mean Grinch!"

It was the way he smiled when he said it that got me imagining the trouble he may cause at recess today.

Which brings me to my subject: the pleasure of power.

We all know the thrill that comes with overpowering someone. We get it when we win a game of skill, say a video game or a ping-pong match, or a sport. We get it when we argue a point forcefully, winning an argument outright (rare, but don't you remember those few times when it happened?). There is something intensely pleasurable about the demonstration of power.

I remember after 9-11 seeing a newsclip of a burly man on the Brooklyn Bridge shouting out, "The people in the Middle East better watch out, we're coming to get you!" The newscaster said something anodyne about the strong feelings of the people of New York. But sitting on my couch all the way out in California, I felt the same feelings of rage, and a desire to overpower anyone who could have done what they did.

I believe that this recalibration of my own sense of the world, this tweaking the dials to allow more interest in the use of power, affected my outlook in the two years leading up to the Iraq War. Even knowing that the French were probably right, that we should give the inspectors more time to find the WMDs, it still pissed me off that they wouldn't back up Colin Powell in the U.N. with the second resolution.

I mean it pissed me off disproportionately. I didn't go so far as to refuse French fries, as did some, but I realize now that as a result of 9-11 I viewed events in the world for some time through a lens of power.

But this urge is ultimately infantile, not to mention self-defeating. We know that as parents we need to teach our children to reign it in. We rely on their teachers and other adults to help in this process. Schoolyard bullies (or "mean Grinches") are universally disliked.

So when we see it in a grown adult, seeming without shame or discomfort, it makes us uneasy.

Watch this clip of Mayor Giuliani speaking at a Town Hall meeting in June of 2001.

Consider. Even though the man asking the question may be overreaching, watch how quickly Giuliani falls into calling him and his co-workers (and tax-paying residents of New York City) "idiots" and "morons". It appears to be a comfortable place for him to rest.

A Non-Christian Talks to his Children About Death

I visited my grandparents' graves this weekend, and I didn't know what to say.

It all happened quickly, in the span of about five minutes.

We were just pulling out of the small town of Oakhurst (near Yosemite, where we had spent the night after a friend's wedding). Glad to be all snug and warm in the car, on our way home after a long night in the Best Western motel, we headed toward the highway.

But then saw the small, asphalt road to the cemetery, tucked behind a fast-food restaurant on our right. I remembered that I had planned to visit my grandparents' graves. It's not often that we make it to their old hometown.

I made the turn.

Rolling to a stop alongside the green grassy oval of the cemetery, I hopped out of the car, and, thinking it would be interesting to my oldest son too, I unfastened 3-year-old George from his child's seat. He came tumbling out of the car.

We walked past a few headstones and then looked down at the modest, metal (iron?) plaques showing the final "resting place" of his great grandmother and great grandfather.

That's when I realized I had a problem.

"Look, George. Here they are. That's where your great grandparents are... Stan and Catherine Stavrum." I started by stating the facts as best I knew them.

He looked down at the dark gray rectangles in the grass, then back up at me blankly.

"They had to go away..." I said uncertainly. "They died."

He waited for me to continue.

"But now... they are..."

What? "Sleeping"? No, that's silly. And in the moment it struck me as downright frightening for a 3-year-old, too. Who wants to sleep forever? How do you know it's not going to be forever when you go to sleep on any given night? It raised too many troubling issues.

Plus it was a lie.

So I changed the subject.

"They lived here in Oakhurst. They had a house here, by a river."

George pointed to their two metal plaques, like two rooms in an architectural plan.

"Is that their house?" he asked, putting two and two together.

"No..." I said. I looked down with him. I was still not sure what level of metaphor, what softening language, to use for the occasion. Maybe in some sense these two graves are their "house" now? Maybe this grassy oval is?

"No, that's not their house," I continued. "But they are here now, in the ground. And it's beautiful. Look at the sun!"

He followed my pointing finger to gaze at the orb of the sun, rising yellow in a mist over the nearby hills.

I took his hand and we walked back in the brisk air, our mouths breathing steam.

He didn't say another word about it. But I knew that I needed to come up with a better way of talking about death with my kids. As I slid into my seat, my wife said, "How did it go?"

"We've got to talk," I said quietly and turned the ignition.

"Yeah," she said, knowing exactly what I meant.

*

Some people would have no problem with this one. "Grandma and Grandpa are in Heaven!" is easy to say and sounds uplifting. If your child asks more questions, talk about God and angels, the Oneness of Love, even clouds.

But I believe that teaching children to honor top-down, faith-based ideological systems (see the major monotheistic religions, or for that matter, secular state ideologies which preach blind faith and devotion to some authority figure) is tantamount to child abuse. Richard Dawkins and others have written powerfully on this theme, and it appears frequently in readers' comments on Dawkins' website richarddawkins.net.

Below you will find the most-viewed user-generated video in America. Nearly 4 million people have watched it. Here we have a simple scene, an adorable girl reciting Psalm 23 in her family's kitchen. It's hard not to smile at her innocence and her concern about getting the words right ("Surely?" she keeps asking as a point of clarification).

But from my vantage point, what we are witnessing here is an indoctrination into the cult of not-thinking and in-group mentality. Before our very eyes, this girl is learning how to abdicate responsibility for her own values. Instead, she is learning to rest her natural moral sense (can you imagine this girl willfully doing harm to another person?) in the all-too-eager hands of the many authority figures who will claim to represent the Way of Jesus Christ. In ten years or less she will probably hold pointless, hurtful beliefs about why some people are not entitled to love and marry those whom they choose. And if she happens to talk about religion and morality with me someday, she may shed a tear about how my family will burn in hell.

Watch it with these parenting issues in mind and it changes the experience:

So easy (and false) answers about "heaven" are not an option for me and my wife. That would be damaging to our children, we believe.

But that doesn't help us when it comes to finding answers that do fit the occasion of visiting my grandparents' graves.

After pondering this question some, here is what I have resolved:

1. I will give the children more information rather than less. That means everything. The truth as I far as I know it.

2. To the extent that there is a strong possibility that individual consciousness ends and nothing replaces it (except a slow or quick mixing of the physical body with the earth, depending on whether you opt for burial or cremation), I will acknowledge the full scope of my feelings about it. It is upsetting, seen in some lights. But it is inspiring too, seen in others. We need to talk about our emotional responses to the knowledge of death, even our fear of dying.

3. I will never presume to know exactly what happens after we breathe our last breath, since the truth is that no one knows.

4. I will use the occasion to remember and celebrate those people who are no longer with us. Next time the deaths of my grandparents comes up with my children, I plan to tell a story or two about them. It will be a treat.

The Internet and Kids

I have strong feelings about freedom of speech and expression.

Nothing makes me more viscerally angry towards a politician than when he or she starts bloviating about how Hollywood, or the media, or the internet pushes "every depravity known to humanity" on our children, and something must be done!

I'll make my own decisions on how to raise my kids, thank you very much.

And anyway, who are you to restrict my (or my fellow-citizens') access to information of any kind? "We the People" make the laws in this still-free Republic, and the free flow of information is the red blood of our healthy body politic, so don't you dare interfere with it!

Sorry. Joseph Lieberman irritates me to no end.

But I had an interesting conversation with a friend yesterday regarding the question of whether parents (not government, parents) should or should not restrict internet access for their preteen and teenage children.

What she said shocked me.

My friend's son is ten, and she and her husband have decided (for now) to place no restrictions, install no "safe search" software, enforce no limits at all on what their son can look at online. (Though they do restrict him from playing certain video games based on their ratings -- he had to return a Halo3 game recently, with tears in his eyes, which he had purchased with his own money.)

"You're saying that he can look at anything online that he wants to?" I protested. "Do you have any idea what is out there?"

Yes, she claimed, she did. She had seen some bad stuff. When searching for a "gift for grandma" she stumbled upon some very... disturbing things. (No links -- apologies to my depraved readers.)

But her plan is not one of a kind of benign neglect. Instead, my friend argues passionately, she and her husband intend to talk with their son constantly, I mean on a daily basis, about the perils and dangers and shocking things that can be found there, how he feels about them, how they feel about them, what people do and why they do it, which values we may share with them, which values we do not.

She believes that by opening up the communication channels entirely and refusing to create an "us vs. you," we-know-better attitude about the internet, her son will gradually, naturally, develop his own understanding of what to avoid, what is disgusting and depressing, what to devalue and what to value, on the internet. He will learn how to navigate this onslaught of information on his own.

She also believes that her son's sense of judgment will soon equal (or even exceed?) that of his parents.

I am impressed by the clarity of my friend's position. But I am troubled by it too.

My children are still so young that I don't have to worry about them going on Google. But I can only imagine what they will find when they do, and if they are anything like me it will stick in their minds forever (not that unlike traumatic experiences in the offline world).

Of course no one wants their children exposed to violent and sexually graphic images and writings. Every parent can appreciate the impact that this exposure might have on the mind of someone who has had fewer years to become inured to suffering (i.e. has had less time to learn how to pretend to be inured to suffering).

So what's the best approach? My friend's insistence on open access with constant communication? Or my off-the-cuff rejoinder, which was to install safe search software and keep the open communication by explaining, openly, that we don't view certain kinds of materials in "our home"?

My friend's argument is that teenagers will find access to these websites in any case (at a friend's house, at a library, or even by circumventing whatever restrictions you have on your home computer). She believes that the damage done by building walls (because your children would then have to resort to subterfuge) is worse than allowing the images to hit their eyes freely.

I agree that they will probably see it elsewhere. And I wouldn't lay a trip on my child for doing that. But I like the idea that my childen know that mom and I don't like that kind of material; that we believe it dehumanizes people; that it bothers us to have our most primal impulses of fear and revenge and domination triggered by images which bear very little relation to what we aspire to in the rest of our life. Etc. And that we feel so strongly that we don't want it in our home.

Would this make us prudes in our children's eyes? Possibly. Could I claim that mantle of prudishness and make it my own? Possibly...

The truth is, I am conflicted, thinking about it. I've never thought of myself as a prude, though I laughingly will admit that I am sensitive. There's a world of difference.

I do see my friend's point that this not-in-our-house approach might lead to defiance and subterfuge on the part of my child, if he or she then decides to look at certain materials anyway outside of our house. It would be natural that this child would not spontaneously bring up his or her reactions and feelings about those materials over dinner. We would possibly have placed limits on the conversations we could be having.

But maybe those limits are porous enough to be healthy? At least my child would feel very comfortable telling us how he or she felt frightened or upset by something a friend had watched on his cellphone that day in school. Our child would feel no trepidation about being considered silly or squeamish, or (dreaded word) prudish, because mom and dad would have already made their concern about that sort of thing very clear. But then we would make this clear anyway...

Much to think about. I'm glad I don't have to face this yet. (And so much is changing so fast, I imagine that the ground will likely be quite different in seven years time!)

I welcome comments and stories from parents with teenagers already dealing with this.

Update: Since posting this, I found out that my friend and her husband have not yet even hooked up their 10-year-old's computer (the one in his room) to the internet. So he has to use the shared computer... and ask before he uses it. So that's the current state of things, which sounds like a pretty good arrangement.

The more I ponder this I am inclined to think that talking and talking and talking (and not a safe search filter or other restrictive parenting software on my child's computer) is the right way to approach it. I think my friend is right, and my initial reaction was wrong.

Wow. Big decisions ahead, whether you look in a timeframe of days or months or years...

How Prejudice Slinks Away -- Quietly -- and What It Means for Our Kids

Bad things -- from war, massacres, murder, rape, mobs, car crashes, terrorist acts, industrial accidents, unjust imprisonment... all the way down to food fights and schoolyard teasing -- are usually loud, attention-grabbing, sudden, alarming, often lit up in orange and red, fire and blood and flushed cheeks.

Good things are nearly imperceptible. They only reveal themselves gradually, in someone's half smile, a newly confident way of walking, a handshake, a healthy child.

But even when conditions get better in society, even when people become more equal in their opportunities and status, it often means more conflict, more noise, more obvious bad things. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed: "Democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have the least fuel." As people get closer they tend to harp on small differences even more vociferously.

So what does this have to do with prejudice?

Prejudice is an obvious bad thing. It shows itself in extreme acts of cruelty and brutality -- genocide, pogroms, lynching, gay-bashing, and a thousand other nameless acts, undertaken by states and individuals alike. It is ubiquitous; it seems intractable.

But sometimes it goes away. And when it does, it goes away quietly. And it seems to me that this has profound implications when we think about how we raise children.

Let's take a specific example: prejudice against homosexuality.

See if this story is familiar to anybody.

When I was in public school in Berkeley, California, in the early 1980s, although Berkeley was (is it still?) known for its social awareness (we were taught "herstory" along with history at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High), I had absolutely no compunction -- not even a tiny flicker of self-consciousness or shame -- about using the term "fag" or "faggot" with my friends.

We called one another that term as a kind of all-purpose putdown. The idea that someone in our social group -- some guy -- might take offense (amazingly, from today's perspective) never even occurred to me.

By the end of the 1980s, even in my teenage circles, something was changing. Thanks to the efforts of many activists, and the simple, graceful, increasingly out lives of many gay and lesbian people, and the added attention that the AIDS crisis was generating for the homosexual community, the idea of gayness, beyond the schoolyard taunt of "fag," had trickled into my adolescent consciousness. Arrriving at college in 1987, I found that I had a gay Resident Assistant in our freshman dorm. Cool, I thought. Whatever. But there still wasn't much of a dent in my thinking. Maybe I had grown out of childish putdown words like "fag," but it still wasn't personal to me.

Then I spent a summer in New York in 1988, and I stayed with a good friend. I admired him and thought he was handsome as well -- I always had (but never thought much of it). On my last night in the city, as we sat talking, the TV on with the sound off, a rainstorm streaking down the windows, there was a kind of erotic charge in the air. I didn't realize it at the time, but thinking back on the night the next day, from my position in the window seat in an airplane preparing to take off, it occured to me that... being gay might... could... oh my god... even apply to someone like me.

I knew I liked girls, a lot, but what was it that was in the air as we sat in his apartment talking, laughing, enjoying each other's company?

Staring out the airplane window, watching baggage carts move around in the rain, I forced myself to say aloud, just to see if I could do it: "I... am... gay." It was difficult to form the words, and when I said it I felt relief. (I have no idea what the man in the business suit in the seat next to me was thinking!) I knew then that I could face it -- if that was the case.

I had broken my threshold of prejudice. I also sensed at that time that my acknowledgement of the erotic charge with my friend on that particular, aesthetically-pleasing night did not actually make me "gay." Perhaps in some scenarios -- as a Samurai in 12th century Japan? as a teenager in 21st century America? -- I could engage in fulfilling same-sex relationships. But the fact is that my heterosexual urges always buried -- and bury -- whatever potential there is under a landslide of inchoate longings for the female form. (It's kind of like asking a gay man if he could imagine being with a woman: "Ah, sure," he might reply. "But why?")

Perhaps this personal revelation of mine -- confronting my own prejudice against homosexuality -- coincided with an awakening in much of young, heterosexual America, I don't know. What I do know is that beginning in the early 1990s people who were not gay started accepting gay identity on equal terms. Yes, I know, it was then that Clinton backed off his efforts to allow gay men and women to perform military service openly -- the political cost, he no doubt concluded, was too high. But something was changing nevertheless. When Kurt Cobain french kissed his bassist Krist Novoselic on Saturday Night Live in 1992, or when he sang (in "All Apologies" from 1993's In Utero), "Everyone is gay," these events were perfectly in synch with the culture. They shocked, but not too much -- we knew what he was doing in rejecting the clumsy categorizations of our religion-soaked, rigidly gendered, traditional, homophobic culture.

Still, some prejudice remained in me. In graduate school I briefly dated a bisexual woman and felt threatened by her previous relationships, wondering if she was missing something that I couldn't provide (well, maybe that was not so much prejudice as paranoia). I remember talking with friends during those 20-something years about what could possibly rattle us if we were parents someday. I distinctly remember us agreeing that, for all of our self-congratulatory open-mindedness, we would be rattled if our teenage kids came home with a same-sex date and said, "Mom, Dad, it's no big deal -- everybody does it." Special gayness was all right, but not matter-of-fact, everyday gayness.

And then, somewhere along the way (I would like to think it was sometime around 1994?), even that residue of prejudice just dropped away for me.

Now I think of gay or lesbian orientation as being akin to other personality traits -- a mix of genetic predisposition, choice, who cares. When people find love in each other, it makes me happy. Period.

I don't make any distinction anymore between gay couples or heterosexual couples. Gay marriage is plainly needed -- now. The issue of gay adoption confuses me -- Why would this be a problem? You mean you would object to a loving couple wanting to adopt a child in need of a home?

If my child came home and announced he or she was gay (or just mentioned it in passing, for that matter!), I would have the same questions that I would in regards to any relationship. I would be interested in how he or she was feeling. I would want to know more. I would be concerned that my child is careful about using condoms. And I would be just as excited for the romantic adventures, highs and heartaches, which loomed ahead, as I would be if this same child were heterosexual.

What I am saying is: the prejudice against gays or lesbians now strikes me as bizarre. And a recent poll conducted by the New York Times and MTV shows that, for a growing number of people in the U.S. under the age of 29, it is a relic of the past.

But this change in me was not marked by high-profile events. It happened quietly.

How does this story translate into an approach to parenting? Well, it occurs to me that we need to make an effort as parents to get around the noisy, alarming, bad things which take up the foreground of our concerns. Of course we need to worry about drunk driving and the like. But we also need to make the time with our children to explore with them the quiet ways in which we choose to appreciate other people and open our minds.

If, for example, we meet a transgendered person, instead of just registering surprise or curiosity, we should take the opportunity to talk to our child about the frustrations which the transgendered and transsexual communities face. Continue the conversation at home. Rent Transamerica (actually do that regardless -- I just saw it and recommend it).

I guess what I am saying is that if we see anything that is unfamiliar to us, don't just shrug and move on. Initiate a quiet talk with your kid.

Who knows, we may end up learning more from our children than they do from us. Because, when you think about it, it's the act of listening -- the state of attentiveness to others -- which creates good things most of all.

Do Some Cultural Practices Mean Some Parents Love their Children Less?

An article in the New York Times today caught my attention -- and made me really, really sad.

It's about a recent decision by the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals to deport a young woman, Ms. Alima Traore, back to her home country of Mali. Ms. Traore is currently living in Maryland, where she works as a cashier.

Ms. Traore's concerns about returning to Mali, which the three-member panel rejected, are:

1) upon her return, her father has arranged for her to marry her first cousin ("My decision is irrevocable," her father insists, "...the animal sacrifice has been made for the village"); and

2) having had her own genitals cut as a young girl (her clitoris and vulva were removed as part of the standard practice for young girls there), she fears that any daughters she may have will face this same procedure.

"While we do not discount the respondent's concerns," the decision reads, "We do not see how the reluctant acceptance of family tradition over personal preference can form the basis" for allowing Ms. Traore to stay in the United States.

I think you will agree that this three-member panel of the Board of Immigration Appeals is -- how to put it?

Confused? Idiotic? $%@!&*?!? (Excuse my language.)

We are not facing here a question of Ms. Traore's "reluctant acceptance of family tradition." We are facing a question of her reluctant acceptance of something that is wrong, regardless of the cultural and family traditions of Mali.

But how can I flat-out say it is wrong? Can something that is imposed on 95% of the girls in Mali be wrong? Aren't values merely social and contingent for "secular progressives" like me? (I can practically hear my religiously-inclined readers "amen"-ing this point and sighing in disapproval.)

As an atheist, or a secular humanist (or your fellow-citizen in a Republic, if you like), how can I condemn the cultural practices of another people, living as they do, far across the ocean, by their own codes of right and wrong?

Well, here goes...

The fact that my moral reference-points are Shakespeare, Hume, Woolf, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Dylan and Rorty, does NOT mean that I have to abdicate my moral judgment.

When I say something is "wrong" I mean it is wrong. We atheists, humanists and fellow-citizens are allowed to take that word out of quotes too.

I mean, let's speak plainly. You and I know ( if nothing else then as parents) that genital cutting -- cutting off the clitoris and vulva of a healthy girl with a saw-toothed blade without anesthesia -- is wrong.

The people of Mali, emeshed in cultural traditions of their own -- can say it is right all they want. They are free to say that, if that's the kind of world they wish to inhabit and defend.

But we can respond, with equal passion: No, it is wrong. We will fight it.

And we can then look at our various means of persuasion, from firsthand accounts of suffering, meant to evoke sympathy (as in Uncle Tom's Cabin or Boys Don't Cry, to take two examples), to full-out invasion (as in the NATO-led war on Serbia over Kosovo). Here I encourage readers to read Rorty's article, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality if you haven't already.

It is tremendously important, I believe, for people who believe that values and moral judgments are not received but are instead built up -- from a mix of our basic instincts, our use of language, and our social relations -- to make our beliefs of right and wrong known, loud and clear. For the responsibility is ours to change other people's judgments.

*

One sensitive area when it comes to making moral judgments is of course, parenting. We are all rightly careful not to critize our friends or siblings for their parenting practices. At least not too hastily.

Most of us notice small variations in others' approach when contrasted to ours. But these are minimal, and we recognize that every parent-child relationship has complicated dynamics and challenges and aspirations which we cannot hope to understand. So it's generally best to reserve judgment and enjoy learning from examples that we like.

But when it comes to outright shocking practices like genital cutting, I believe that we can and should speak out, even as parents. So let me be blunt:

To mutilate your daughter's genitals for any nonmedical reason -- causing your daughter a lifetime of pain and agonizing complications -- means that you do not love her as much as I love my daughter.

That will anger some people, to hear it put that way. But I ask you: is your experience of love at all reflected in the willing infliction of suffering on one of your loved ones? Is the infliction of such suffering on a loved one ever justified by some other countervailing concern?

I would ask the people of Mali to apply the same standard when they criticize our family traditions. I would love to listen and learn from any insights they have into how in my role as a father I inflict suffering on my girl. I mean this seriously! I would expect them to listen to me with the same openness, considering that we both recognize how important the concerns are.

I would like to believe that even if I had lived my whole life in the cultural tradition of Mali I would refuse to have my girl undergo this procedure.

And if this is just my own cultural bias talking -- and if I had been raised in Mali I would feel differently -- then I stand by my cultural bias with everything in me.

Either way, I'm sorry, I will say it: It is less loving to cut a girl's genitals than not to do so.

Sam Harris makes a similar point, with characteristic force, in his book, The End of Faith:

"Consider the practice of "honor killing" that persists throughout much of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We live in a world in which women and girls are regularly murdered by their male relatives for perceived sexual indiscretions-ranging from merely speaking to a man without permission to falling victim of rape. Coverage of these atrocities in the Western media generally refers to them as a "tribal" practice, although they almost invariably occur in a Muslim context. Whether we call the beliefs that inspire this behavior "tribal" or "religious" is immaterial; the problem is clearly a product of what men in these societies believe about shame and honor, about the role of women, and about female sexuality...

Given the requisite beliefs about "honor," a man will be desperate to kill his daughter upon learning that she was raped. The same angel of compassion can be expected to visit her brothers as well. Such killings are not at all uncommon in places like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. In these parts of the world, a girl of any age who gets raped has brought shame upon her family. Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood. The subsequent ritual is inevitably a low-tech affair, as none of these societies have devised a system for administering lethal injections for the crime of bringing shame upon one's family. The girl either has her throat cut, or she is dowsed with gasoline and set on fire, or she is shot. The jail sentences for these men, if they are prosecuted at all, are invariably short. Many are considered heroes in their communities.

What can we say about this behavior? Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly incredible about the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts."

An important corrective that I would add to Harris' point is that I do not think he should generalize about all "Middle Eastern men murderously obsessed with female sexual purity" in contrast to all "American or European men." It sets up a false opposition between a particular group of Middle Eastern men and the whole population of American or European men. Certainly there are American and European men who -- in view of the callous or selfish nature of their actions, and the brutal consequences of them -- love their wives, daughters and sisters even less than the aforementioned Middle Eastern men who are "murderously obsessed wth female sexual purity." Unhappily, we may find that it is a toss-up in many cases.

But his larger point is well taken. Some of the things parents do (even if they are merely following the cultural practices of their community) mean that they love their children less, in any meaningful sense of the word love. Love without quotes.

This sad conclusion gives me serious motivation to examine my own cultural traditions -- to see where I might be less loving to my children than I believe I am.

Any thoughts from readers about the ways in which we are blind to the suffering we cause due to our own cultural traditions? Bulimia comes to mind. Or pole dancing classes for 8-year-olds. Any others?

For some interesting further reading on the neurological underpinnings of "goodness" and altruism (and some of the anxiety these latest findings provoke in people), I refer you to a review by Oren Harman of a book on the topic in this week's New Republic.

The Despotism of "Father Knows Best" and the GOP

The great French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who may have had more influence on the framers of our Constitution than any other one thinker, wrote famously of three basic kinds of government:

1. Despotism (rule by force)
2. Aristocracy (rule by the few), and
3. Republican Government (rule by the people).

He suggested that each of these forms of government has a principle which supports it and which must be active for it to thrive.

Despotisms, or dictatorships, operate on the principle of fear, with recourse to the use of physical coercion to get what they want.
Aristocracies, or monarchies, operate on the principle of honor, with status or rank being of paramount importance to their subjects.
Republics, or democracies, operate on the principle of virtue, with each citizen demonstrating (through voting or other forms of civic engagement such as forming a group of like-minded people) concern for the interests of his or her fellow-citizens.

These points made a strong impression on me when I first encountered them. It amazed me how Montesquieu was able to take a step back and study our systems of self-rule from the vantage-point of a scientist. (Alexis de Tocqueville is another Frenchman who followed in this approach.) In some chapters of his most influential book, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu even discusses ways in which different types of soil or climate may determine which form of government that prevails in a given country.

When you read The Spirit of the Laws you can't help but ask how well the form of government prevalent in your own country is functioning.

He makes political science seem so clinical, as if we are merely examining the health of our respiratory system by listening to our breathing in a few standardized places. Just a regular check-up.

But when we perform this check-up on ourselves, we find there are some worrying wheezes and rumbles going on in there. This passage from The Spirit of the Laws particularly chilled me when I first read it back in 1994 (and it does even more today, seven years into the Bush administration's cronyism and ceaseless talk of "tax relief"):

"When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law; and as each citizen is like a slave who has run away from his master, that which was a maxim of equity he calls rigour; that which was a rule of action he styles constraint; and to precaution he gives the name of fear. Frugality, and not the thirst of gain, now passes for avarice. Formerly the wealth of individuals constituted the public treasure; but now this has become the patrimony of private persons. The members of the commonwealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of a few, and the licence of many."

Yikes. To think this was written some 260 years ago.

I bring up an 18th Century French Enlightenment philosopher now, partly for its own interest, but also because it strikes me as a useful way of reflecting on our approaches to parenting too.

Tolstoy may have opened Anna Karenina with his assertion that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But the truth is that we have to look more closely at the structures of authority, the system of self-rule, adopted in each family, if we want to determine the particular ways it is happy or unhappy.

We don't have elections in my family, thank god. But I would like to think that the active principle supporting our family is virtue -- concern for one another. So I guess I would like to imagine that my own family has the form of a Republic.

My thought is that perhaps family values really do guide people in their politics, beyond the media's focus on the "hot-button" issues gay marriage, abortion, or sex education. Family values are actually based on deeper understandings within each family.

Those who live in a state of fear at home (with the threat of physical punishment) may vote more willingly for a strong executive, a big military build-up, a government which emphasizes security. Giuliani has postitioned himself as the star of this "father knows best" role. The columnist Jimmy Breslin described him as a "small man in search of a balcony," which says it all.

Those who live under extreme strictures of place and status at home ("because I said so!") may vote more willingly for a government run by oligarchs, see corporate influence as a boon, and embrace big tent parties. I would say that Clinton and Romney are vying for this role. Clinton with her obfuscations on the campaign trail, so as to preserve her lattitude once she is our Inevitable Leader, and Romney with his sense of giddy excitement about bringing big business into the center of American life.

Those who live in families which value the views of all members may be more willing to vote for those who emphasize these open, democratic (some would say "socialist") values in public life, in the form of progressive taxation, universal health care, public education, and absolute freedom of speech. I would say that Kucinich lives up to this role the best; though Obama, Edwards, Biden, Richardson, Dodd, and even McCain all make claims to it.

Anyway, I think it's useful to take Montesquieu's approach to look at our own families, and examine both the outward show of our family's interactions, as well as the principle which holds it together.

Every family would no doubt insist that love is what holds them together, but it is more interesting to take a more fine-grained approach and ask what motivates our most common, every-day interactions.

When a father takes it as granted that he "knows best," what does that teach that father's child about his or her role in the world at large?

Thomas the Tank Engine, Anti-Semitism, and the Sex Pistols

A friend told me a few months ago that she won't let her son read Thomas the Tank Engine stories -- or watch the TV series -- because of the anti-semitism contained within them.

That caught my attention.

I had been watching Thomas and Friends on TV for over a year (maybe once every two weeks or so) with George first, and now Cole too. I had found the episodes mildly entertaining. They mostly functioned as an opportunity for me to get up and do the dishes while the boys stayed on the couch.

Sure, I had noticed that irritating catch-phrase, "You are a really useful engine!"

And come to think of it, certain values -- industriousness, respect for authority, devotion to duty -- seemed to underlie the stories.

And, well, now that you mention it, Sir Topham Hatt, the bald, black-top-hat-wearing Chairman of the Railway, has a kind of obsessive, ruddy-faced concern for the status quo...

But what of it?

For a few months I scoffed at the idea that the series is "anti-semitic." My friend's comment seemed in line with the regrettable tendency for political pundits, when cornered, to compare their adversaries to Hitler. But her comment continued to nag at me.

So I started thinking about the show in its particulars.

Written by an Anglican minister, the Reverand W. V. Awdry, beginning in 1943, for his son Christopher, these stories have a modest, typically English concern for the trivial concerns of everyday life. (Orwell wrote marvelously about how the English character, molded by the familiar details of small town life, resists the dangerous lure of abstraction, in his essay, England Your England.)

But everyday life in the world of Thomas the Tank Engine comes with a difference. It is hyperclean, without regrets, unreal. Watching the episodes of the TV series "Thomas and Friends" you will notice immediately a kind of utopian dream in the clouds and greenery that introduce the Island of Sodor. We enter an idealized place, where everything can and will be resolved within the span of a single episode.

Bridges may need repairing, helicopters may threaten the trains' self-image, Cranky the Crane may dump a crate of fish on a newly-washed train (usually James). But everything is manageable. It's all good for a laugh.

There's certainly something clean-as-a-whistle and safely conformist about this island and its inhabitants.

Then too: the lines of authority on Sodor are unmistakable. Sir Topham Hatt's word is supreme. The trains are encouraged to run on time, avoid risks, help others, and most of all, obey.

Vanity proves wasteful. Paranoia proves unfounded (rest assured, that red hot-air balloon will not take business from the trains after all; it will merely provide another attraction on the island!).

Kafka would have a lot to say here. The Kafka of Sodor would grapple with all those sticky, ugly little concerns which are otherwise pushed under the oncoming trains. But Sodor has no Kafka. It has no subversive current running through it at all.

You start to realize that if only these primary-colored engines (Thomas, Percy, James... the whole gang) could just repress any vestige of unique personality, they would show themselves to be, at last, once and for all, "really useful engines."

On the surface all of this is harmless. And I don't worry about any damage I may have inflicted on George and Cole's psyches.

But it got me thinking: "Wouldn't it be great if just once a rainbow-colored, feather-bedecked engine came whistling down the track?" "Wouldn't it be great if this engine didn't have to justify itself by proving its usefulness?"

Which brings me back to the anti-semitic charge my friend made.

No, I'm not saying that Jewish people have a proclivity towards rainbows and feathers (though a visit to the open-air stalls on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on any given Saturday may suggest this surprising connection). But let's revist the arguments in 1930s Germany directed against the Jewish population of Europe.

Anti-semitism has always used the language of "usefulness." Relegated to minority status, and in most cases restricted from owning property, Jews throughout Europe developed roles outside of the traditional agrarian ones. They charged interest (gasp!) for money-lending, and their religion's reliance on the word of the Talmud led many Jews to find work in journalism, academic pursuits, literature and the arts.

Degenerative Art. "The Non-productive few." Pseudo-scientific concerns about hygiene (in the amazing documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah, the Nazis who are interviewed reveal their disgust for the dirt and disease of those in the ghettos -- which they mistake for a cause, instead of an effect, of their actions). It would all seem perfectly natural in the world of Sir Topham Hatt.

I don't mean to say that Sir Topham Hatt is a closet Nazi. I don't mean even to say that the Thomas the Tank Engine series is overtly anti-semitic. Or that W. V. Awdry was a Nazi sympathizer while writing children's stories for his son during the aerial bombardment of his country by the Nazis.

But the parallels are there. The conformist outlook in the series does match that of regimes (throughout history) which favor social control and work to restrict, or even criminalize, individualism.

What kind of values do I want my children to internalize? I would prefer individualism, thank you.

In the end, we kept our Thomas books around. I still read them to the boys some nights. But my dishwashing innocence is gone. I am now more aware of the need to balance out the conventional values of the Thomas books with the downright weirdness of my bedtime stories.

Less trains meeting their schedules.

More pirate ships which sprout orange trees from the mast...
only to be eaten in one gulp by a giant squid...
which then spits the orange seeds out, along with the rum-drunk pirates...
until they land, in a heap, orange seeds, eye-patches and all, on the shore... making an orange-flavored pirate rum cake.
Something like that anyway.

Let weirdness prevail in all of your bedtime stories.

For a taste of Thomas the Tank Engine (fittingly, an episode called "Escape"), see below.

For a taste of the subversive current running through England ("God Save the Queen / the Fascist Regime / That made you a Moron / Potential H-Bomb..." etc.), see here.

Obama's Example for Parents: It's Better to Hedge than to Lie

Telling the truth can be problematic. We all know that.

I propose that we take a personal example and a political example in turn, and see what they show us about the importance of having respect for the truth -- in life and in politics.

First the personal example:

My two-year-old, Cole, looks up at me, his face smeared with chocolate. His eyes fierce.

"'Nother cookie!"

I know what he wants. He wants another chocolate chip cookie, and dammit he shouldn't have had even the first one, because it is bedtime. And he's tired.

And now he is shouting for "'nother one," jumping up and down, pointing to the cupboard where he knows that, earlier in the day, we hid the tupperware containing the cookies meant for tomorrow's party.

Have you been there? Is this familiar? If so, then you may know what happens next.

I blurt out: "Cookies all gone!" It just comes out before I can check myself: "All gone!"

Cole glares at me silently for a moment. Then even louder than before: "'Nother cookie!"

"Cookies all gone!" I insist.

I meet his gaze, my eyes widening in that give-away, "Who me?" expression I always get when I'm bluffing. His eyes narrow into a suspicious squint.

And he gives up. He sinks to the floor, muttering about cookies. I scoop him up and head upstairs for pajamas, storytime, and bed.

But it sits wrong with me later. I lied to my child. I lied to Cole. He knew it. And he knew I knew it. It can never be made good, not ever... something is broken, lost.... (okay, I'm tired -- I get dramatic when I'm tired). I go to bed.

But in the cold light of day, I think it over. Outright lying is always wrong -- even trivial lies like that one.

It would be better, if I can handle it emotionally, to suffer the outburst, the tantrum, whatever the consequences. Pick him up and take him away from the kitchen. Do what I need to do. But don't lie.

Why do I say this? Because I believe that the most important thing that I can do as a parent, other than love my children, is to establish unquestioned honesty in my communication with them. Without this, I would quickly lose a sense of how to adjust to my children's changing needs. They would stop telling me what's on their minds, and our communication would be broken.

If I allowed the little lies, the little distortions, to build up into a kind of static in our communication, my children would gradually develop a more cavalier attitude towards my word. They would begin to assume that behind what I said is really only my authority and, worse, my concern for expediency.

Even if lying about the cookies worked in the short-term with Cole, it was the wrong way to go. I should have picked him up, kicking and screaming, and carried him upstairs.

*

So now I want to turn to a political example to show how we can get by without lies. It's hard to do, and we may as well turn to someone who has the motivation to lie all day long but the good heart that keeps him from doing it.

Barack Obama has many problems which trigger this same truth/expediency dilemma. Here's one of them:

Obama personally opposes discrimination of all kinds against gays and lesbians. Yet many people in the country have a prejudice against homosexuals, and they feel threatened at the prospect of gay marriage...

Obama knows that if he speaks out for full legal rights for gays and lesbians, which of course would include access to the institution of marriage with not only its privileges but also its symbolic value, he would instantly lose many potential voters. This is true in the Democratic primaries, but even more so in the general election.

So what does Obama do? He hedges.

How do I know this? I saw him do it.

On February 19 this year I went to hear Obama speak at a fundraising event in San Francisco. There were about 80 to 100 people there. He was asked about gay marriage (or "marriage equality" as I recall the questioner phrased it).

In that small setting, without ever saying so outright, Obama made it very clear that his decision not to support gay marriage was based on political expediency. In an attempt to get us to understand his predicament, he drew an analogy.

He mentioned that under the miscegenation laws which existed in the 1960s (before Loving v. Virginia in '67) his own mother and father could not have married in many states. And so he understood personally the importance of "marriage equality".

But then he drew the audience's attention to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s -- those same years leading up to Loving v. Virginia -- on issues such as voting rights, employment discrimination and education. He told us that he had asked himself many times, if he had been in King's position in 1963, would he have "leaned" on the issue of miscegenation -- or would he have postponed it?

His answer of course was that he would have put it off -- even if it meant that his own parents' marriage would have remained illegal in many states.

This pragmatic argument -- coupled with a rueful mention of the mixing of the term "marriage" with religious traditions in many people's minds -- was the best he could offer. In effect he was saying, I can't do this now -- I can't even say anything more... We have to wait.

Strangely, his tone was so personal and thoughtful that, from what I saw, he won the crowd to his side -- at least in the moment.

It helped that he finished his answer with a direct look at the questioner and then a scan of the audience as a whole, saying very clearly, "I will continue to listen to my gay and lesbian friends on this." It almost felt as if he was winking at us in some solemn way (I can't say it, but I am with you!).

What impressed me about Obama's answer at the time was that he did not lie to us. Admittedly, he did not say outright what he hinted: that he personally opposed discrimination of all kinds, including marriage. But he didn't say that he was opposed to gay marriage either. He did a dance in which he managed to avoid lying while avoiding the truth.

As I said, he hedged.

*

This, I think, is the way to go as a parent (when you can't just tell the truth -- which remains the first and best option). It feels dodgy of course. When your kid looks you in the eye and demands "'nother cookie!" it is hard to worry about finessing the point. But finesse is exactly what you need.

If you say, "We're not going to have any more cookies!" in the melancholic tone of "All gone cookies!" for example, you have avoided lying.

You child may get confused. But he doesn't glare at you, knowing that you intentionally used words to express something untrue.

There is a difference, and the difference is a matter of respect.

That's why I am determined to avoid outright lying to my children on any point, however small.

I know that in the teenage years it's going to get a lot more difficult to trick my children with tone. The art of hedging will have to become increasingly advanced.

Perhaps I'll just have to face more temper tantrums...

But come to think of it, with a relationship based on telling the truth, perhaps, even when the truth hurts we will still be able to look each other in the eyes and resolve to disagree. We will have learned to have that kind of mutual respect.

(I'll have to get back to you on that one in about 10 years -- I can hear those of you with teenage children saying softly, "Good luck.")

Doomsday Thinking in our Popular Culture

To continue on the theme of the politics of fear from the last post, I want to share with you an article from The Nation that made an impression on me. It's about the role of the media, and our popular culture generally, in preparing us for doomsday thinking.

No wonder the area where the two towers fell was quickly dubbed "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for the spot where an atomic explosion had occurred... No wonder the events seemed so strangely familiar. We had been living with the possible return of our most powerful weaponry via TV and the movies, novels and our own dream-life, in the past, the future and even--thanks to a John F. Kennedy TV appearance on October 22, 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis to tell us that our world might end tomorrow--in something like the almost-present.

Read the full article here.

I definitely feel a need to think more deeply about the messages that my children are getting from the media.

I invite parents to share their thoughts on this. So far in my home we have introduced the following concepts:

Thomas the Tank Engine
Superman, Batman, the Riddler, the Joker, Aquaman, Aqualad, etc. (mostly DC comic superheros with a 70s feel).
Pirates of all kinds, including Captain Hook -- and Peter Pan
Tintin and his cohorts
Various children's stories, including Where the Wild Things Are, Cordoroy, Olivia, Mike Mulligan, etc.
49ers football games (10 minutes at a time, but enough to get the concept)
Cars -- the Pixar Movie ("Lightneen the Queen" is a current favorite in our house)

Do these stories provoke fear?

How can we make sure our children gain knowledge of this world -- not stand apart from it -- and yet avoid the doomsday dichotomies of good vs. evil in our popular culture?

Write in!

The Politics of Fear and the Urge to Control (a Parenting Perspective)

Yesterday in a press conference, President Bush mentioned the possibility of, oh, "World War III" in passing:

"I've told people that, if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

You can watch him say it here.

That's a good example of what could be called raising the stakes.

It's also a good example of the politics of fear, which we have seen a lot of since 9/11.

But hey. I'm a parent, I know fear. As a dad, I now live in a state of constant fear that some harm will come to one of my children.

My wife and I have an expression: "Little heart attacks every day." We say it to each other after we catch our breath and recover from one of the many near-accidents which occur in our home every day.

You see your child trip on the stairs, and his face just misses the end of that black iron, ornamental, oddly pointed piece at the end of the railing as he falls. Another child has a strange coughing fit in the middle of the night, which sounds like a horse munching on hay, and then is gone as fast as it started. Your doctor notices a slight heart murmur in your child during a routine check-up, and in the moments before he pronounces it "innocent" (wonderful word!) you have actually died, lived an eternity in some insufferably hot and sulphur-smelling place in which you adamantly don't belive, and then come back.

We know fear.

One time I was telling a friend about my dread that my children will, sometime, get injured. I was saying that I feel I should prepare now in some way, since the overwhelming onslaught of adrenaline and heartache which would hit me, if I got a call saying that... that... (my voice building to a fevered intensity here) my child had broken his leg in three places, might be too much!

My friend started laughing. I looked at him blankly. I asked why he was laughing.

He said, "I can see you're worried. I've never actually heard of a leg breaking in three places at school or anywhere else. I would be worried too!"

Oh I can imagine specifics, let me tell you. And I do.

So what you got, Bush?

Fear? World War III? What's that to me? What's that to any parent?

But the other thing a parent knows is that you can't get too hung up on your fear. You have to let your child take risks (within reason), wander off to play, investigate new things. In short you have to let your most loved little ones find their own way in the world. And it starts early.

Sometimes I have to remind myself to back away when I'm standing too close and commenting on every little step they take on a play structure. "How about sitting down on the bench and just watching?" I have to remind myself. And so I sit, and they're fine. Maybe some sand gets in someone's eye. Maybe someone is too scared to go down the slide and gets shoved out of the way by another kid. Big deal. They learn how to wipe the sand out or get out of the way faster.

So there is a balance. Fear plays a role in motivating us to protect and moniter our kids. But we also need to resist our fear. Resist our urge to control.

And this is the insight that perhaps our experience as parents tells us about the Bush administration's use of the politics of fear. It is motivated partly by an urge to control. (It is not only motivated by an urge to protect. And it is not only a cynical election strategy either. Though it is both of these too.)

The politics of fear's deeper motivation, I think, is the urge to control, albeit presented in the form of a humble concern for the safety and simple well-being of others.

Since at least his time in the Nixon administration as chief of staff, Cheney (along with his pal Rumsfeld, who was then Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity) have sought to expand the power of the Executive Branch. They watched in despair as Congress dismantled the levers and knobs which they and others had manipulated in Nixon's White House. They determined to do something about it.

This urge to expand the power of the Exectutive Branch took wing, during the Reagan and Bush years, in a a catchy legal theory called "The Theory of the Unitary Executive." During George W. Bush's years in the White House we have seen its effect: signing statements, expanded Executive privilege, a general disregard for consultations with Congress, the frequent use of interim appointments, and of course a shrugging off of concerns about the politicization of hiring practices at the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales.

Is it a coincidence that this attempt to expand the power of the Executive, this urge to control, has occurred at the same time that we have witnessed the use of the politics of fear? Smoking guns as "mushroom clouds," equations of domestic dissent with "emboldening" the enemy, casual talk of "World War III" -- all of this is directly connected with the urge to control.

And what lies behind this urge to control?

As parents, we know. It is to avoid messiness, the unexpected, accidents of all kinds. When you ask yourself what is at the bottom of it, I think you will agree.

Take a moment, if you will. Really ask yourself. What is it that lurks behind your own occasional, manageable, but never completely absent urge to control the lives of your children, your urge (which you overcome every day, and will overcome every day for the rest of your life) to have them always in your arms, home-schooled, safe from the influences and dangers of the world?

What really is there, I think, behind this urge, is a flat-out terror of disease and decay and injury and... death.

Death.

It goes deep down to our amygdala, that little part of our brain that we share with animals and reptiles alike.

Picture a lizard sitting on a rock. A shadow moves over it. It's eyes send an signal to the visual part of the brain, and then that part send a signal -- ping -- to the amygdala. The amygdala sends a strong signal back: Must. Get. Control. Now! And the lizard is off and running. That's about the whole of what's going on in America these days.

So perhaps what we really need to say to Bush and Cheney in their final 15 months in office is this: How about sitting on the bench for a while?

Do your preparation, bring lunch, check for mean kids, keep an eye out for sharp objects, and then just watch. We're fine. It's sunny out.

After a while, you might even find yourself smiling, Mr. Cheney.

Thoughts on George W. Bush's... Unique Way with Words

Here is a provocative theory.

We all know that George W. Bush mangles words.

Recently, while promoting the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, he comically urged that "childrens do learn." Over the past six years his clumsy speaking style drew frequent contrasts to Tony Blair's endlessly cheerful, sustained eloquence. As Bush acknowledged, meeting with French President Nikolas Sarkozy in August: "I don't [speak French], I can hardly speak English!"

Although Bush's unique way with words is a frequent topic in the media, it has never interested me much on the face of it. We all know people who do not speak extemporaneously very well but nevertheless have intelligent and complicated responses to the world. Vladimir Nabokov, for one, was famously tongue-tied in person. He demanded interviewers submit their questions in advance, so as to avoid his endless "umms" and general incoherence as an interlocutor. What they got, after submitting their questions as instructed, was stunningly lucid language, which Nabokov made to seem effortless only by a massive amount of work.

So give Bush a break. Forget "misunderestimate" and the like. Imagine if any of us had to speak spontaneously every day in front of multiple recording devices. I know I would spend every night with my regrets.

But maybe there is something about the way he talks that is significant after all.

This is what got me thinking:

I noticed that Bush not only says silly things -- it's the way he says them.

I'm sure it has caught your attention that he also emphasizes words more than most people. Jon Stewart's imitation of Bush captures some of the habitual emphasis he puts into his sentences with that sharp, downward gesture with his hands on the last word (followed of course by the "he he" knowing laugh).

Think back to every time Bush has introduced an appointee (or said goodbye to a departing one) in his administration. He often says, "He's a good man" in a strange way, as if this simple description carries with it a tremendous amount of meaning -- which we are expected to share. Or think more recently to the clips you have seen of Bush insisting that we "don't torture people." Again, the word "torture" has a kind of talismanic quality for Bush, as if by saying it out loud, and insisting that it is what our country does not do, he has separated himself from it. Done deal.

Well, what's wrong with this use of emphasis? It gives him a kind of charming everyman quality, doesn't it?

Exactly. It does give him an everyman quality. And how does it do that? It signals that words to Bush are not malleable -- they represent fixed things in the world. Bush's way of talking suggests that he believes that things simply ARE a certain way, and he is privy to the key, the talismanic words, which reveal the simple truths of this world (which were obscured behind, no doubt, a cloud of confusion stirred up by liberal "PhD types").

It's very effective, this certainty Bush has about even the most abstract words like "good" or "freedom." And it's very dangerous.

I would imagine that this misapprehension about the nature of language is natural for someone who struggled with it as a child. If we can imagine that George W. found reading difficult because of his dyslexia (or some other learning disability), he might have learned to think of words as deeply mysterious, holding some key that was often just beyond his grasp.

The point of all this is that he used this mindset to craft a very powerful self-image -- a man who speaks more haltingly and simply than his friends at Andover and Yale, but who nevertheless has the keys that are necessary to access the Kingdom of Things as They Really Are. He believes that words count, and he makes you feel that.

You might be saying... Wait, words do count. Isn't Bush right in this?

Of course they do. We rely on them to count every time we speak. But most of us know, consciously or intuitively, that words are only approximations of meaning -- and inextricably social in their meaning at that. They do not represent anything fixed underneath them, any Platonic ideal that stands apart from their use in context.

I am influenced by the philospher Wittgenstein here, who pointed out that without both a speaker and a listener -- a social interaction -- words cannot have any consistent meaning through time. Robinson Crusoe on his island, calling a bird a "redfeather," would have no way of confirming that when he called a bird a redfeather the next day it would still be the same word or the same kind of bird. The sounds produced by "redfeather" would simply have no meaning. (This, incidentally, is what is known in philosphy as Wittgenstein's "anti-private language argument.")

So instead of thinking of words, rightly, as a social process, and definitions as fluid, Bush learned somewhere along the way to think of words as, well, name tags, each placed on a definite and unchanging thing. "Torture" has some meaning in his mind (I don't even want to know the series of images that flash through his consciousness). So when he says that we don't "torture," he means it. The problem is, without discussion it means nothing to anybody else. The word alone is worthless. And so is the false sense of sanctimony that his private languge provides him.

Here we begin to see how Bush's problem with language has many real-world repercussions. A talismanic understanding of language (perhaps brought on by a childhood learning disability?), has created a kind of short-circuit to our President's ability to think in terms of process, streams of data, analysis.

He is the Decider. The One Who Knows What Things Really Are.

The rest of us, still mulling over nuances are, in his mind, merely "PhD" types. We can debate into the night, while he sleeps the sleep of the innocent.

Most voters, or half of the voters in this country at least, apparently appreciate this short-circuiting of thinking. If you say, in a subtly aggressive tone, "I don't know about you, but I love America because it is free," then you don't leave a lot of room for a discussion about what this term "freedom" conveys. If you have to ask, you are on the wrong side to Bush and those like him.

Perhaps to compensate for boyhood slights due to difficulties with what is often called "book-learning," Bush has developed an uncanny ability to channel the charisma of not-thinking. When he speaks in simple terms of freedom, evil-doers, or even hot dogs, we are compelled to listen because he invests in these words a sense of an unchanging, unreflective meaning which they otherwise lack.

The last point I would leave you with is that neuroscience may support a connection between difficulties with language (diagnosed as dyslexia or some other learning diability) and a tendency to impulsive decision-making. We may be able someday to speak accurately about specific areas of the brain which are affected. Wouldn't it be interesting if someday, in a peaceful world (a guy can dream, can't he?) the disasters wrought by the Bush Presidency are taught in terms of the unique nature of his brain and his adaptations to it as a teenager?

If only it were that simple.

Integrity vs. Reputation

The awarding of the Nobel peace prize to Al Gore today caused me to reflect on two different understandings of honor that are floating around in our contemporary culture.

To me, Al Gore represents the kind of honor which is rooted in his own private sense of self. It is inward-looking. When, for example, Gore conceded the 2000 election to Bush, he acted in a way that was no doubt painful when considered from the perspective of his public life, but which his inward sense of honor told him was right.

For some, his concession forever branded him with the stigma of a "loser." (Who can forget the bumperstickers and signs we saw during that time saying "Sore/Loserman"?)

I felt that, on the contrary, we witnessed, on live TV, a true act of patriotism; whether right or wrong, Gore made his decision based on what he believed was best for the country at the time. Gore's honor is strongly associated with the idea of integrity.

Consider another kind of honor that competes with Gore's. This other honor requires the vigorous and constant defense of a person's public image. Justice Clarence Thomas makes clear in his recent book that he believes that great harm was done to his honor in the Anita Hill controversy. He carries his bitterness with him even today. But what harm could possibly be done to his honor if he simply carried himself in a dignified manner, acted as he saw fit, and told the truth? Justice Thomas' idea of honor -- traditionally heralded as "a man's sacred honor" -- is strongly associated with reputation.

The tension between these two conflicting ideas of honor -- one based on integrity and the other based on reputation -- lies beneath many of the cultural skirmishes we see playing out in our national debate. The media promotes reputational honor above all else -- because this kind of honor requires an active defense on the part of those who feel their's is under attack, and that helps ratings.

As a result, most TV talk programs (spanning the political spectrum from Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olberman) present everything as a debate between opposing sides. One side says something shocking, and the other side defends itself.

In our private lives, however, many people continue to cherish the idea of a quiet, private sense of honor based on integrity. We tear up when we hear stories of dedicated parents who provide for their children, without any recognition, in the face of enormous hardships and even humiliations.

This cuts across both political parties. Republicans and even the religious right do celebrate integrity-based honor when they see it in a working family who quietly cares for the poor in their charity work. The left celebrates honor based on integrity when they see someone working for an unpopular cause such as ensuring a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, despite the protesters outside the door.

Both also celebrate the kind of honor based on reputation: members of the Republican Party, reflecting the values of the Old South, talk of facing down opponents almost as if they wish to fight a duel -- as Limbaugh did last week when he called for Harry Reid to act like a "man" and to come on his program to discuss the "phony soldiers" comments personally. Democrats celebrate honor of this kind too when they vaunt Hillary's "experience" over Obama's naivete. What is naivete but sticking to your own sense of what is right in the face of tough odds (in other words, showing integrity)?

As a father, I hope to teach my children to value the kind of honor that Gore shows. I sense that it starts, for Gore, with childhood, for this is the reference for our most closely-held sense of identity.

My sense is that the other kind of honor, the one based on reputation, starts not in childhood but in adolescence. It recalls our first victories and embarrassments among our peers. It is suggestive of high school shenanigans.

Reputation is a poor substitute for integrity.

Raising Children Right... or Left

Do we make our children liberal or conservative by the way we raise them -- even before we ever discuss politics with them expicitly?

I would argue that we do give them an outlook on the world which likely predisposes them one way or the other.

But there are too many dimensions to politics, too many values informing our positions, for our children's political views, once they emerge, to conform perfectly to our own. Thank golly.

Into this teeming mix of values and lessons and clashing political views -- familiar to parents with teenagers, I imagine -- comes a new theory. It is worth examining from a parenting perspective.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, has proposed a theory of morality which involves 5 "moral axes." They are: harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. His ideas were discussed in the New York Times's Science section a few weeks ago, and the article generated a storm of commentary on the internet.

Haidt claims that liberals and conservatives, answering the same questions (you can do the test yourself to see where you come down) will find that their results cluster around different axes. Liberals will, according to Haidt, put far more emphasis on avoiding harm and ensuring fairness. Conservatives will add to these concerns a strong feeling for ingroup loyalty, a respect for authority and an interest in preserving sacredness/purity.

So Haidt would suggest that we are influencing our children's politics by the values we teach them.

"Of course," I wanted to say when I first read this. "Values inform politics, what else is new?"

But something about Haidt's approach continued to nag at me in the week after I read about it. Then I finally realized why. He suggests that conservatives have more moral axes, more resources for decision-making, than liberals -- five rather than the stunted two that I favor.

Here's how I counter Haidt's theory:

A dear friend of mine had a birthday recently, and I was thinking about his great qualities. One of his qualities is his deep loyalty and steadfastness towards his close friends. Suddenly, I remembered the Haidt moral axes. And so I asked myself, "Does this loyalty that my friend shows make him more moral in my view?" My answer was no. I realized from this that I do not consider loyalty to be a moral quality, merely an admirable personality trait.

With this thought-experiment in mind, the three "conservative" axes, (loyalty, authority, and purity) seem to me more tied to personality traits than they are a sense of morality.

Haidt (and cultural conservatives) would argue of course that I am so steeped in the contractual model of morality that I simply can't see these for what they are -- axes of moral decision. But the burden is not on me. It is on Haidt to demonstrate that his "5 axes" matrix is truly an exhaustive list of moral axes. Otherwise it's just a cute exercise.

Has he done that? I don't think so.

Why not add a few more "moral" axes, such as flexibility/rigidness, or openness to difference/desire for homogeneity? These two suggestions have a bias towards recognizing culturallly "liberal" acts of generosity and kindness as opposed to the Haidt axes of purity and authority and loyalty, which are biased towards recognizing conservative virues. But aren't they just as legitimate?

I would bet that we could generate a list of some 20 or 30 axes which would be borne out in studies as distinguishing liberal vs. conservative inclinations about morality. In short, the whole thing reeks of the typical weakness of psychology: mistaking labeling for insight.

Certainly, by encouraging, say, "openness to difference" rather than "ingroup loyalty," I am predisposing my children to political views on the liberal side of the spectrum. On that we can agree. But I am not making them morally deficient. They have the two crucial "moral axes" covered: minimize harm and try to be fair. The rest are a matter of taste. And some, like the cult of sacredness/purity, are not to my taste at all.

Behind the Bright Lights of Tonight's Republican Debate

Watching the Republican Debate tonight on CNBC, I was struck most of all by the production values, and what they say about how our media distorts our lived experience, even in this supposedly "unfiltered" setting of a live debate.

Just as in every TV debate I can remember, the candidates were placed against a red, white and blue, luminous backdrop. Patriotic design elements (stars, stripes, etc.) appeared to dance around their heads.

The faces of these older white men looked well-tanned (read: made-up), and their eyes flashed pleasingly in the lights. The graphics that introduced them to the viewers were swift and expressive. The snatches of music that led into advertisements -- and grabbed us again after breaks -- were, frankly, invigorating.

The candidates' answers, of course, were uniformly banal, just as the Democrats' answers are in their debates.

What is going on?

Well, here's what I think. What we are seeing is something profound: a picture, if you will, of our society's blinkered values, presented in flashing lights and smiling faces.

We have grown accustomed to a picture of the world, as presented on TV, that is protected from suffering. This picture does not show garbage loosely strewn across the floor. It does not show skin cells that are infected and pink, or lacerations on cheeks, or stubbed toes with cracked nails. It rarely shows tears, or if it does they are stylized (Paris Hilton shielding her tender face from paparazzi). They are not the snotty tears, the snorting gasps and choked-off shouts that we experience in our private lives.

Where on that stage could possibly fit anything recognizable from daily life? Where would we indicate -- in that spare, "patriotic" design -- the odd mix of cultures which we now see in most American cities, large and small?

We're so used to it that it is easy not to see anything is amiss. But while Romney and Thompson share a laugh over whether the debate seems like an episode of "Law & Order" (ha ha!), the country's homes are filled with people who actually don't have health care, who actually smoke marijuana, who (some of them) actually talk in languages other than English, who actually can't pay for a new transmission for the car and so will have to take the bus to work for the foreseeable future.

I don't mean to sound righteous at all. I live in that privileged world which the media does represent on our TV screens -- the "high-protein land" (as the band Pavement once memorably put it). I drink cafe lattes, never question paying utility bills, call friends long distance, worry only occasionally and indulgently about financial ruin.

But without sounding righteous, I can say that I do recognize my world as uncommon, an anomaly. A fraction of us (including most of the people in the national media) live like proverbial royalty, while the rest of the country has a far more immediate sensory experience of poverty, filfth, unwanted noise.

To look at the Republicans debate is to know where they stand. And the same goes for the Democrats (perhaps Gravel excepted, since every time he speaks he angrily attacks the frame). The politicians, as presented by our media, are just as "clean" as Senator Biden controversially described Obama. They stand in opposition to darkness, smelliness, toughness, dryness -- in short, the world as lived by most of the people in it.

How do we teach ourselves and our children to break through this shimmering barrier of media and see behind it? It seems to me that we must actively seek media alternatives. I welcome suggestions.

Torture, First Principles, and Our Children

The New York Times today revealed the existence of "secret memos" in the United States Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales, which authorized "enhanced interrogation techniques" for use on terrorism detainees. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" is of course a euphemism; the same phrase in German, "Verschaefte Vernehmung" was used by the Nazis during World War II.

In either language, it means torture. The United States of America, our beloved country, now belongs to the long list of nations which have used and continue to use torture as a tool of public policy.

How does that make you feel?

The specific techniques -- a word that is far too sterile and scientific-sounding as a description for the sweat-stained, shit-streaked, brutal actions involved -- which Gonzales' Justice Department authorized, and the Bush administration used, include:

keeping detainees naked and shivering uncontrollably in extremely cold cells;
keeping them in a sleep-deprived, semi-deranged for extended period of time;
playing non-stop loud music;
hitting them on the head repeatedly;
and waterboarding.

This brings to mind the question of how to instill moral "first principles" in our children. By first principles I mean bright lines over which we simply cannot cross without losing a sense of who we are.

I believe that opposition to the torture of another human being is a moral first principle (just as the stirring statement in the Declaration of Independence about those rights which we hold to be "self-evident" represents a political first principle).

Let's examine what morality is at its core. I would argue that it starts with that most unique human characteristic: our capacity to empathize with other human beings by way of our imagination. It is this capacity, coupled with our pre-cognitive instinct to protect other human beings from harm if we can imagine them facing harm, that is the source of morality. With this small imaginative leap -- "Oh, that sharp stick will hurt him if I poke him, just as I have felt sticks hurt me when I am poked!" -- we begin a huge project, taking place mostly in our formative years but also throughout our lives, to build a sense of moral interconnectedness to others.

If you follow me so far, that the basis for morality is our capacity for empathy (by way of the imagination), then I am sure you will agree too that there can be no clearer violation of what we term "morality" than the intentional causing of severe pain to another person. If we do not renounce this act unequivocably and unmistakably, then morality becomes nothing more than a strategy for advancement, a code for proving loyalty to our own in-group. But morality is something else than a strategy or a code. It is a stop, a boundary, a means of knowing who we are.

Of course there are scenarios in which we would be tempted to physically hurt another person, even severely, for some larger cause. If you have watched a recent debate between the Republican Presidential candidates then you have been conditioned to think reflexively of the example of the nuclear device primed to explode in a major metropolitan area, and the one man that can defuse it glaring at us with defiance. Guiliani relishes this hypothetical -- there is a glint in his eyes when he brings it up. In such a situation, I would not predict how any of us would act. I suspect that most of us would do something that would qualify as torture under those circumstances. But this act -- which we must remember is an unlikely occurance, as it would require an astonishing constellation of events to create this scenario -- must be considered outside of our moral range. it would change the person doing it forever. It should be viewed as rupture of our moral principles rather than an adaptation within them.

For someone to claim that this would be a morally justifiable act shows that his or her sense of identity is simply not bounded by first principles. He may be a charming person; she may live a generally admirable life; but such a person, I would argue, missed out, at some formative stage, when it came to establishing a bedrock upon which to build a coherent moral outlook.

So back to the initial question of this post. How do we instill first principles, particularly moral first principles, in our children?

Already, when faced with an altercation between our 3-year-old and our 2-year-old (his birthday's today!) my wife and I say things like, "There is no hitting in this house!" But those are just rules, and they are understood as such. I believe that first principles are not taught through catch-phrases or "time outs." My sense is that first principles are taught by the everyday reinforcement of the values which define the relationships in the home.

If, as I would like to think, our compass needle points regularly to the practice of love and concern for others, then when the needle spins the opposite direction to the practice of dehumanization and cruelty to others our children will have an immediate gut reaction that something is off.

Those times in my life when I have managed to dehumanize someone enough to be cruel, I have felt an uneasy feeling, a gathering creepiness, inside. You can't always put it into words, but you know it.

I believe that it is up to us, as parents, to encourage empathy, to ask questions about other people, to speculate about our children's friends' feelings with them -- "Why was Jack crying? Was he upset that his bubbles spilled?" In short, to create a sense of a larger world of sentient human beings -- in which each of us happens to inhabit only one body. When we do this -- in a million ways, by the way we make sure they share their birthday cake as well as the vigor with which we wave goodbye -- we create the sense of first principles without ever overtly discussing them. The outer boundary, the web that holds our moral self together, if you will, is woven from countless, subtle, daily interactions, not from spoken rules.

In this way, as parents, we create citizens who would simply not endorse the physical abuse of detainees as matter of public policy. It is not even arguable -- regardless of the perfect-constellation hypothesis about a ticking nuclear bomb pitched by Tim Russert or Brit Hume on any given night.

One wonders what the parents of the polite, articulate John Yoo, architect of the legal memoranda in the Justice Department supporting these secret memos, did NOT do. Surely they taught their son manners. Surely they taught him how to succeed in the world. Surely they taught him much about equipose and patience. But why did he not acquire a set of first principles which would exclude torture? I would find it very interesting to know how much value, if any, John Yoo's parents placed on the imagination (and the capacity for empathy) when he was growing up.

Memories of Burma and the Impetus Behind Politics

One thing I did not mention in my last post is that I traveled in Burma with my family when I was young. It was 1981, and I was 12. The memories I have are so vivid -- and, what is more relevant to this meditation, they are from a child's perspective.

I believe that the direct, non-analytical nature of these experiences, even dating back 26 years, adds to my feeling of connection to the people there today -- and my sense of political urgency about the situation.

Let me share some of my memories with you:

In Rangoon (now Yangon) we stayed in a creaky, gorgeous colonial British hotel. It had slowly circling fans in the lobby, where we drank lime juice on ice to stay cool. Vintage 1940s and 50s cars lined the streets -- used without thought to their antique looks, but simply because those were the models of car available. I suffered a mysterious allergic reaction (never repeated) one night as we returned to our hotel room, and I began breathing frantically, trying to get air. In retrospect I can only imagine how frightening that was for my parents. I remember they called the front desk to try to get medical assistance, but by the time they had communicated the problem my attack had subsided.

I remember the beggers and the monks, the gleaming, gold surface of the central Buddhist temple (the Schwedagon pagoda), the talk of the Buddha's tooth once preserved there. We then traveled north to Mandalay, and we also visited the most fantastic place I had ever seen, Pagan (now called Bagan).

There are hundreds of temples dotting a flat dusty plain in Pagan. They have secret stairways, ornate carvings, impossible balconies, and dark tunnels. Each one is different in design. My sister (a year older at 13) and I raced around these temples, laughing and gasping for air while my parents took a more leisurely pace and considered the history.

My sister and I felt as if we had discovered the real Disneyland, the one that wasn't at all ersatz -- a true lost kingdom with crumbling stone and stange aromas and odd shafts of sunlight. We rode from temple to temple in a horse-drawn cart, with our driver occasionally giving rides to villagers. The people smiled and some spoke broken English. It was the most memorable single day I experienced in all the travels that my family took through Asia during those years (we lived in Hong Kong from 1979 through 1981 and took the chance to travel extensively in the region).

How do these memories bear on politics?

The simple point I take from this excursion into my private archive of sights and sounds is this: We are driven poltiically as much by what we FEEL as what we think. I feel sorrow (and anger too) when I think of Darfur -- as when I watched the documentary by a friend of mine, Annie Sunderberg, "The Devil Came on Horseback," at Sundance this year. But because I have no direct, sensory connection to that part of Africa, my motivations are more analytical than visceral. When it comes to supporting aggressive action again the regime in the Sudan, I am all for it -- but out of calculation rather than the force of conviction. When faced with similar suffering Burma, however, my childhood memories provoke me to brood on it more. I am more inclined to talk about it with loved ones, check to see what my government is doing about it, even take to the streets (if the chance arises).

This makes me think of a great essay by Richard Rorty on human rights. It's called "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality." Read it if you want to be provoked.

Rorty's argument is, in a nutshell, that we should forget claiming that we are on the side of reason, that we are "right" and those who abuse other human beings are "wrong" in some absolute sense. Rather, the only effective way to change people's behavior (short of the use of force) is to appeal to sentiment. Show them photographs of their victims. Make them confront what they are doing directly through some method of storytelling (film, TV, theater, writing). Get them to see, and smell, and feel the consequences of their actions. And then ask a simple follow-up question to provoke them: Is THIS the world that you would like to live in?

As David Hume famously wrote: "Reason is the slave of the passions." It doesn't work as well the other way around.

When it comes to Burma, I find that my reason is at work, trying to find ways to alleviate the suffering, because my passions for that country were ignited 26 years ago as a child.

What passions are we igniting in our children today that will motivate them 26 years from now?

Why Democrat Dad?

This blog will explore the intersection of politics and parenting. I invite other dads, moms, or anyone else who is interested, to contribute to the conversation. My intention is to write every day on some issue which connects politics with parenting.

Why "Democrat Dad"?

I am a citizen and a Democrat, and I believe that these are not mere labels. They are important aspects of myself.

Why is my political identity so important that I feel compelled to write a blog about it? Well, I believe that we all have a responsibility to take politics seriously.

Those of us worried or enraged or disillusioned about our country cannot simply escape, drop out, or (romantic as it sounds) "drop off the grid," without losing much of what we cherish about ourselves.

I agree with Aristotle here (see his Politics) that human beings, choosing to exist outside of their community, are abdicating part of themselves. They are living as either "god or beast" -- the lives of monks or hermits, but not something that is recognizable to me.

My values are informed by the opinions of others; and this is not a point of shame. We are social creatures. We respond to praise and blame. Our participation in society is a pre-condition of language and a basis for morality.

I am enamored of our country and its laws. When I think of it... when I picture the whole whirring, clicking machine going like crazy on any given day... I am inspired to believe the best of my fellow-citizens and our future, all over again.

Through multiple decisions at many municipal, state and federal levels, through checks and balances of the different branches of government, through experments in legislation taking place concurrently in the states and in Washington D.C., through elections for offices ranging from a seat on the local school board to the Presidency of the United States -- through all of this never-ceasing activitiy -- our system of law provides what I like to think of as a perfect fit.

Think of it as a complex, ever-adjusting, digital map of the analog curve of our collective needs. And it is all thanks to the best "software" ever designed for the organizing of human beings and their diverse interests: the Constitution.

I am a citizen of this country, and proud of it. And politically, I am a member of the Democratic Party.

Hence, Democrat Dad.

Please join me. I look forward to thinking through parenting from a political perspective -- with you as my fellow-parents and fellow-citizens. Fellow Democrats of course are invited. Republican Dads and Moms too! Let's get started!