Solastalgia and Shelter-at-Home

"I wonder when we will return to the life that we once led, which now seems like a dream," I wrote to two friends in a group message.

I am not the only one who feels nostalgic when I think about the old days--you know, from less than two months ago.

In that BC (Before Coronavirus) era, we freely moved around, had dinners with friends and family, went to restaurants and movies, traveled.  We shook hands, and hugged.  now, it simply ain't what it used to be!

There is an intense feeling of distress, angst, associated with change even when we are at home, because we are stuck at home.

A couple of summers ago, I blogged about a situation when people didn't stir out, and those that did wore masks.  It upset me then that I couldn't even enjoy the simplest pleasure of walking up to the river, leave alone walking my favorite five-mile loop by it.

But, that was not because of a virus.

In 2017, forest fires miles away blew smoke and fine particulates into the valley, and we were trapped.  I came down with solastalgia.

The symptoms include an underlying sense of loss, a vague sensation of being torn from the earth, a general out-of-placeness, homelessness without leaving home. ... Solastalgia is the unease we inflict on ourselves as we create a world we don’t want to inhabit, a world stripped of nature.

I quoted there:

“Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote, “is the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment. Solastalgia exists when there is recognition that the beloved place in which one resides is under assault.” The type of assault may vary. The force of the assault may vary. The loss and unease that follows in the wake of the assault do not.
Glenn Albrecht chose “solasta” as a new root word for two reasons. “Solasta” contains the sense both of “solace” and “desolation.”

That is no different from what we feel now.  There is a "pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment."

Glenn Albrecht writes in a recent commentary:

If I live to be 100 years of age, it is my hope that my life will come to exemplify a neologism that is sumbiotude, or the state of living together.
Sumbiotude is the exact opposite of solitude: instead of contemplating life in isolation, sumbiotude involves contemplation and completion of a lifespan with the loving companionship of humans and non-humans.

To rid ourselves of solastalgia, and to practice sumbiotude, we will have to overcome COVID-19 at the earliest.

Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us

I think about death a lot.  Not because I am pathologically obsessed with dark thoughts; far from that.  Death being inevitable is not an existential crisis either.  Thinking about the coming death--of parents,family, friends, myself--provides clarity about the life that I want to live.  In many ways, death gives meaning to life, which otherwise is absurd!

Thus, the blog-posts in plenty about death.  Read them carefully, and you will find that the posts are not about death per se, but are my thoughts on how to live one's life. Whether it is about visiting with parents or not burdening the children, that clarity results from an understanding that we all have expiration dates that we carry; thankfully, those dates are hidden from us.

Of course, most of us do not want to die.  If only we can live a little bit longer.  Extending life has been a quest, I suppose, ever since humans started thinking.  Like the Tom Cruise character in Vanilla Sky, we have all been mumbling or yelling "ellie", by which he is referring to LE--Life Extension.  Over the past 200 years,  we have dramatically increased the average life expectancy at birth, and reduced the chances of dying from ailments that easily killed our ancestors.  We even defeated small pox, and rounded up the last of the virus into test tubes that are in secure locations!

Yuval Noah Harari writes about all these and more in the context of the novel coronavirus.  Harari raises an important question:

When the vaccine is indeed ready and the pandemic is over, what will be humanity’s main takeaway?

That question is practically a Rorschach Test.  How you answer it says a lot about how you think about life and death, and the meaning of your existence.

Harari writes:

In all likelihood, it will be that we need to invest even more efforts in protecting human lives. We need to have more hospitals, more doctors, more nurses. We need to stockpile more respiratory machines, more protective gear, more testing kits. We need to invest more money in researching unknown pathogens and developing novel treatments. We should not be caught off guard again.

We will, of course, do all that.  Maybe we will even reduce our military by a couple of stealth bombers and instead use that money to stockpile on medical masks.  We will throw as much resources that we can into LE.

But, shouldn't we also spend some to help us all deal with the mystery of our existence?  The puzzle that haunts us?  As Harari notes: "We have to own up to our transience."

Neither Harari nor I imagine that humans will take up that question of our fleeting existence.

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

We will waste yet another opportunity that presents itself as a crisis.  Colleges will further decimate the humanities, and instead invest more in science and technology!

Harari ends his essay with this:

Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us. But they can buy us some more time to grapple with it. What we do with that time is up to us.

Up to us.

I know what we will do with the time: Watch sports, porn, baking shows, ... everything other than owning up to our transience and making sense of this absurd life!

Such a higher education system cannot go on forever

Like every economic activity, higher education is also in flux in the time of the coronavirus.

So much of what we do in higher education has always been about people in the real world.  If we looked at it from the students' perspective, college is about people way more than it is about learning.

It has always been that way.

Where there are people, there are problems.  When colleges have thousands of people, well, COVID-19 presents a nightmare to decision-makers on when and how to reopen college.

In the BC (Before Coronavirus) era, I have complained a lot about higher education here in the US.  I mean, a lot.  COVID-19 has merely amplified many of those problems.

The problems confronting America’s #colleges long predate the #coronavirus crisis.
But if current trends continue, the #pandemic is likely to act as a catalyst for a historic reckoning that may transform #highered https://t.co/WpYINgwQLr

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) April 20, 2020

Of the many complaints that I have, most of them come back to a fundamental issue of mission drift.  The mission drift that places athletics above academics, for instance.  The mission drift that promotes building fancy dorms and recreation facilities.  It is an endless list of malpractice that results from mission drift.  The mission drift is also a big reason why higher education has become terribly expensive.

In this post in 2011, I wrote:

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever.  As Herbert Stein famously remarked, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families, and taxpayers begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.

That post became a newspaper commentary a few days after that.  I didn't earn any new friends for writing that commentary ;)

I can only hope against hope that the coronavirus will compel us to rethink about our mission and to focus on it.

#COVID19 will compel #HigherEd to do what some of us simply couldn't get our universities to do: Focus on the mission! https://t.co/y0moRZ43G3#ncaa #ClimbingWalls #Bullshit

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) April 11, 2020

The following is a lightly edited post from April 27, 2011.
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If only we were all aware of the cost of higher education and engaged in those discussions, as much as we are painfully in sync with gas prices!

Every once in a while, I point out to students that in the academic quarter system, it costs about $110 every week, per term, for each of the four-credit classes that I teach.  A majority is paid for by students through tuition and fees.  Taxpayers chip in which a significant amount as well. 

Such an expensive investment is guided by a belief that college education is about employment and economic productivity.  But, this is not entirely true.  In fact, this linkage of higher education to economic performance is relatively new in human history. 

Education, for the longest time, was not about credentialing for the trades.  As one looks back to the days of “gurukula” in India, or Plato’s “academy” it becomes clear that education was simply about knowing.  Preparations for the trades and professions happened elsewhere.

Thus, higher education wasn’t an “industry” either.  Galileo pursued research on the cosmos because of his undying, and heretical, curiosity, and not because he treated that as a convenient opportunity to charge students fees that they could not afford. 

But, especially since the post-World War years, there has been a transformation that has resulted in a twisted understanding that higher education is some sort of a credentialing service for young adults interested in joining the 21^st century equivalents of trade guilds. 

The irony is that it does not require an undergraduate degree to complete the tasks in every service sector job either.  Yet, we have managed to convince ourselves that a college diploma is a must-have for mere survival, let alone prosperity.  Most students I talk to feel that they have no choice but to get a college diploma, if they want to get any job anymore.  And this is a horrible Hobson's choice they face.

After spending $110 week after week for classes like mine, students graduate, typically, with about $20,000 in debt only to realize the realities of employment.  Despite all my full disclosures in the classroom, they are shocked to find out that there isn’t really any job waiting for them, and that the diploma is not necessarily the guaranteed route across the (un)employment gates.  Further, trade guilds, often, add, and require, their own training and certification. 

At the end of the day, the only beneficiaries are colleges and universities that are, naturally, recording enrollment increases.  Even in my classes in the summer!  This enrollment growth then triggers the need for additional facilities, which necessitates a demand for more money from students and taxpayers.

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever.  As Herbert Stein famously remarked, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families, and taxpayers begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.  Maybe students and taxpayers will then demand a refund of the money they spent on my classes, eh!

Vegetarians and the coronavirus

The President and his toadies, like his Secretary of State, like to refer to COVID-19 as the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus, the latter even torpedoing a G-7 comminique.  But, as the author of this essay notes: "Those who think that this is a Chinese problem rather than a human one should think again."

Why?

There is no shortage of zoonoses that have emerged from human maltreatment of animals. The most likely origin of H.I.V. (human immunodeficiency virus), for example, is S.I.V. (simian immunodeficiency virus), and the most likely way in which it crossed the species barrier is through blood of a nonhuman primate butchered for human consumption. Similarly, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease probably had its origins in its bovine analogue — bovine spongiform encephalopathy (B.S.E.), or “mad cow disease.” The most probable mechanism of transmission is through human consumption of infected cattle.

Zoonosis--a disease which can be transmitted to humans from animals--is not uncommon.  As Wikipedia puts it, it is one long list of zoonotic diseases!

So, they can continue to refer to the Wuhan virus, but that is a pleasure and comfort that is no different from peeing on oneself for warmth on a cold night!

When we know that so much of human misery has been zoonotic, shouldn't we seriously think about how we humans interact with, and treat, animals?

In the future, we should fully expect our maltreatment of animals to wreak havoc on our own species. In addition to future pandemics, we face the very real risk of breeding antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance is not even a future problem.  It is already here.  It will only worsen in the future.

Imagine a couple of bacteria mutating just enough and spreading quickly too.  Then, when the next virus pandemic arrives, it will cause secondary bacterial infections like how COVID-19 delivers the blow that then makes it possible for bacteria to launch attacks.  But, we won't have drugs to fight the superbugs--the current antibacterials won't work.  (I wonder if COVID-19 patients are already experiencing the superbug problem.)  It is estimated that by 2050, ten million people could die each year from diseases that are resistant to drugs.

We can play this game of successive generations of vaccines and antibiotics in order to fight new viruses and bacteria.  And we should.  But, perhaps we also need to think more about the zoonotic dimension, especially when "there can be a significant lag between that emergence and the development of a safe and effective vaccine, during which time great damage can be done both by the virus and by attempts to prevent its spread."

So, what can be done?

Why not minimize the human-animal interaction to the extent possible?  We could stay away from the parts of the planet that have never been home to us homo sapiens. 

Well, that is not going to happen.

Or, we can pursue "a more intelligent — and more compassionate — appraisal of our treatment of nonhuman animals, and concomitant action."

Well, that's not going to happen either.

In that case, don't ever say that we weren't warned!

What does it mean to be college educated anyway?

COVID-19 has upended our lives in so many different ways that most of us would never have ever imagined.  How many among us imagined a situation, for instance, when students of all ages would be forced to be in their homes because of closure of all schools and colleges?  And on top of that, they would learn remotely?

In higher education, remote learning has compelled teachers to think about what exactly do they want students to learn from their classes and, therefore, how they should go about teaching it.

Now, pause for a minute and forget the coronavirus.  Shouldn't teachers have always been thinking about what exactly do they want students to learn from their classes and, therefore, how they should go about teaching it?  Isn't that fundamental to teaching?

I think so. I believe so.

But, not all teachers did.

I even tried to engage in discussions on what exactly it means to be college educated in the 21st century and, therefore, what does it mean to be a faculty in the 21st century.  It was a disaster, with most colleagues pooh-poohing it all.  Of course, it could be that the messenger was the problem, but I think it was more than that.

When I became a full-time academic, within a couple of years it became clear to me that the traditional approach to college was not working.  In fact, it was often counter-productive.  I have even blogged in plenty about it here in this blog.

I wrote in this post, for instance, "One would think that all these mean that now is a real good time to seriously think about what it is to be educated."  And that was in April 2013.  Seven years ago, to the date, almost. The missed opportunities; what a shame!

The following is from April 27, 2013, unedited:
***********************************************

Even if I am a total dud in helping students in my classes understand and appreciate the materials, I bet there are very few who doubt my commitment to liberal education.  If they paid attention to me, then they also know that even as they go through a rigorous liberal education, they have to keep thinking about their career plans as well.

In this structure, problems are in plenty.  Universities offer such a diluted and distorted version of liberal education that we insiders are the ones giving liberal education that awful stink.  Here is an example: at my university, a student can major in the social sciences and minor in geography, and successfully graduate with not even a tenth of the requirements coming from the sciences.  This is merely one of the gazillion possibilities of students legitimately avoiding being liberally educated even as they earn their diplomas at the colleges and universities all over the country.  Not the well-rounded liberal education at all.

My point has always been that such an education is a waste of time and money.  We might as well merely offer professional training.  We should stop referring to what we do as liberal education.  Why call it liberal education and offer something else?

At the same time, we have been completely marginalizing professional education too.  Instead of providing career and technical education to those students who might prefer that, we put that down as some kind of an inferior option and we force all students to go through the hoops of whatever that is we do at four-year schools anymore.

No wonder then we are finding ourselves all twisted trying to figure out the "real payoff of a college degree." To a large extent, Ronnie L. Booth, president of Tri-County Technical College, near Greenville, S.C., articulates the points that I try to get across to people:

A vocational degree is not for everyone, he readily admits, but many of his students are arriving with four-year degrees in hand, looking for something practical. In coming months, he will direct Tri-County's academic counselors to more aggressively steer students away from fields and majors that might prove a bad fit. Don't like the sight of blood or the smell of bodily fluids? Nursing might not be for you. Interested in engineering? Let's have a serious talk about your grades in algebra.
"Better to find out on the front end," he says. "I believe in truth in advertising."
More parents and students, he says, need to "understand that someone has to pay the bills." In his region, he frequently meets waiters and waitresses who have four-year degrees, and he has a friend whose daughter went to college to study dance. She is working in retail.
"That is not what Daddy had anticipated," Mr. Booth says in a Southern drawl. "I believe in a broad educational program, things that make you a good citizen, but I am not sure that it is necessary to rack up $50,000 or $100,000 in debt to get that—and then not to be able to get employment. I have told my children that one of Daddy's goals is to get you off my payroll."

In healthcare, which has been one of the fastest growing sectors, ""It looks like B.A. is now entry-level, or it's becoming that way."  The jobs that didn't require a four-year degree are rapidly evaporating:

The erosion of midlevel jobs goes beyond nursing. Experts say several forces are at work. Automation has eliminated many transcription and clerical jobs. Cost pressures have led hospitals and other health-care providers to push many routine tasks onto medical assistants and other lower-paid workers.
Pharmacies, for example, increasingly employ a mix of licensed pharmacists—who now often need a doctorate—and technicians who fill prescriptions with only limited training.
The shift to electronic medical records, meanwhile, has eliminated many traditional jobs maintaining patient records but has created a wealth of new opportunities for those with coding skills.
At the same time, the increasing complexity of medicine, along with an increased focus on measuring and improving patient care, has raised the bar on educational requirements for some jobs. An Institute of Medicine committee in 2010, for example, recommended that 80% of registered nurses have bachelor's degrees by 2020, meaning nurses with associate's degrees may soon find themselves in the position LPNs face today.

The system is so rigged that the youth seem to have no choice but to get a college degree, even if it means that they will be underemployed:

In the short term, we're still obviously digging out of the jobs hole left by the recession. Unemployment for college graduates is higher than normal. Underemployment is more prevalent, though it's less severe than college critics portray, and perhaps no worse than during the Reagan days. It's the long view that's cloudier. Maybe, as the recession's impact fades, the economy will naturally go back to quickly churning out more jobs for high skill workers, and academics like Beaudry and his colleagues will be proven wrong. Or, perhaps they're right, and we'll need to wait for another great tech revolution before the market for educated workers goes back to growing the way it did 15 years ago.We can't say for sure. But we do know that young people are safer with a degree than without one.

One would think that all these mean that now is a real good time to seriously think about what it is to be educated.  Here is an example: how much math should we require that students do?  Or, even if we think that the math will do them good for critical thinking skills, which I believe it does, should we reconsider how we teach math?  We need to look into such questions because "less than a quarter of U.S. workers report using math any more complicated than basic fractions and percentages during the course of their jobs.":

And, here is the interesting aspect of it all.  Remember how we systematically treat technical training as some kind of a second-class option that the young should be discouraged from?  Ahem, they need math!

Upper level blue collar, e.g. craft and repair workers like skilled construction trades and mechanics

Lower level blue collar, e.g. factory workers and truck drivers

So, quo vadis?

Do not drink Lysol or bleach!

This coronavirus nightmare will end, and America will be great again.
Because of Trump.

That is how this letter from a Eugene resident ended in the local newspaper.

But that was a couple of days before the letter-writer's hero talked about injecting disinfectants in order to treat COVID-19 patients.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light ... and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that,” Trump said, addressing Bryan. “And then I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that."

I wonder if that letter-writer considers tRump to be her hero even after bleaching one's lungs!  Chances are pretty good, however, that she continues to adore her hero.  His base offers him unwavering support and loyalty.  It is practically cultish.  He knew it very well, which is why he boldly proclaimed, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters"

I have blogged plenty of posts in which I refer to this Dear Leader attitude from 63 million voters.

He said that he alone could fix things, and they wholeheartedly agreed.  He did not like science and evidence being used--because that conflicted with the reality that he was creating with alternative facts for the 63 million voters.  So, as I noted in this post in January  2018, they even changed the words used to describe the work that the CDC does.  After all, if Dear Leader did not like something, then reports and websites were even rewritten.

Yes, the CDC that we now rely on to fight the damn coronavirus.

63 million fucking voters did this: "Instead of “science-based,” or “evidence-based,” The Post reported, “the suggested phrase is ‘C.D.C. bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes."

So, who cares that injecting disinfectants is deadly, if that is based on consideration with community standards and wishes that were directed by Dear Leader himself!

Donald Trump: Unfit. Unwell. Unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/6fts56gzaA

— Republicans for the Rule of Law (@ForTheRuleOfLaw) April 25, 2020

In case any of those 63 million voters, including former commenters here at this blog, are reading this post, here's a helpful reminder from Joe Biden:

I can’t believe I have to say this, but please don’t drink bleach.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 24, 2020

The following is the post from January 11, 2018:
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As I have often remarked here, 1984 was one of the books that made me seriously rethink my commie interpretations of life and how to make the world a better place.  Ultimately, all those books led to the decision to come to the United States as well.

In 1984, Winston Smith holds a minor job in the Ministry of Truth.  He, like other workers there, are engaged in the never ending work of rewriting history in order to make sure that the Party is absolute and never wrong.

After three decades of life in America, I would never have imagined that the US would engage in constant rewriting of history in order to project the infallibility of the Party and its Dear Leader.  Yet, truth is stranger than fiction, yet again!

Climate information has been condensed or excised from the websites of at least six federal agencies under the first year of the Trump administration, according to a report released Wednesday.
The most extensive changes have occurred on the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, which has dropped “climate” from various program names and removed hundreds of pages and links to climate resources.
The Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, State Department, and others have also seen changes, according to the report, compiled by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that’s been tracking website changes since Trump took office.

At this rate, it is only a matter of time before those of us who refuse to accept the "alternative facts" are taken to Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where, after a few days or months, we will begin to truly believe that 2 + 2 has always equaled 5 and that there has never been anything called gravity.

The Ministry of Truth has also been hard at work:

The Department of Health and Human Services tried to play down on Saturday a report that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been barred from using seven words or phrases, including “science-based,” “fetus,” “transgender” and “vulnerable,” in agency budget documents.

MiniTrue also had helpful suggestions:

Instead of “science-based,” or “evidence-based,” The Post reported, “the suggested phrase is ‘C.D.C. bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.’’’

63 million fucking voters!

It is what it is!

In a recent reply to colleague's email, I wrote, "I am in acceptance only because there is nothing that I can change."

I said a lot more along those lines in an email to my siblings.  I wrote there:

In any case, all our worries are for real.  We have reasons to worry about lots of things.
We will all do the best that we can in these extremely challenging times.
Should anything go wrong anywhere in our lives, we know that it is not anything that any one of us could have prevented, nor can we devise any way out--the problem is way too complex and global.

It has been a conscious struggle on my part to be accepting of the circumstances that I cannot change.  Throughout my life, I have worried about, and panicked and saddened over a whole bunch of things over which I have no impact whatsoever.

As I have blogged here, this personality of mine apparently easily came across even in the on-campus interview 35 years ago!

In one of my previous avatars (!) I was a final semester engineering student.
There was a campus interview.  I had no idea what the hiring company was and nor did I care.  I had no idea what I was supposed to wear, or how I ought to behave, and I cared not.
It was quite an interesting interview I had with the personnel guy.  He easily figured out that I was not keen on an engineering career.  We talked and talked about societal and political issues.
He then took out a blank paper and drew concentric circles.  Pointing to the innermost, and the smallest circle, he said that was the limit to which I can directly act. An immediate outer ring, he said, is where perhaps I could influence actions.  Anything beyond that was stuff that I could only talk about and can't do a damn thing.

Of course, that interview did not do anything to change my personality.  If anything, I became even more worried about everything all around me.  I blame this on empathy, though I am mighty relieved and happy that I am not an unempathetic sociopath!

The novel coronavirus has done what no other event or crisis could ever do to me.  COVID-19 has made me erase those outer concentric circles.  It is what it is.

But, old habits die hard, which is why I was drawn to this essay that asks, "If something’s out of your control, should you still worry about it?"

I read it.

I now know better than to engage with the arguments in that essay.  After all, it is what it is.  I now focus only on the innermost, the smallest, circle that limits my actions.  I do look at the slightly larger circle where somebody might listen to what I think--but, I panic no more over what happens there.

Maybe that COVID-19 has completely humbled me and I understand far more than ever before that I am not even a piece of dust in this incomprehensible cosmos.

Reflecting on life in the time of the coronavirus

As I have often mentioned here, religious high holy days are important moments for this atheist to think about existence in this cosmos that I do not comprehend.  Ramadan provides me with yet another opportunity to think about it, this time against the backdrop of a global pandemic.

Ramadan begins today, and it will be completely unlike all the previous years through the centuries:

Around the world, Muslims will not be able to observe the holiday as they normally do — with 30 nights of communal prayer and post-sunset feasting. Instead, they’ll spend the long days of fasting mostly in their own homes.

Such is life now in which we find ourselves locked up in our homes, unable to get together with friends and family.   Everything is shut down!

The virus has emptied Islam’s holiest sites at the most sacred time of year. The Ka’bah, the gold-embroidered shrine in Mecca’s Grand Mosque, is closed to worshippers along with the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina and Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.

Caption at the source: A nearly deserted Ka’bah in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on 7 April.

The pandemic does not stop this Islamophobic President from offering juicy anti-Muslim red meat to his base.  "our politicians seem to treat different faiths very differently ... They go after Christian churches but they don't tend to go after mosques."

The deafening sound that you hear is that of 63 million people cheering him!

As I wrote in this post seven years ago, in 2013, Ramadan "is an intentional pause to our everyday lives.  A forced interruption that then makes us think, for at least a few minutes every day, about what we want to do with the little time we have on this planet."  Unfortunately for the rest of us, this President and his toadies have a clear and starkly different idea of what they want to accomplish with the little time that they too have on this pale blue dot that we call home :(

The following is a slightly edited post from July 10, 2013:
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I suppose it can look contradictory for this atheist to post about religion but without critiquing it.  But, I have never been one of those militant atheists making a fanatical religion out of atheism.  As long as the religious do not impose their practices on me, I seek nothing but peaceful coexistence with them.  And enjoy food and laughter and conversations with the faithful.

Furthermore, I am not that different from most atheists in that we reach the conclusion not with ignorance about religions, particularly the religion with which we were raised.  Even through my agnostic teenage years, I was curious about the Hindu faith and its philosophy.  Which is also why I am so familiar with dukrijnkarane.  And then curiosity made me find out at least a tiny bit about a few other religions.

This being Ramadan time, I have been thinking more about Islam.  It is a tragedy that the hysterical suspicions about followers of that religion prevents us from even appreciating the arts and literature that grew out of that faith. Thus, Rumi and his mystical works are among the many that get sidelined.  Of course, according to Islamists, Rumi and other sufis were not "real" Muslims.  All the more the reason the world will be better off without those crazy Islamists who make it difficult for all of us!

The way I--an atheist--interpret the Ramadan is this: it is an intentional pause to our everyday lives.  A forced interruption that then makes us think, for at least a few minutes every day, about what we want to do with the little time we have on this planet.  Especially with Ramadan coinciding with the hot summer days in the northern hemisphere, it is a wonderful time to stop doing whatever it is that we do day in and day out and ponder some serious questions instead.

As we do, I bet we will immediately realize that Rumi was profound when he distilled the wisdom to this:

Inside the Great Mystery that is,
we don't really own anything.
What is this competition we feel then,
before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?

May our politicians gain this wisdom from Rumi!

Get back to where you (once) belong(ed)

The President has come out with a bold new strategy that will put an end to this coronavirus epidemic.  He is suspending immigration to my country!

Looks like there are only two trusted #Republican solutions to everything:#Taxcuts for the rich, and
Beating up on #immigrants
I cannot wait for #Election2020 to throw these bums outhttps://t.co/st4pUIWGbt#tRump #Biden2020

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) April 21, 2020

Of course, he is merely trying yet another "hail mary" pass to his base that loves immigrant-bashing!  Only alternative facts matter to him and his 63 million toadies!  Not even the big-talking, tRump-voting, former commenters here care about facts like this, it seems:

Share of foreign-born workers in other industries critical to the coronavirus response https://t.co/GHDtPQJ0xC pic.twitter.com/PrFkaeSeGL

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) April 21, 2020

Forgetting the immigrants' contributions to the country is very much an American trait, however.  It is always done--tRump has merely removed the facade that hid the political undertone.  The following is an unedited post from 2009.  Almost to the very date in April.  Eleven years ago!
******************************************************************

Tomorrow, my intro class will turn in their papers on immigration, in response to an essay titled "The international mobility of talent." Next academic year, I think I should include in the readings this report from the NY Times; here is an excerpt:

Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs.
Just over half the companies founded in Silicon Valley from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s had founders born abroad, according to Vivek Wadhwa, an immigration scholar working at Duke and Harvard.
The foreign-born elite dating back even further includes Andrew S. Grove of Hungary, who helped found Intel; Jerry Yang, the Taiwanese-born co-founder of Yahoo; Vinod Khosla of India and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Germany, the co-founders of Sun Microsystems; and Google’s Russian-born co-founder, Sergey Brin.
But technology executives say that byzantine and increasingly restrictive visa and immigration rules have imperiled their ability to hire more of the world’s best engineers.

Click here for a slideshow

Until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them

"I trust everything is good in your part of the world."

The recipient of the email in which wrote that sentence lives far away, diagonally across the country from me.  Jim moved there a few years ago.  Every once in a while, we trade emails in which we share awful groaners.  Like this one that he had sent me a while ago:

Jim is much older than I am.  So, naturally, I was/am concerned about him in the time of the coronavirus.

In his reply, Jim writes that he is healthy, and adds, "I haven’t had much in the way of puns for awhile so have not sent you any."

There are a couple of posts in which I have referred to this old friend, who was a good neighbor for a few years.

The following is an edited version of a post from August 2012.
***************************************************

It seems like during crises in the recent past, the younger generations texted, or posted on Facebook, or emailed sympathetic messages, whereas the older generations who lived close by went beyond that and asked if they could help out by bring over food.  The younger generations who lived close by didn't think about the food aspect.

Of course, with the coronavirus, it is a whole new paradigm of the young and the old keeping to ourselves and engaging in virtual interactions.  Damn COVID-19!

My best memory of a neighbor sharing food left me with a deep appreciation of the neighbor and the idea of sharing food.  I was in high school when my grandmother died.  In the traditional brahminical context in which I grew up, no celebrations for a year, which meant that we kids wouldn't get to eat all those wonderful goodies that mother would have otherwise made.

Well, fully aware of this, our neighbor then sent across home-made sweets for every major religious event that entire year.  Not just a couple of pieces, but a tray full of tasty eats every single time.

The neighbor's actions were immensely louder than powerful than the most commonly expressed phrase of "I am sorry to hear about your loss."

Of course, the situation doesn't have to be mournful in order to share food.  We can do it on good days too.

One of my best experiences when I reconnected with old school mates was when they invited me over to have food at their homes.  Equally wonderful was when I got some of them to come over to my parents' home to spend some time together and break that proverbial bread.

These experiences of interacting with, and understanding, friends is not the same as interactions with friends on Facebook.  There is simply no comparison at all, which is what the NY Times' David Carr found out a few months ago when he was invited to a dinner with a bunch of people with whom he had had extensive online interactions.  The host had baked the bread that Carr found to be very tasty, and he writes that the"connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread."

As I have often blogged (like here,) interactions on Facebook seem far from the real and substantive friendships that most of us prefer.

Carr notes:

you can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them.

When my neighbor Carol was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, I took food over a couple of times.  Before a road trip, I took Jim and their son a salad that I had made.  Jim asked me whether I wanted to visit with Carol.  I followed him to the bedroom, but she was asleep.

That was my final visit with her. Soon after that, Jim sold the house and moved. 

You cannot virtualize all these from the real world.

Do the religious worship nature?

One of my students has begun her project work on the disconnect between humans and the natural world.  "This disconnect from nature conflicts with human’s quality of life, physical health, psychological well-being, food sources, drinking water, our awareness of the natural world, and many more factors," she writes.

I am glad that younger people are thinking about these issues.  But then this is Oregon, and it is a rare Oregonian who is not in tune with nature.  I hope that kids and youth all over the world are thinking about these, so that they can undo the mess that we older folks have created for them.

The following is a slightly edited post from a few months ago:
********************

The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion.  Like a pendulum that violently swings, suggesting instability and the entire structure falling apart, the violence within was also reflected in my words and action.  In retrospect, I am immensely glad, and relieved, that I did not suffer a breakdown.

The internal tensions related to religion and the various daily practicalities of life resulted from the years of brainwashing.  I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be.  Graduate school provided me that opportunity too.

While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I listened to, gave me insights.  One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and humans.

In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, there is plenty of nature worship.  Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees.  And, of course, even killing the damn roaches troubled the really faithful ones.  But, apparently not so in the Judaeo-Christian framework.  Why?  The Bible said so:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God rules over man, who rules over nature.  A relationship that is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.

Of course, just because people say they are religious does not mean they truly mean it. Many devout brahmins, for instance, devour meat.  And there are nature-worshiping hippies among Christians.  But, the broad framework suggests that the faithful might look at nature differently because their views stem from what their religions brainwashed them.

Do evangelical Christians in the US then put into practice a view that man rules over nature?  And, therefore, do they think differently from many of us who are worried about environmental crises and climate change in particular?

The following excerpt should settle that, it seems:

Here, for example, is what a church youth minister had to say about environmental care: “If we have the opportunity we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale, or a species of monkey.”
It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.

Of course, the people that evangelicals care about don't live in shitholes--but, that is a post for another day!

Meera Subramanian worked on a series to find the middle ground in these environment discussions.  In one, she talked to a bunch of students at the Harvard of the evangelicals--Wheaton College.

While many evangelicals are preoccupied with the long-term state of human souls and the protection of the unborn, Diego and the other students I met at Wheaton are also considering other eternal implications and a broader definition of pro-life. They are concerned about the lifespan of climate pollutants that will last in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and about the lives of the poor and weak who are being disproportionately harmed by the effects of those greenhouse gases. 

But, as much as I found the world a challenging place back when I was a teenager, these students also are in a tough spot:

It can be tough to be an evangelical who cares about climate change, Chelsey said, "because the environmental activists don't trust you and the evangelicals hate you." Or they could hate you

If only we could engage in serious and sincere discussions all over the world on the relationship between humans and the natural world that envelops us.  If only!

Every day is Earth Day

It is Earth Week!

I worry about the natural environment, the living and the non-living, to qualify as an tree-hugging nutcase according to some. But, because I am not ideologically fully in the environment camp, there are others who view me with suspicion that I am one of those right-wing guys.  As always, I don't belong to any party.

The following is an edited post from April 19, 2015.
*****************************************

My neighbor has always made fun of me, whenever he finds me sweeping away the cobwebs around my home.  "You don't have to do it if you spray the chemicals I use" he reminds me and jokes that I am one of those who doesn't want to kill even spiders.

Which is true.  I don't want to kill spiders or ants or anything unless they directly interfere with my life.  I don't want to see ants in my kitchen, but I don't care if they are having a party on the sidewalk outside my home.  I don't like to see spiders or flies or gnats inside my home.  When I do see them inside, well, I do kill them.  But I feel bad for them.  I feel guilty when I crush those tiny critters. Sometimes I even apologize to them, as if that makes any difference to the ant!

I care for, and worry about, the natural environment--the living and inanimate--because of a deep conviction that the cosmos is not merely about us humans and our own comfortable material existence.  My sincere belief that there is nothing for me after this life ends does not mean that I am going to trash this place while I am here.

Source

This being the Earth Day time, my various news feeds feature writings on many aspects of our existence on this glorious pale blue dot.  In one, the author reflects on a part of his life in which he was an animal experimenter:

First, I had to learn how to shock a pigeon. A graduate student demonstrated how one person held the pigeon upside down while the other plucked out the feathers in back of its legs, cut two lengths of stiff stainless steel wire from a spool and pushed them through the skin and under the pelvic bones. The wires were then soldered to a harness placed on the pigeon’s back. The harness contained a plug that would be connected to a source of electric shock during experiments. No anesthetic or sedative was used.
One day, while programming an experiment, I accidentally touched the electrodes and got a jolting shock that numbed my entire arm. I was amazed that, according to my professor, the shock level was the correct one to use for pigeons. I told myself that pigeons must not feel pain as much as I did

We tell ourselves all kinds of things in order to keep doing those things over and over.  

I was told that everyone had to take a turn killing the pigeons after the experiments were finished. A graduate student showed me how to dump a couple of dozen birds into a clear plastic garbage bag, then pour a splash of chloroform on them and tie the bag shut. I remember the first and only time I did the killing

I would imagine that except a minority, most of us would get messed up beyond repair if we conducted experiments on animals.  Especially if we did that more than once.  I would think we would forever be haunted by the images and the sounds.  

As I look back on this nearly 50 years later, I am astonished that the daily grind of depriving, shocking and killing these animals did not move me to leave my job. My rationalization is that I was a student and young worker in institutions of higher learning, programmed to receive the wisdom of academia. I was studying how the science that supposedly advanced our civilization was done. Speaking of his infamous experiments in which human subjects followed orders thinking they were giving extremely painful shocks to other humans, the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram said, “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” I think that describes me pretty well.

Even when I kill ants and spiders that come into my home, I make sure I kill them as fast as I can.  I don't want those critters to suffer.  Yet, experiments on animals is nothing but watching them suffer.  If from those experiments we derive some life-extending benefits to humans, are our additional years worth all that suffering we put the animals to?

I sat with a small notepad writing the alien’s speech as my thoughts drifted back to my days in punishment research. The words flowed in almost final form as I drew on my own rationalizations for my acts of animal torture. Tears welled up in my eyes as I wrote: “We now recognize that you, too, are a sacred life-form. We deeply regret what we have done. We ask forgiveness. We are sorry.”

I don't ever get trapped into the Earth Day rhetoric of "save the planet."  As George Carlin joked, the planet knows how to take care of itself.  The planet will easily shake us humans off--a volcanic eruption alone can knock us out.  A virus can easily knock us out and put us in our place.  It is not "save the planet" mantra.

Instead, it is the every day life (and death) issues, starting from how we treat the rivers and the mountains, the ants and the elephants, and fellow humans, ... that Earth Day should be about.  And for those, we need to think of every single day as Earth Day.

We miss these during these awful shelter-in-place days :( 

Searching for meaning behind the coronavirus? Don't!

"We are meaning-haunted creatures."

A remarkably well-phrased sentence, which I quoted in this post about a year ago.  In a less philosophical manner, and in a way that would easily appeal to students, I have often remarked in classes that we want narratives that seem to explain whatever it is that we are curious about, or even afraid of.  We have narratives that explain how the universe came about, how life was created, what happens after we die, and anything that puzzles us.

We are now in a pandemic moment.  The meaning-haunted creatures we are, well, we wonder whether there is a larger purpose behind the coronavirus.  Why is this happening, and why now?

A few days ago, an old friend forwarded me an email that had plenty to think about for "those of you trying to make sense of why nature is putting us through the current pandemic."  I disagreed with the premise in that original email; to me, there is no purpose behind this pandemic, nor is nature trying to teach us anything.  I wrote to him:

Viruses, for instance, have always terrorized humans, even when we lived a lot more respectfully of nature.  Even when we absolutely worshiped nature.   All over the world, for hundreds of years, people were afraid of the small pox, and prayed to every god and saint and mysterious forces.  Modern science eradicated small pox.  There is the HIV virus. Dengue. ... the list of deadly virsues is long, to which COVID-19 is the latest addition.

Nature is.  The cosmos is. The virus is.  They exist.  That is it.  There is no grand reason.  As this NY Times essay puts it, the current pandemic has no purpose either.

But then we are meaning-haunted creatures.  Which is why:

Many religious people see something benevolent in nature, or at least see purpose dimly grasped in the interworking of biology. But there’s something even deeper than religious optimism. There is a broader conception of nature — shared by monotheists, polytheists, Indigenous animists, and now politicians and policymakers. It is the mythopoetic view of nature. It is the universal instinct to find (or project) a plot in nature. A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective, impersonal laws. It’s a prescientific worldview, but it is also alive and well in the contemporary mind.

If only we accepted and operationalized something that is fundamental: "Nature doesn’t care about you."  But, we mostly don't.  "Against the frightening neutrality of nature, we humans marshal the powerful imagination."  And from that imagination we construct meanings.

It is all part of a Darwinian natural selection, and the struggle to continue to live.  Whether it is bacteria or viruses or spiders or fish or elephants or humans, it is a struggle to survive against the odds.  Going extinct is not wired into us, but adapting to survive is.  We humans also adapt and survive and fight one battle after another.  We Homo Sapiens have made it thus far because of remarkable brains that have made many things possible.  It has been a phenomenal run thus far.

As a naturalist, I resist the theological version of human exceptionalism, but as a philosopher, I’m inclined to recognize that nothing has intrinsic value until we humans imagine it so. Since we cannot find our species’ value objectively by looking at the neutral laws of nature, then we must just assert it. And simply affirm that the universe is more remarkable with us in it.

Nature does not care about us humans.  We humans--not tRump or the Republicans or the Chinese--want to be here, and we humans will make every effort to defeat the damn coronavirus and anything else that comes our way!

Be the change you wish to see

When it comes to climate change, many of us who want to do something about it are often left asking ourselves and others, "What should I be doing as an individual?"

Mary Heglar responds to that very question in an essay that is simple and direct.  And her bottom-line is also simple and direct:

We don't know that special thing that you bring to the movement—only you know that. And we can't wait to see the magic that will happen now that you're part of our world.

Only you know that.  Yes, YOU!

But, it is complicated.  Four years ago, in this post, I wrote:

how would one go about convincing people that they have to make some serious lifestyle changes?
...
As that grand old man from the old country said:

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.

The following is a slightly edited version of the post from April 23, 2016.
********************

This opinion essay at the Scientific American explores what ought to be done:

Social science can point to effective ways communicators can help the public distinguish fact from untruth, and hopeful understanding of how science might sidestep contention in the first place.

Good luck on social scientists helping ways in which the public can "distinguish fact from untruth."

It is not as if the public is in the dark about the lifestyle aspects of climate change; Pew Research Center notes this from its global survey:

Even in the US.  Yes:

Even in the U.S., a country known for its technological advances, only 23% believe technology alone can solve climate change. 

If so, then how would one go about convincing people that they have to make some serious lifestyle changes?

Here's where things get complicated.  I suppose it can easily become a game theory scenario where people think it is a great idea--as long as others do it.  But then everybody waits around for others to implement changes!

As that grand old man from the old country said:

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.

Abolish NCAA sports. It has no "business" at universities

Shahab earned his masters degree in Nebraska before he settled down in Southern California for good.  He once remarked that the entire state turns red when the University of Nebraska's football team played at home. (Red is their jersey color.)

In the Midwest and the South, and even here in Eugene, college football rules the lives of many.  I was a fan, once, before I was woke, as we say now. 

The coronavirus threatens the football season, and people are already losing it.  Like this coach at Oklahoma State, who went on a rant:

“In my opinion, we need to bring our players back,” said Gundy (via Sports Illustrated), who has posted a 129-64 record over 15 seasons with the Cowboys. “They are 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 years old, and they are healthy and they have the ability to fight this virus off. If that is true, then we sequester them and continue, because we need to run money through the state of Oklahoma. ...
Everybody needs to see football. Even if you just watch it on TV, it’s going to make people feel better.”

This is at a time when colleges and universities--including his own--are all closed down.

There are plenty of nutcases like him, and addicted fans in millions, who are already panicking about no-football-Saturdays.  tRump knows well that his base are "yuge" football fans, and not having football in the months leading up to the election will doom him even in the red states.  The toddler-in-chief has, therefore, thrown a tantrum about that too!

With the COVID-19 crisis, we now have an opportunity for a major reset.  Will we make use of this opportunity?

I have been blogging forever about the atrocity of the business of sports at universities.  The following is a quote from Katha Pollit, which I blogged about in November 2011:

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

A much better system we too can have.

So, what should we do?  I need to only slightly alter Pollit's prescription:

Cancel the season. Fire everybody. Get real. Grow up.

Death in the time of the coronavirus

Death is a part of life.  Yes.  But, what worries us now is the additional deaths--the ones that have been suddenly caused by the coronavirus.  It is overwhelming, literally and emotionally.

Hospital chaplains are also overwhelmed.  This essay in The New Yorker that is centered on a young chaplain in New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital is poignant.

[Kaytlin] Butler, twenty-six, is one of eight chaplains on Mount Sinai’s Spiritual Care team. The team, which also has four residents, includes two rabbis, a Jewish woman who is not ordained, a Seventh-day Adventist, a woman who is inspired by Buddhism, and an evangelical Christian. (The hospital is also served by two Catholic priests, who are sent by the New York archdiocese.)      

What if a patient is Muslim? Or not religious?  "when families request prayers for loved ones, she honors their traditions. For Muslims, she says the Shahada."

It is a tough job--both in terms of what they have to do, and the context in which they do it.  COVID-19 has made it even tougher for chaplains because invariably the coronavirus patients die alone when they are hooked up to ventilators and more in the ICUs.  It is such a lonely event that even the chaplain cannot be at the patient's bedside calming and reassuring them.  This virus is diabolical.

I have blogged about death as the loneliest event, though that "lonely" was about the end being a solo act.  The following is an edited version of that post from September 2017.
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I am pretty much convinced that it is the acute realization that I might be dead at any second that drives most of my decision-making.

It is good to know that I am not alone in thinking like this.  Today, I came to know that there is something called existential psychotherapy, and that there is an existential psychotherapist writer named Irvin Yalom.

Yalom is practically my father's age.  He "helped introduce to American psychological circles the idea that a person’s conflicts can result from unresolvable dilemmas of human existence, among them the dread of dying."

Hey, that's what I have been saying and writing, based on my intuitive understanding.

Another of Yalom’s signature ideas, expressed in books such as Staring at the Sun and Creatures of a Day, is that we can lessen our fear of dying by living a regret-free life, meditating on our effect on subsequent generations, and confiding in loved ones about our death anxiety. When I asked whether his lifelong preoccupation with death eases the prospect that he might pass away soon, he replied, “I think it probably makes things easier.”

Exactly!  Regret-free life. Effect on future generations. Talking about death and the anxiety.  To me, this is a healthy formula for a wonderful life.

“If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven’t done, if we’ve lived an unfulfilled life,” he says, “when death comes along, it’s a lot worse. I think it’s true for all of us.”

Yep, the religions and cultural traditions do not matter one bit.  It always comes down to living fulfilled lives.

When two of his close friends died recently, he realized that his cherished memory of their friendship is all that remains. “It dawned on me that that reality doesn’t exist anymore,” he said sadly. “When I die, it will be gone.”

Friends die.  Sometimes suddenly. Relatives die. Every death tears the fabric of our own lives.  We worry that we did not spend time with them when they were alive.

But, memories remain. And memories are all that we can take with us.

“Dying,” he wrote in Staring at the Sun, “is lonely, the loneliest event of life.” Yet empathy and connectedness can go a long way toward reducing our anxieties about mortality.

Empathy is perhaps the emotion that is most important to me, especially in the way it helps me understand my own existence and, thereby, my death.

For all the morbidity of existential psychotherapy, it is deeply life-affirming. Change is always possible. Intimacy can be freeing. Existence is precious. “I hate the idea of leaving this world, this wonderful life,” Yalom said.

Yes, when the day comes, I will hate leaving behind this wonderful life.  But, as my father said, "even the great souls could not stop death.  They too are gone."  Such is life on this pale blue dot.

On the failure to understand the urgency of "what is it to be human?"

COVID-19 is forcing us to shelter-in-place, and remain physically isolated from the rest of humanity.  This awful house-arrest is also compelling us to figure out--for ourselves--what truly matters in the lives that we lead.

I have always wanted everybody to understand what it means to be human.  I have blogged in plenty about that.  But, such an atrocious lesson is not what I want.  As a teacher, I have never attempted, nor would I ever attempt, teaching through punishment.  Coronavirus is diabolical.

But, it is what it is.  I hope we will make the best of the dark stage in which we are unwilling actors.

The following is a slightly edited post from this very date--April 14th--seven years ago.  Yes, in 2013.
************************************

Last night, I got to watch Prometheus.  The movie is about the question that has dogged us forever: how did we humans get here?

It is by no means a simple question, and the answer(s) we accept then correspondingly influence even the most mundane aspects our lives.  For instance, pork is avoided by Jews and Muslims because of the narrative that is given as the answer to how we got here also tells them to void pork.  The Crusades were fought as a response to the clash of two narratives.  Even the atrocious caste system in India was/is be justified with yet another answer to the question of how we humans got here.

The rapid developments in our scientific understanding and technological capabilities might even make us look like gods to people who lived during the times when those old religious narratives were drafted.  The old movie cliche of a Westerner flicking a lighter and creating fire that impressed the cannibals who were preparing to cook him alive can now be replaced with any of us walking around with a smartphone that can do wonders that are beyond the wildest imaginations of the generations that preceded us.

The tremendous advancements in technology prompts us to further banish to the dark background any systematic inquiry into what it means to be human.  Formal schooling in the humanities and the social sciences are often considered to be wasteful spending.  In doing so, we don't seem to feel the importance, more than ever, of helping students and the general population inquire into and understand what it means to be human.

As much as religious narratives of how we got here provided people with rules on how to behave towards fellow-humans within the religious tribe and fellow-humans of other tribes, our modern day constructs of what it means to be human will then have its implications for our collective public policy responses.

Here in the US, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, spending on wars, education, illegal immigrants, ... all could potentially be viewed differently depending on how we define what it means to be human.  When we routinely rain bombs from drones and kill children and yet pay no attention to it, that action is itself a statement of how some humans are more important than other humans.  When we think it is important to prevent abortions but not important to provide support for children growing up in disadvantaged contexts, those public policies reveal a different interpretation of what it means to be human.  It is the same case with practically every single public policy.

I was not keen on my undergraduate studies in electrical engineering, and did not care about pursuing that field as a career, because it didn't directly address the question of what it meant to be human and, therefore, how to respond to the human condition.  On top of that, science and technology has contributed--in a big way--to dehumanize humans.

I have always wondered whether the scientists and technologists who work on developing yet another fancy way to kill people, for instance, ever ask themselves whether they are doing good for humanity.  Perhaps they are no different from the lobbyist Nick Naylor in Thank you for smoking.  The libertarian in me does not want to tell others what they can or cannot do, yes.  But, the humanist in me wonders whether all the people, especially the educated ones, whose work generates nothing but harm for fellow-humans, ever clearly articulated for themselves answers to how we got here and what it means to be human.  

Like most atheists, I, too, find the question of how we got here and what it means to be human not only highly fascinating but also extremely challenging.  More so when I don't need any reminders on how mortal I am.  As Susan Jacoby says:

We have our time on this earth, we have to use it in the best possible way, because it is limited.

Within that limited time, wouldn't it be worth it to educate ourselves so that we can think about what it means to be human?

New year greetings from "a civilized human being"

"Tomorrow it will be a new year," my father said.

It has been a few days since he talked about anything other than the damn virus.  No, not COVID-19 but the shingles that has made the lower jaw movements a tad painful.

After a couple more minutes of chat, I said, "you talked a lot today compared to two weeks ago."

"Yes, it is slowly getting better.  But very slowly," he replied.

And then we talked about the coronavirus too!

He passed the phone to my mother, who also remarked about the new year.  "But, it is not like how it used to be celebrated," she added.

It is the Tamil New Year.

We mark time in many ways.  Birthdays are our personalized new years.  There is the January 1st new year. The Islamic calendar.  Rosh Hashanah. The academic new year. We have a gazillion "new years" all in the same year.

But, celebrations are muted in the time of the coronavirus :(  Strange and eerie times these are!

Tamil is one of the oldest living languages of the world--if not the oldest--with a vast body of literature.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the immense richness in which I grew up, but failed to systematically study.  I am all the happier that I came across the fantastic biography of Tamil that David Shulman authored.  As he so wonderfully put it, "to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."

This classic from quite a few years ago, with lyrics by the poet Bharatidasan convey a lot about the language. And, of course, set to delightful music by the old masterful team of Viswanathan-Ramamurthy.



But, of course, the old Tamil is even more difficult to understand than Shakespeare's English can be to a teenager of today.  We needed experts to interpret that old Tamil to us.

We need experts to guide us out of this global catastrophe.  More than ever, we need humanists to interpret the human condition.

As we struggle through, we will continue to mark the passing of time ... by wishing us better times ahead.

Happy new year, dear reader!

So ... are you better off than you were four years ago?

The following are screen shots from letters over the past few months in the local newspaper.

I wish I could ask the letter writers, and trump voters including those who were frequent commenters at this blog, about their ballot that favored tRump.  Was the misogyny, the racism, the birtherism, the seat at the Supreme Court, the "but her emails," ... all worth it?

Guilty as accused they all are!