Professional sports and life

Now that the football playoffs are here, it reminds me that professional team sports like football, if one but looks, teach many of the important lessons in life:

• Perseverance and persistence matter as much as talent, or perhaps more.
• Be nice to your opponents. You may be playing on their team next year.
  
• You have to show up to win.
• Practice, practice, practice!
• If a play repeatedly doesn’t work, stop trying it and try something else.
• Attitude matters as much as talent.
  
• When there is a free ball in the air or a fumble on the ground, everyone is an eligible receiver, whatever their position.
• The game is never decided until the final whistle. Or in the popular version, it ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings.
• Every week is a new game.
• Keep your temper. Losing it is a good way to get your side penalized.
• It doesn’t matter how good you were last week. All that matters is how good you are today.
  
• Sometimes you have to take chances to get chances.
• It’s glamorous to be the quarterback, but then it’s the quarterback that is always the target of two or three very big, very fast , very determined defensive players. Sometimes it’s nice just to be an unimportant lineman.
• Never get too comfortable with your success. There is always a rookie or two in the wings just waiting for a chance to replace you.
• In general, simple and basic beats fancy and tricky.
• Always play the odds.
• Resist the temptation to take cheap shots. Your opponents will make you pay for it sometime in the next few plays.
• There comes a time for everyone to get out of the game and let younger players take over.
• Individuals never win. It takes the whole team to win.
  
• The trick to winning is to force the other team to play your game, rather than you trying to play theirs.

We are stardust

Nature is amazing. For example, did you ever think that all of us are basically made of star dust?

When the cosmos began, current evidence suggests that just about the only elements present were hydrogen and helium, with traces of lithium. Gravitation pulled clumps of dust and gas together until there was enough mass to begin to form a star, and when the mass was great enough for gravity to squeeze and heat the mass enough, thermonuclear fusion began to fuse hydrogen into helium. Late in a star’s life, when it runs out of hydrogen, it shifts to fusing helium, and then carbon and then heavier elements. Finally, at the end of its lifecycle, it blows out much of this material into the surrounding void, and that becomes the gas and dust from which the next generation of stars are born.

So our world, unusual in its concentration of heavy metals, is no doubt the product of several generations of stars, each generation fusing more of the lighter elements into heavier elements before blowing them back into the cosmic dust to be recycled into another star.

It’s awesome to think that we, and almost everything around us in our world, have been created in the massive thermonuclear furnaces of stars. It’s interesting that the creation myths in so many cultures have the first human being made of dust scooped up by some deity or other. In a sense they were right, we are all made of dust - star dust.

The myth of the “public servant”

Politicians and government officials love to refer to themselves as “public servants”. Now that we are getting into the next presidential election cycle, we will probably hear this often. Let’s get real here. No one in government is a public servant.

The American myth is that democratic government serves everyone equally. The reality is, and always has been from the beginning of central state control in any society, that the government, whatever political form it takes, disproportionately serves the powerful and wealthy, in and out of government. We profess to the shocked and outraged when we discover that someone has taken advantage of their government position for personal gain, but unless we are terribly naïve, we have always known that those in power cannot resist using at least some of their power for their own benefit.

Certainly the public, at least in our society, get something from the government. The powerful aren’t stupid. They know that in a democracy the government has to deliver enough benefits to keep the electorate paying their taxes and voting for the party. And when politicians compete for our votes, they know they have to promise to deliver something appealing, and even deliver at least some of what they promise. But in fact our government budget is so large that even if the powerful only skim off a few billion a year, there is still enough to do some useful things for the rest of us.

Politicians and government officials with power have been bought from time immemorial. Not perhaps so often with direct bribes, but certainly with little favors, re-election help, nice “fact finding” trips, campaign funds, jobs for family members, promises of lucrative jobs once they leave office, and the like. Notice the high paying lobbying and business jobs congressmen and high level bureaucrats go to when they leave government. Things are no different now than they have always been. There are certainly a few thoroughly honest politicians here and there, but there won’t be many because except for local and some state races it’s hard to get elected without powerful and wealthy backers who, quite naturally, expect something back from their investment.

Of course, democratic governments are not monolithic – there are opposition parties. But their battles are primarily over which faction of the powerful and wealthy will control the levers of power, not about who will work for the good of the people. This is every bit as true of the socialist and communist governments as of our capitalist government.

Even more duplicitous than the “public servant” claim is the “power to the people” slogan so widely used by revolutionary movements. What the people get is the chance to lose their homes, families and lives in the service of the cause. Notice that in the end the power, and all the nice perks that go with it, always goes to the leaders.

This is simply human nature. All institutions of any size operate by the exchange of favors between the powerful and their supporters. It’s sometimes called “networking” or “seeking allies”, but it comes down to the same thing – the local old boy’s/girl’s network scratching each others backs. It’s the way the world works, and always has worked.

Unless we are one of the wealthy and powerful who would benefit, we ought always to be careful about supporting the expansion of either the size or the power of government, however enticing the supposed benefits appear. Chances are such changes will help someone, but probably not us.

Recommended: Did Iraq Really Ruin the U.S.?

I recommend Victor David Hanson's recent essay Did Iraq Really Ruin the U.S.? Hanson's essays are valuable because, whether in the end one agrees with him or not, they do tend to give an alternative perspective on the world to the perspective offered by the media and the political spin doctors. Since Hanson is a historian, he tends to think within a longer-term framework than the more typical day-to-day "reactive" media.

The many and the few

The world is divided into the many and the few along all sorts of lines. There are the many followers and the few leaders. The many reactive and the few proactive. The many poorly educated and the few well educated. The many prey and the few predators. The many poor and the few rich. The many who don’t plan ahead and the few who do.

The Pareto principle or 80/20 rule seems to apply everywhere. 20% of the people account for 80% of the problems in the world. 20% of the people own 80% of the resources. 80% of one’s business comes from 20% of one’s customers. The skill and innovation of 20% of an organization carries along the other 80% of the employees. And so on. The many and the few again.

Of all these many-few distributions the one that interests me most is the difference between the few who struggle to see the world the way it really is and the many who are content to see the world the way they have been taught to see it by their families, their religions, their cultures and their peers. It is one of the few cases where each individual can choose whether to be one of the many or one of the few.

Of course none of us ever sees the world the way it really is. All of us have our vision clouded to one degree or another by our expectations and experiences. And the real world is far too complex and subtle to be fully grasped by any human mind. At best, and with great effort and persistence, we get only occasional tantalizing glimpses of reality.

Still, as Erasmus noted, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king". Who sees the world more clearly than his opponents and competitors has the critical advantage. Besides, the real world is far more wonderful and fascinating than the simplistic myths we have created for ourselves. It’s more satisfying to be one of the few than one of the many.

The beauty of the cosmos

On clear warm dark nights I sometimes like to sit outside for a while before going to bed. We live high in the mountains, away from air and light pollution, and the stars are so sharp and clear that they seem almost be within arm’s reach. What always comes over me at these times is how vast, how unimaginably vast, the cosmos is, and by comparison how completely insignificant we humans are.

Two dim little stars that sit side by side in my field of view, perhaps seeming only as far from each other as the width of my fingernail, are probably in reality each one a vast galaxy of billions of stars, so distant from each other that light would take longer than the age of the earth to go from one to the other. And for every star bright enough for my limited human vision to see, there are billions and billions more in the sky that I can’t see. I keep Hubble telescope photos as wallpaper on my computer screen to remind me of this vastness every time I get too focused on human concerns.

I find the massive scale of the cosmos truly exciting. It stirs my blood to think of the intricate workings of all those elemental forces driving the nuclear furnaces of stars and binding the wheeling galaxies together in a unimaginably complex cosmic dance. Surely if anything was ever made in the image of a deity it is the massive galaxies, or perhaps the even more massive superclusters of galaxies. That some people would think, in the face of the incredible scale and majesty of the cosmos, that a small, weak recently-evolved mammal on a minor planet around a very ordinary star buried toward the periphery of a galaxy in a minor spiral arm would be the central focus of attention for whatever intelligence created all this vastness simply shows how unbelievably self-centered and egotistical we humans can be.

The writer of Psalm 8:3 understood: “When I look at thy Heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; what is man that thou art mindful of him….”

There are those who think science is cold and heartless, and that scientific study removes the beauty and magic from life. To get even a glimpse of what the natural world is really like, and of the incredible efficiency and complexity with which it operates, is to be filled with wonder and passion. Frankly, I feel sorry for those whose view of the natural world is constrained by the narrowness and unimaginativeness of human myths. The real world revealed by scientific study is so much more complex and beautiful and inspiring than any man-made myth could ever be.

I am reminded of the story of Thomas Becket, onetime Archbishop of Canterbury before he was murdered by followers of King Henry II. It is said he was much discomforted by being made archbishop until one night when he had a dream and saw himself as no more than a single drop of water in the ocean, and then was at peace with himself. I find something of that story in the realization that we humans are such a small, insignificant part of such a vast system, and yet we are endowed with the amazing ability to see (if we will only trouble to look) and appreciate the vastness and beauty of that whole system. Don’t tell me that science doesn’t have passion!

Can Iraq ever become civilized again?

Reuters News, Jan 16,, 2007

Baghdad - Bombers killed 70 people, many of them young female students, at a Baghdad university on Tuesday, one of the city's bloodiest days in weeks. In all, at least 105 were killed in bombings and a shooting in the capital on a day when the United Nations said more than 34 000 Iraqi civilians died in violence last year. Four United States soldiers were killed in a bomb attack in northern Iraq.

Its hard to see how Iraqis can build a stable government in a culture where, when they are not killing Americans, they spend their time killing each other, each other’s children, or even their own sisters and daughters. This is one of those cases where culture matters a great deal, and a culture that is this steeped in hatred and blood feuds and religious violence and tribal conflict and honor killings doesn’t seem to me to have much prospect of advancing in the world, despite all the glowing promises of the current American administration.

No doubt the violence is perpetrated by a minority of the population, but it wouldn’t be possible if the culture of the majority didn’t allow it to happen, and even condone it to some degree.

Recommended: How Long Will America Lead the World?

I recommend Fareed Zakaria’s June 2006 article How Long Will America Lead the World? We do lead the world today by most economic measures (R&D, productivity, output, growth, etc) but no empire lasts forever. Whether we can prolong ours for another ten or twenty decades depends on whether or not we can keep our political attention on what really matters.

All cultures are not equal

It’s politically incorrect these days to compare cultures. We are supposed to believe that the values of every culture are equally valid, and in this multicultural world we are supposed to respect the values of other cultures, whatever they are. This completely non-judgmental point of view just doesn’t make sense.

Certainly it is arrogant and egotistical to assume that our own culture is the best and other cultures ought to be like us, and in fact we suffer a good bit from such arrogance. But that’s a far cry from needing to “respect” everything about other cultures. Some cultures are clearly better than others. Some cultures are self destructive. Some cultures inflict terrible things on their young, or on their woman, or on anyone who is different. Some cultures are still stuck in the middle ages or even the dark ages. Some cultures wallow in hatred and blood feuds.

This isn’t just about “other nations”. There are things in our own American culture, or in some of our own subcultures, which are self-defeating and destructive and medieval.

It’s time to abandon this politically-correct multicultural attitude of accepting everything. Some cultural traits are just plain self-destructive, some are immoral and uncivilized, and some are downright dangerous to the rest of us. It’s time to discuss and debate openly what is and is not acceptable in cultures (ours and others) and what is and is not self-destructive.

The President

I’ve been thinking about President Bush the past few days while he has been mulling over his options in Iraq. Now I’m not particularly a Bush supporter. I think he and his team have been terribly naïve about the Middle East from the very beginning, and we are paying a terrible price for that naiveté. I am uncomfortable with the certainty his religious views give him on some subjects, and I don’t agree with some of his priorities. And I think he has been slow to recognize when a policy isn’t working.

Nonetheless, I feel for the President. It’s an impossible job. Most choices at that level are between the lesser of evils. Most choices have to be made on insufficient information. Most choices have a raft of unintended and unanticipated consequences. All the easy choices get made at lower levels – he only gets the really difficult problems. If he makes the correct choice, nobody notices and he gets little or no credit. If he chooses incorrectly, the whole world is ready to jump on him.

Nor is the Washington culture any help. As President Truman said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. For every decision there are a thousand partisan voices offering conflicting advice. For every decision, there are a thousand lobbyists and members of Congress pressing for their own agendas. For every decision there are crowds of media people just waiting to jump on the slightest misstep and blow it out of proportion into tomorrow’s headline.

It’s always easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but in fact the President, whoever he or she is, is the one on the hot seat every day and every night. World events move onward at their own rapid pace, prompt decisions have to be made, and the President doesn’t have the luxury of his critics to complain from the sidelines after the fact about what might have been or what should have been done. Being the leader of a nation this size, in a world this dangerous and complex, is a truly awesome task. I don’t always agree with the decisions our Presidents make, this president or any of his predecessors I have lived under, but I will always respect the difficulty of the office, and the difficulty of the decisions the man or woman in that office has to face.

It’s not a job I would want, and it’s probably not a job I could do. It has never been clear to me that I could have done any better in handling the Middle East problems. My mistakes would certainly have been different that President Bush’s, but I’m not sure the outcome would have been any better, and it might well have been much worse. That thought tempers my criticism, as it ought to temper some of the hasher of his critics.

The centrality of hope

One of the extraordinary abilities that has evolved in human intelligence is the ability to speculate and think about things that might come to pass in the future. Our nearest primate relatives may possibly share just a little of this ability, but for most animals life is like driving in the dark without headlights. Things happen when they happen, but there is little or no opportunity to see what might be coming.

As with any gift, the ability to think about the future has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that we can anticipate events to a certain degree, and so we can sometimes plan and change things in the present so as to improve what might happen to us in the future. The disadvantage is that we can foresee unpleasant things, like our own deaths, and worry about them.

For creatures who can think about the possible future, hope is essential. If we have no hope, the gift of foresight is simply a pathway to depression. If we have hope for the future, we can bear an amazing amount of distress in the present.

So it is no surprise that the core of most religions, of most political philosophies, of most political movements, and of most personal relationships is hope. Hope that things will be better in the future. Hope that we can avoid this or that future unpleasantness. Hope that we will attain in the future that which we have been seeking in the present.

When we think about making people’s lives better, the important thing is to focus on what offers them real hope. The reason it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish is because giving the ability to fish provides hope for food in the future, while the fish given today provides no hope of food tomorrow. Too many of our well-meaning attempts to help people fit the “fish today” model, rather than the “fish in the future” model. That is why a welfare check is not as good as a marketable job skill. That is why shipments of grain to a nation are not as good as helping their farmers to increase their own yields. That is why American troops keeping the peace in Iraq is not as good as Iraqis keeping the peace among themselves.

I had a wise friend years ago who was a graduate student in clinical psychology. I asked him once which “school” of psychiatry he believed in. Surprisingly, he said whichever one he could convince his patient of. He went on to explain that patients came to him believing they were crazy and their condition hopeless. As soon as he could convince them that they weren’t crazy, that their condition was understood, and that there was clear hope for their recovery, they calmed down, and only then he could begin to work effectively with them. Hope was the key. Hope is always the key!

Recommended: A War of Endurance

I recommend Victor Davis Hansons's recent article A War of Endurance. He outlines the stark choices we face in Iraq, and they are the same choices we will face in the inevitable future actions against other failed states that harbor terrorists.

It's clear the rules have changed, and that we are still struggling to figure out the new rules for the sort of prolonged, low intensity warfare we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also clear that America will never prevail in such conflicts if the American people cannot be brought to understand and support long-term military commitments, with the accompanying casualties, in support of our own long-term safety. Our enemies have deduced from our experiences in Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, and other places that if they can prolong the battle and the steady trickle of casualties long enough, American public opinion will eventually force us to withdraw.

It seems to me that the military is already doing their part pretty well in learning from their Iraq experiences and innovating tactics to meet the new challenges. But I don't see the political structure of either party doing their part yet - (a) learning how to decide wisely when it is and when it is not worth committing American troops and (b) learning how to gain and maintain long-term public support for these sorts of prolonged military actions.

Here’s a frightening statistic

According to a May, 2006 Gallup poll, something like 46% of Americans reject totally the evidence of modern science and reason and believe instead, on the basis of literal interpretation of scripture, that the entire world was created at one time within the last 10,000 years. If this were a measure of the beliefs in some country where there was no education, it might just be believable. That this is a measure of beliefs in American society, one of the most advanced in the world, just boggles the mind.

Here are well over a 100 million Americans who owe to rational science and engineering their plentiful food, their good health and access to modern medicine, their cars and TVs and iPods and cell phones and computers and electric lights and appliances and almost everything else that has raised their lives from brute survival to modern comfort. And yet, if the evidence of science doesn’t agree with their literal reading of scripture, they choose to believe scripture instead.

Those who hold these sorts of beliefs see nothing odd about it. Indeed, they may even believe that their literal religious convictions in some way help explain America’s success in the world. It’s hard to have any effective dialogue with people who have abandoned reason for faith.

But for the rest of us who have not subscribed to a literal interpretation of scripture, this is a frightening statistic, the more so since this group apparently includes highly-placed government officials who control our national destiny and foreign policy. It’s frightening, for example, to think that our nuclear weapons may at times be under the control of people who believe, on the basis of scripture, that initiating a nuclear Armageddon might be a good thing, bringing on the End Times and the Second Coming that they passionately await.

We are understandably dismayed by the irrational religious fervor of Islamic fundamentalists. We ought to be far more dismayed by the irrational fervor of our own Christian fundamentalists, who in the end, because of the vast power America wields, pose a far greater danger to the world’s safety than a few Islamic suicide bombers or even the 9/11 terrorists.

If we are losing the hard-won advances of the Enlightenment, when reason and logic and an open mind began to replace superstition and religious certainty, we are in deep trouble. History has shown us what the world looks like when it is ruled by religious conviction, and it is inevitably a brutal, bloody, intolerant, self-destructive picture, replete with crusades, pogroms, holocausts, inquisitions, ethnic cleansings and jihads. If the statistic quoted above is even remotely correct, we are in danger of repeating this bloody history, perhaps for the last time.

The reparations scam

The world is awash in scams, and always has been. One of the more recent ones that concerns me is the reparations scam.

Now reparations make some sense when the object is to compensate individuals for something that was taken from them improperly or illegally. But the new twist is to claim reparations for wrongs done to ones ancestors, perhaps even many generations back. To the best of my knowledge it started with African-Americans playing on liberal guilt to claim reparations from large, well-heeled companies for how they may have used or abused their slave ancestors. But since it sometimes works, I see it beginning to crop up elsewhere, such as the African nations request through the UN for reparations from their former colonial rulers.

It’s interesting that American blacks don’t seem to feel it necessary to ask for reparations from their black African brothers who originally captured them, transported them to the coast, and sold them to whites. Could it be because these tribes have almost no money? Or perhaps because these tribes aren’t infused with the liberal guilt that makes the scam work in the first place?

Of course, this might become the world’s new growth industry, since almost everyone in the world can find a few ancestors who were trampled on by somebody or other, human history being what it is. Perhaps I ought to seek reparations from the Normans who about 1000 years ago took over what is now England by force from my putative ancestor Harold Godwinson (almost certainly not an ancestor of mine, but in this sort of scam, accuracy doesn’t really matter). With a good lawyer, I might get rich this way……..

Where are the moderate Muslims?

One hears a lot of angry rhetoric from the few violent Muslim fundamentalists around the world, but surprisingly little public refutation from the many moderate Muslims.

This may be because at heart they agree with the radicals, or because they are afraid to speak out, or because they feel the ties of religion obligate them side philosophically with the radicals, or simply because they aren’t as good at getting their message out as the radicals.

Or perhaps moderate Muslims, especially if they live outside the Middle East, think this isn’t their fight, so they don’t need to get involved. But it is their fight. It is their religion, Islam, that the terrorists use to justify their actions. So unless moderates Muslims speak out strongly in opposition, the world is naturally going to assume they are in sympathy with the terrorists, and act accordingly. The actions of the violent fundamentalists imperil all Muslims.

Thus far the world, and America in particular, has managed not to blame all Muslims for the actions of a relatively few radicals. There were a few, a very few, attacks on Muslims immediately after 9/11, but in general the political powers in the Western nations have promoted the idea that the fanatical few don’t represent the attitudes of the majority of the world’s Muslims. Religious profiling is still in general not politically correct.

However, that all could change in an instant if any one of the many Islamic fundamentalists groups ever manage to launch a truly damaging attack on a Western nation, and especially if they succeeded in such an attack on the USA. Set off a small nuclear weapon in a major Western city, or loose a devastating bioweapon on the world and rational tolerance will probably go out the window in an instant. Especially if the aftermath again includes TV pictures of Muslims dancing in the streets in celebration. The response is unlikely to be rational or just or proportional or moral – but it will most likely be overwhelming and devastating to Muslims worldwide, not only immediately but probably for generations to come.

The jihadists, who may know their own history but clearly don’t know much Western history, think that the resulting chaos will work to their advantage. It won’t – it will finally truly mobilize the major powers to hunt them to extermination, but that hunt is not likely to be very selective or much constrained by civil liberties, and lots of moderate Muslims will suffer.

So it seems to me that moderate Muslims, for their own long-term safety and the safety of their children and grandchildren, and even for the safety of Islam, need to be seen to speak up, loudly and publicly and often, against the excesses of their fundamentalist brethren. If they don’t, they are likely to be tarred with the same brush as the terrorists.

Survival

In the end, there really is only one indisputable measure of a human society. Can it survive or not? It doesn’t matter if a society fancies itself morally superior, or thinks it has a better value system, or is more generous in spirit, or is more innovative, or is specially favored by the gods – if it doesn’t survive none of this matters.

We humans continue to delude ourselves that we are somehow above nature, or special in the natural world. But we are not. All nature is about competition and survival. We are in the same competitive race as the cockroaches and viruses and dinosaurs and ragweeds. And in that race only one thing matters – survival!

Dinosaurs survived for about 160 million years. Cockroaches in one form or another have been around for about 350 million years, and are still with us. Recognizable humans appear to have been around for perhaps 1.5-2 million years, and civilized humans only perhaps 10,000-20,000 years, so we have a long way to go yet to prove that we as a species are survivors.

And our American society/empire is barely 200 years old. By comparison, Rome’s empire, in one form or another, lasted from about 500 BC to about 475 AD, or almost 1000 years. So our American empire has a long way to go yet to prove itself a survivor.

So the real test of all of our grand ideas ought to be whether we think they increase our society’s odds of survival or not.

Does structuring our society so that our birth rate falls below replacement levels increase the odds of our survival? Obviously not. We just free up an ecological niche for some other society to replace us.

Does structuring our society so that our massive debt and dependence on oil puts us at the mercy of our competitors increase the odds of our survival? Obviously not.

Does letting our educational system shortchange the next generation increase the odds of our survival? Obviously not.

Does letting our economic system divert many of our best and brightest to high-paying but ultimately non-productive activities like playing the markets or indulging in litigation increase the odds of our survival? Obviously not.

We have become so deluded by our own new-age hype that we seem to have forgotten that life is about the deadly serious business of surviving and helping our offspring to survive. There are other societies on the globe, less coddled, that haven’t yet forgotten that, and if we are not careful, they will replace us.