Christians Think the Rest of Us Are Just Places to Pile Their Shit

My next door neighbors seemed to be the nicest Christian people in the world. They just had a baby, their firstborn, and have been cheerfully preparing their house to accommodate the new arrival. Derek Brewer is a realtor, just starting his own business. His wife Whitney was one our our brightest and smartest alumnae from Biological Sciences at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

I counted myself really lucky to have them as neighbors, especially since we have a shared driveway. They are very quiet, even when they have a lot of visitors. Because I wanted to encourage them to stay, and not move away—nearly anybody who might move in after them would be worse, I figured—I have given them unlimited right to park in the shared driveway, half of which is mine, and I waived my right to park there.

Apparently I was a fool for trusting Christian goodness.

I generate very little garbage. I am proud of treading lightly upon God’s good green Earth. I do not use disposable dishes except when the alternative is very burdensome. And my lovely wife Lee spent many, many hours washing cloth diapers when Anita was young. (One of the pleasures of having an almost-28-year-old daughter is that it has been a long, long time since this was necessary.)

But when I did open my city garbage bin to put a tiny bit of refuse in it tonight, I found that it was almost completely filled by a big plastic garbage bag full of disposable plates and newborn diapers (used, of course). This bag was as much garbage as I generate in two months. I know where it must have come from. In order to put the garbage in my bin, one of them had to open my gate, walk across my back yard, and put it in, then walk back and close the gate. It could not have been a simple misunderstanding. Anyone stupid enough to do this by accident would not have been smart enough to open a gate.

I’m fucking tired of Christians treating everybody else in the world as places to pile their shit, and I mean this literally, or for target practice, or as scapegoats to blame everything on. If only us fucking Democrat bleeding-hearts would get the fuck out of the world, all problems would be solved.

The possibility remains that someone else, maybe a space alien, just happened to have newborn diapers at this very moment when my neighbors do, and put them there. In that event, I will delete this blog entry and replace it with an account of Derek and the space aliens or whatever is appropriate.

It is, in itself, a small thing, since I generate so little garbage. I just wish they had ASKED first. But Christians don’t fucking need to ask before dumping their shit on neighbors, or parking their fucking cars in their neighbors’ yards, or any other fucking thing they want to do. They are the chosen of God and the rest of us are just standing in their way.

Now, if I trespassed in someone’s yard for ANY REASON they would consider it their right and God-given duty to shoot me. I do not have a gun or any plans to get one. But (see the previous blog entry) it appears that there are two groups of people: the people with guns who believe they have a right to do whatever the fuck they want, and those without guns who must just accept whatever the others do. Happy July 6, and God bless America.

Here is the letter I will be leaving for them, to give them a chance to set the record straight in the event that the garbage came from somewhere else:

“Derek and Whitney—In my trash I found a large trash bag full of disposable dishware and used newborn diapers. Would those happen to be yours? Or did you happen to see anyone enter my back yard through the fence and leave a bag of garbage there? They should know I am not the neighborhood dump. If you need extra space for trash please in God’s name ask first. You have my number. Dr. Stan Rice. P.S. If you see anyone doing this, please let them know it is a bad example for Christians. –S.R.”

If anything should change the accuracy of the above information, I will update this essay or simply delete it.

Do Americans Have the Same Human Nature as Everyone Else?

America bristles with firearms. You can safely assume that everybody you see has one hidden on their person or within easy reach. This is not true, but it is close enough to being true that you certainly would not want to make the opposite assumption.

Firearms advocates, who want to see as many people carrying guns as possible, claim that this makes us safer. They have all kinds of rationalizations and anecdotes to support this.

But the numbers tell a different story. Here are some numbers from Wikipedia regarding the number of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people per year in recent years. The article appears well-referenced and I consider it more reliable than either conservative or liberal things I see floating around the web.

Australia: 1.06

Austria: 2.95

Brazil: 19.03

Canada: 2.38

Colombia: 28.14

Costa Rica: 6.28

Denmark: 1.45

France: 3.01

Germany: 1.24

Honduras: 64.8

Israel: 1.87

Italy: 1.28

Japan: 0.06

Mexico: 11.17

Netherlands: 0.46

Nicaragua: 7.29

Norway: 1.78

South Korea: 0.06

Sweden 1.47

UK: 0.25

USA: 10.3

Clearly, the United States has one of the highest rates of firearm-related homicides in the world—not as high as countries with lots of organized crime, like Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras, but higher than virtually anyone else. Our rate is even higher than Nicaragua, a Central American nation whose socialistic government we considered so evil in the 1980s that President Reagan used illegal means to get firearms to the right-wing “contras.” But if you compare us to countries that have similar living conditions to ours, or so we think, we have ten to a hundred times as many firearm deaths per capita. Just compare the UK and the USA. We cannot claim that there is no social strife in the UK; they have ethnic and economic tensions just as we do. Perhaps ethnic uniformity explains the exceptionally low firearm death rates in Japan and South Korea, but not the UK, France, Germany, or Italy.

Americans have more guns and more gun deaths. Most other countries have fewer guns and fewer gun deaths. Clearly guns are not keeping us safe from gun deaths.

There appear to me to be two possible explanations. One is that we have too many guns at least in the hands of people who are not capable of handling the responsibility. The other is that there is something exceptional about America that makes us different from everybody else. “American exceptionalism” is usually meant as a belief that America and Americans have special privileges in the world; to religious conservatives it means that we are specially blessed of God, God’s people. A lot of conservative megachurches have American flag backdrops for their services. But if this is so, then it means that one way that we are exceptional is that we are exceptionally bloodthirsty.

There’s something different about an American that will make him (sometimes her) ten to a hundred times more likely to shoot your brains out (or your children’s brains out) than someone from any other country except those with drug cartels or civil wars. What might this be? If it is not simply the fact that so many Americans have guns, then it must be something about us.

I refuse to believe the latter without further proof. I believe that all humans have the same human nature, based on the recent evolutionary diversification of all races only about 100,000 years ago. I do not believe that Americans are biologically or intrinsically more bloodthirsty than Englishmen. I believe that the problem is too many unregulated guns. We need gun regulations—not by themselves but in conjunction with education and a deliberate cultural effort to shift the way we think. If you say that this is impossible, then think about what you are saying: that Americans are intrinsically bloodthirsty.

Either our gun problem is a problem that can be solved, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t then we should hang our heads in shame and not meet the eyes of the rest of the world, recognizing ourselves as incorrigibly bloodthirsty. If there is a third alternative, I am not aware of it and my readers are welcome to post a third alternative.

Oh, by the way, how many weapons did Jesus own? And if He owned none, what the bloody hell was wrong with Him? The God that Americans worship should have beat some sense into that Boy.

Happy July 4 everybody.

Black Gold

For the last century, the most important source of energy for the human economy has been oil. We hear all the time, not the least from my blogs, about the environmental costs, including global climate change, of our oil dependence. And while it may seem like a distant memory even to those of us who lived through it, dependence on foreign oil has caused immense economic and geopolitical instability. It has taken decades for America to get to the point at which we import less oil than we produce, but we still use a lot of foreign oil. And we spew a lot of carbon into the air.

What I wish to address now is the immense toll of injustice that comes from our dependence on oil. Oil is a highly concentrated source of energy, both in terms of the number of calories of energy per volume and in the concentration of oil resources in specific geographical areas. In contrast, sunlight shines more or less evenly on the Earth’s surface. Although some places in the world are cloudier than others, and places far to the north or south get significantly less sunlight, solar energy is broadly distributed. The same is almost as true of wind energy. Low-level geothermal energy (which can be used to stabilize indoor temperatures) is also widespread, although only a few places have really hot rocks near the surface that can allow steam turbines to produce electricity. The fact that oil is concentrated in a few places means that whoever controls those places (whether governments or corporations) has an immense amount of geopolitical power.

And it is not necessarily the people who live in those places who have the power.

Native Americans from all over what is now the United States were forced into what is now Oklahoma, mostly in the nineteenth century, so that white people could have their land. The white-dominated government of the U.S. supposedly had a constitution, but whites broke every treaty with Native Americans, in complete disregard of the constitution as well as the most basic concepts of dignity and humanity. Then, much to the consternation of the government, oil was discovered on Indian land. While in some cases (as with the Osage tribe) this meant wealth for the Native Americans, what it usually meant was that whites decided to take Native land by any means necessary or imaginable, to treat Natives like vermin, as nothing more than impediments to oil production. By and large, having oil land has been a curse to Native Americans. I am speaking from the viewpoint of Oklahoma, where I was born and where I live, and the experiences of my Cherokee ancestors.

If you want to know about the many devious ways in which whites illegally took Native American land and oil rights, the most definitive source remains Angie Debo’s And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. It is about how the land promised and then allotted to Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Muskogees, and Seminoles was stolen from them (us) during the twentieth century. Lies and forged documents were routinely used to defraud tribal members. The courts appointed “guardians” to take care of the supposedly simple-minded Indians; these guardians would then sell or rent the allotted land and keep all, or most, of the money. In one case, a guardian had 51 Indians under his control. Three of them were children who held title to very productive oil land, but the guardian did not tell them about it. They were living in a hollow tree and begging for food when a conscientious state government agent found them. In this one case, the “guardian” had his privileges taken away; but this rarely happened. And this “guardian” never went to jail. Jail was for drunk Indians, not for the whites who defrauded them. And even today, prison is mostly for poor drug offenders, not for financial crimes committed by the rich, with an occasional exception like Bernard Madoff.

But it wasn’t just fraud that whites committed to get oil land from Indians (and from freed slaves within the Indian nations). It was also murder. The whites would trick the Indians (some of them children) to making them the heirs, and then they would kill them. In Glenn Pool (now called Glenpool, right down the highway from my house in Tulsa) whites dynamited two black Muskogee boys while they slept to get their land. Glenn Pool was the massive oil deposit that made Tulsa famous. In Choctaw County, the next county over from the place where I work, whites killed Choctaws with carbolic acid or ground glass (put in their food to make them bleed to death from the inside) in order to get their land.

When I read this, on page 200 of Debo’s book, I could not do or think about anything else all evening, just devastated by learning about this. For those of you who think that the last time that whites massacred Indians was at Wounded Knee in 1890, think again! Everyone has heard about the four little black girls who got burned in the church fire set by white arsonists in the 1960s, but has anyone ever heard about those two little black boys in Glenn Pool? At least my ancestors were only defrauded, not murdered.

My point is that nobody has ever defrauded or murdered anyone else in order to get a choice spot for putting up a wind generator or a solar collector. There will never be a Koch Brothers of solar energy.

Is it any wonder that so many Native Americans (and Native American freedmen) are so demoralized? Especially the ones who still live in their own ethnic communities. The white governments of the United States and of Oklahoma have driven them into the ground. Toxic waste sites are often near communities of color; and in Oklahoma, that means Native American communities, such as the Cherokee-Quapaw town of Picher, which drips with toxic metal contamination.

I would expect to see Native American rage over these things, but the steamrolling of Native pride by white culture has been so complete that Natives are in some cases embarrassed to not be white. What should Native Americans do? There is no clear answer. In his 1970 novel The Ordeal of Running Standing, Thomas Fall wrote about a fullblood Oklahoma Indian who tried to be white and use the powers of the white economy against rich whites, failed, and then did a useless but heroic act of defiance against the overwhelming white powers. (If you want to know what it was, you have to read my review in the previous blog entry.) But nothing like this ever happened or ever will. The Indian nations are conquered now and forever. And oil was part of the reason.

As I said, I speak from Oklahoma experience. But anyone who listens to the news knows that rich people (some of them black) get even richer from the lucrative oil reserves in Nigeria, while the poor black Nigerians live in desperate poverty. And today the struggle continues in Ecuador, where oil companies take some land from the native tribes of the Amazon, and pour their wastes on the rest of it. El Oriente of Ecuador (east of the Andes) is the new Oklahoma.

Moving away from energy-dense fuel sources is essential for the ecological and economic future of the world, and also so that, at long last, justice can be done in the world. Oil is just too much of a temptation; it makes evil people destroy their fellow humans.

I Dream of Gini

The May 23 issue of Science had several articles about social and economic inequality of people around the world. One way of measuring inequality is the Gini coefficient, in which 0 means that all the people are completely equal and 1 means that they are completely unequal. All of the authors recognized the problems with inequality, whether within or between countries, and whether of income or access to basic necessities or education; they all believed we should have lower the Gini coefficients in all of these measures.

Everyone realizes that we will never have Gini coefficients close to zero, nor should we desire to. I have explained some of the reasons for this in my reviews here and here of Sir (Saint) Thomas More’s sixteenth-century book Utopia. Inequality will always happen in any population or ecological community in the natural world, and among humans some people will always be luckier, or more talented, or both, than others. One article (summary here, full text here in Science even made the claim that inequality is the inevitable outcome of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: there are more ways for people to lose than to win, and entropy produces inequality. And it gets worse. Another article (summary here, full text here) explained how poverty creates a psychological mindset that nearly condemns children in poor families to perpetuate poverty into a new generation.

We are left with the conclusion that Jesus was left with, that there will always be poor people. (Decades ago, in The Fates of Nations, ecologist Paul Colinvaux quoted this Biblical passage as corroboration of the same idea now expressed in Science.) To some conservatives, this means that even Jesus tells us to not bother with helping the poor to rise out of their circumstances. However, I believe that what the man Jesus called on us to do is to help to reduce Gini coefficients. (I’ll bet you haven’t heard it put that way before.) While we cannot solve the world’s problems, we can address specific problems, such as access to basic health care and education. That is, we can work to keep inequality from becoming dangerous to the people at the bottom. Unfortunately, even this is often an elusive goal.

In all states in the United States, free education is available through grade 12, and most of it is compulsory. It is undeniable that this reduces inequality, though we cannot prove it since there is no control group without basic educational opportunities. But at least in Oklahoma we are undermining public education. The governor has just signed a bill that prevents Oklahoma from adopting the newest set of education standards (CC, or common core, standards) that many other states have adopted and that nearly all are expected to adopt. This puts Oklahoma out of line with other states in terms of the quality of public education.

This might be acceptable if Oklahoma had a process superior to that of the rest of the country in determining the standards of public education—that is, if we could say that the other states are less advanced than we are in knowing what a good education is. But this is not so. The bill signed by the governor specifically allows the state legislature to modify any of the educational standards. The bill states:

"The Legislature may review any rules pertaining to the subject matter standards contained in this act and by concurrent resolution may either amend such rules or return those rules to the rule making authority with  instructions. Nothing in this section shall abrogate any right of the Legislature contained in the Administrative Procedures Act. Should said rules not be approved by the Legislature, the subject matter standards shall remain as before promulgation."

What this means is that state legislators, perhaps in return for campaign contributions from fossil fuel corporations, can determine that global warming is not occurring. In other words, here in Oklahoma, corporate money determines truth. The law opens up a direct pathway for this to happen. You can read all about this soon at the website of Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. Public education that simply reinforces what corporations want people to know will not help eliminate inequality.

It is not just liberal activists who are upset with the new Oklahoma law. As noted by Vic Hutchison, the founder of Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education,

“HB3399 was probably the most divisive bill of the legislative session and engendered massive opposition from many groups, including Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education (OESE), Oklahoma Science Teachers Association (OSTA), Oklahoma Business & Education Coalition (OBEC), Oklahoma PTA, Oklahoma Council of Teachers of Math (OCTM), Stand for Children Oklahoma, United Suburban Schools Association, ExpectMoreOK.org, State Chamber of Oklahoma, Tulsa Regional Chamber, Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, Collaborative for Student Success, and others.  Two retired Air Force Generals, former commanders at Tinker Air Force Base held a press conference urging Governor Fallin to veto HB3399. Two former Georgia Governors, who supported the development of CC, published a ‘Point of View’ column in The Oklahoman on 4 June (‘Oklahoma should keep education reform effort’).  Numerous messages were sent to the Governor’s office by individuals.”

This bill, therefore, is not just bad for science education but, according to people whose business it is to know, bad for economic growth. My point in this essay is that it will also fail to address inequality. It may lead to Oklahoma high school graduates being less prepared than graduates from other states in the nationwide and worldwide job market.

Higher education (my line of work) also helps to reduce inequality. An article in the same issue of Science indicates that a household led by college grads can expect to earn $40,000 a year more than a household led by high school grads. During recent decades in America, economic inequality has increased; so also has the income gap between high school and college graduates.

Those of us in a line of work—whatever that might be—that helps to reduce inequality can feel good about our efforts, but we should not expect a great amount of support from government or society. A very low Gini coefficient is impossible, dream as much as we want; it appears that even reducing the Gini coefficient a little is also impossible.

This essay, minus some of the religious discussion, will appear soon on my evolution blog.

Are We All Deluded?

Sam Kean’s new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain As Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery, is a gold mine of stories about the weird things that our brains can make us do, everything from cortical blindness to alien hand and walking dead syndromes. In people with cortical blindness, the eyes and optic nerves work fine, but the portion of the brain that consciously interprets vision is impaired. The brain has a whole separate set of nerves that process the emotional response to vision, however; people with cortical blindness can therefore smile in response to another person’s smile even though they cannot consciously see it. In alien hand syndrome, a person cannot recognize their own hand—usually the left one—as being part of his or her own body; and in walking dead syndrome, the person cannot recognize the body itself as his or her own.

Perhaps most important, although not the most interesting story in the book, was the experiment that demonstrated that our brain’s conscious decision to do something occurred after the subjects had begun to do the action. That is, the brain’s decision was actually a post-hoc rationalization. This calls into question the entire concept of free will. It appears that we choose to do something only after our subconscious minds have decided to do that thing. Of course, this does not mean we have no conscious control over ourselves. Our conscious minds can prevent us from doing the things we have started to do; that is, however much free will is called into question, self-control is certainly real. As the author says, we may not have free will, but we have free won’t. Also, our conscious minds can create a general pattern of thought that, while it may not control every individual action, certainly influences our general behavior.

The main point of all these fascinating stories is, in the author’s own words: “But if the history of neuroscience proves anything, it’s that any circuit for any mental attribute—up to and including our sense of being alive—can fail, if just the right spots [of the brain] suffer damage…your actions, your desires to act, and your conviction of having acted can all be decoupled and manipulated.”

I have, through reading this book, come to understand myself better. Temporal lobe epilepsy includes the experience of auras that are religious in their effects and intensity—religious delusions. While religion does not consist only of delusion, it has been stimulated by delusion. Famous religious figures, such as the Apostle Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc, and writers such as Dostoevsky to whom religion was of overwhelming importance, showed symptoms of epilepsy. Though I do not have epilepsy, I have some symptoms that suggest my right temporal lobe might be hyperactive in something of the same way as certain epileptics. For example, throughout my life I have had experiences of religious ecstasy. I also have to take an anticonvulsant medication that is prescribed, in higher dosage, to epileptics. And I have a mild case of polygraphia—the compulsion to write everything down, all day every day—that some epileptics also have. Finally, there might be a genetic basis for this; my paternal grandfather was religiously crazy. Somehow just knowing this makes me feel more comfortable inside my skin.

Kean’s book, like the books of Mary Roach, show that the best modern science writing is based on stories and are written to be fun. Filled with fragments and imprecise language, this book would make some science editors howl, but is exactly the kind of book that would make anyone want to learn more about science. This is the kind of science book that I have not yet written myself.

The feeling I bring away from Kean’s book is liberation. I feel no need to blame myself for feeling or believing things that may be outrageous, nor do I have to blame others for theirs. What we need to do is to override anything outrageous that our minds manufacture. The idea that we choose our beliefs rationally seems to be entirely wrong, even though reasoning is a contributing factor. As a scientist and educator, I feel liberation, because I do not need to actually convince or convert anyone to my way of thinking. What I need to continue doing is to provide information and opportunity that will allow my students and my readers to convert their thinking, should that prove possible. If I continue to provide information about the world and its history, humans and their history, and continue provoking new thoughts, I have done my entire job.

Stories as Adaptations

The stories we tell, whether fictional or “real,” are adaptations in social evolution. That is their function, and our brains have evolved to crave them. A people, or a person, without stories is without a framework of life and without hope.

Stories are experiments in which we test hypotheses about how to live in a world of limitations and conflicts. In addition, I believe that all stories are just one story, the story of love, which is always costly. Stories are not mere entertainment. They are the way we members of the primate species Homo sapiens live in the world.

As such, stories (whether fictional or not) must weave together plots that provide some sense of cause and effect (without which the world is meaningless) and offer some hope for going forward. Reality may, in fact, be unmitigated depression and hopelessness, but stories should not be, for stories are our way of coping with hopelessness and maybe overcoming it.

These are my thoughts after seeing a movie many of you have seen and all of you have heard about, Twelve Years a Slave. It is the story of a free black man living in New York, Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Georgia. Such kidnappings happened hundreds of times, and Northup was one of the few people to ever escape from this situation. For almost the entire two hours, I felt totally asphyxiated with depression. Nearly every person and event in the movie was the picture of hopelessness. Every time it looked like there might, just might, be a flicker of hope, it was dashed. For example, Northup realized that he might be able to use blackberry juice to make ink in order to write a letter to tell his friends where he was so they could rescue him. But his hopes were crushed by the treachery of the white man whom he trusted. The slaves were subjected to every imaginable indignity and suffering, and some that I had previously (despite my fertile writer’s imagination) never imagined, such as when the clinically crazy plantation mater made his slaves act out ballroom dances so that he could pretend that he had a social life. Oh, it’s all true; slave owners did not treat their slaves as property, to be managed wisely, but would inflict suffering on them even though it entailed economic loss. The principal demon of the story personally beat his most productive slave nearly to death—a process shown in full graphic detail. Every possible hopelessness was depicted, such as Northup crushing his beloved violin.

At the end, I felt sick for being mostly white, and as if the suffering of my Native American ancestors counted for nothing. But there were even blacks in this movie who were cruel. This movie made me feel filthy for being human. It’s enough to make you wish we would just go extinct.

This is not what a story is supposed to do. If Twelve Years a Slave were fiction, it would be totally unacceptable; its only saving grace is that this story actually happened.

But the producers of this movie made their story even worse than the reality. According to historical records, Northup’s white friends back in New York kept trying to locate and rescue him. Now this would have conferred a plot line of hope had it been included in the movie. But in the movie, the rescue was nothing but random good luck, when a random Canadian (Brad Pitt) happened to randomly pass through and take Northup’s message back to his white friends in New York.

What is the message of this story? That all humans are depraved? Or is it that we should, like Solomon Northup, persist in our circumstances no matter what they are just in case a one-in-a-thousand random rescue comes along? Neither of these messages offers any hope.

A story, in order to fulfill its evolutionary function, should offer a reason for hope, not just random good luck at the end. In this sense, the movie almost reminded me of the P.D.Q. Bach opera (by the humorist Peter Schickele) in which all the characters died at the end then got up and started singing “Happy ending, happy ending…” The producers of Twelve Years a Slave excised every possible element of hope, even the one that really happened.

The movie was very well done, and deserved the acclaim it received. My review is from the viewpoint of a scientist who sees stories as an evolutionary adaptation, and who also writes fiction. As a matter of fact, I finished writing a novel only two hours before seeing this movie.

I will mention one valuable insight from this movie. The plantation masters forced the slaves to listen to Biblical passages about how servants should be submissive to their masters. Certainly, in many if not most cases, religion has been used and continues to be used as a tool of oppression. It does not have to be this way. But religion in the hands of the rich and powerful is nearly always oppressive, itself a form of slavery. Once in a while, religion provides a message of liberation.

The contrast with another famous slave movie, Amistad, could not be greater. Amistad, like Twelve Years a Slave, was based on a real event. But Amistad had a message of hope woven through it. If, in fact, it could be shown that the captives on the ship Amistad were part of an illegal (as opposed to legal) slave operation, there was the real chance that they might be freed by the American court system. Eventually, they were. And it was not random luck that freed them, but the persistent efforts of an old and retired John Quincy Adams. Amistad inspired me. Twelve Years a Slave just made me just want to crawl in a hole.

Why did human language and human intelligence evolve? Nobody knows. But I’ll bet one of the first uses to which either was put was to offer the tribes that developed these abilities a sense (even if it is a delusion) of hope that kept them going despite desperate circumstances and eventually made them prevail. We are the descendants of the people who told stories of hope, not those who wallowed in depression.

I also posted this essay on my evolution blog, but did not include the paragraph about religion therein.

Thomas More and Communism, part two

In the previous essay, I described how the sixteenth-century Catholic scholar Sir Thomas More proposed (indirectly, through a fictitious traveler named Raphael Hythloday) a perfect, communistic society. But More went further than just describing the perfect society. He criticized European societies, including the England in which he lived.

European societies, More indicated, made common people suffer. More asked whether having someone on their knees before you make your knees hurt less. How can someone else’s pain lessen yours?

More described the people of Utopia as doing things that would even today draw sharp criticism from conservatives. People voted for their church leaders and there were even a few female priests (something that even today the Catholic Church does not do). Utopia had state-sanctioned euthanasia. Adultery was punished but divorce permitted, thus removing the need for lawyers. (More was a lawyer.) More even admired Utopian courtship. Before marriage, the affianced partners got to look at each other naked so that they would know what they are getting.

War was unknown in Utopia. How did the Utopians manage this? They offered rewards to people from enemy nations who would betray the enemy.

More said that the Utopians were originally pagans but embraced Christianity. However, they banished any Christians who were intolerant of other viewpoints.

Above all, Utopia was a communist society, just like early Christian communities described in the second chapter of Acts. “Though no man owns anything, yet every man is rich.” And yet the rich in England, said More, were not as happy as any of the Utopians. Many sins die when money dies, said More. Wherever people starve, he said, the rich have full barns. He said that it was better “…to be rid of innumerable cares and troubles than to be besieged with great riches.” In England, wealth was measured by how much discomfort it causes to others. He described the love of wealth as a “hell-hound” that “creeps into men’s hearts…”

More has the fictitious Raphael Hythloday criticize sixteenth-century England in these words: “For what justice is this, that a rich…userer [banker]…or to be brief, any one of those who either do nothing at all, or else something that is not very necessary to the commonwealth, should have a pleasant and wealthy living, either in idleness, or in unnecessary business, when meanwhile poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters, and plowmen, by such great and continual toil, as beasts of burden are scarce able to sustain, and again such necessary toil that without it no commonwealth would be able to continue and endure one year, yet get so hard and poor a living and live so wretched and miserable a life that the state and condition of the laboring beasts may seem much better and more comfortable? [That was one sentence, but a powerful one.—HA] For they [the animals] are not put to such continual labor, nor is there living much worse; yea, for them it is much pleasanter, for they take no thought in the meantime for the future. But these ignorant, poor wretches [humans] are now tormented with barren and unfruitful labor, and the remembrance of their poor, indigent, and beggarly old age kills them off. For their daily wage is so little that it will not suffice for the same day, much less yield any overplus that may daily be laid up for the relief of old age.”

Of course, More could simply say, “Oh, Raphael said that; I just wrote down his words.” Take that, Harry.

To summarize, More (through Hythloday) is saying, Rich people do very little that is valuable to the nation as a whole, while the poor work as hard as they can, doing jobs that are necessary for the survival of our nation, under conditions that would be considered abusive to animals, and cannot even earn a living wage, much less save up for retirement. The only thing missing from this statement to make it applicable almost five hundred years after it was written is that today the rich people accuse the poor of being lazy. Or at least, in Mitt Romney’s case, 47 percent of them. Today, as in 1516, bankers play around with other people’s money and lose a lot of it, woopsie, and still receive million-dollar bonuses.

I realize that there is likely to be no way that natural selection, whether biological or cultural, could produce a sustainable state of communism. More’s Utopia is a fantasy land easily invasible (I think that’s a word) by selfish people. But it might work on a small scale. More, after all, based his Utopia on vague stories he had heard about Native American tribes. My Cherokee ancestors really did hold all their land in common. More even located Utopia in a vaguely American geographical location.

If you have a better idea, leave a comment. Let’s talk.