The Little Lines Separating Us

When I was in high school in 1974, I was our school’s representative to Boys’ State, a simulation of state government run by the American Legion. Most of the instructors were military officers, and military recruitment was one theme. One of our guest speakers was an astronaut who brought a prepared speech, but when he saw us, he threw down his script and just answered questions. Some wiseass asked him if, from orbit, he could see the little lines separating the countries. He said no, and that he couldn’t see the lines separating race and religion either. He got an ovation from that. Remember that this was back before the fundamentalist culture wars in America, and back when race relations were more strained than they are now.

During my recent visit to Big Bend (where I studied botany and evolution; see my evolution blog entry), I came right to the edge of the Rio Grande. It was not a grand river at this time; it was more like a large creek, only about thirty feet wide in some places. The challenge to rafters was to find water deep enough to float on. This is the little line that separates the U.S. and Mexico. Technically, the border runs down the middle of the river bed; the river ran in a narrow channel right next to the cliffs of the Mexican side, while on our side there was a wide rocky floodplain. Therefore, I must have actually been standing in Mexico. I reflected on how porous the border actually is, despite billions of dollars spent by the federal government to repel any Mexican who might venture (or any American botanist who might wander) across the border. Commerce is what happens when people try to make a living, and commerce is going to happen across the U.S.-Mexico border whether regulated or not.

Such was my conceptual view, but then something happened that put a human face on it. I met two entrepreneurs, trying a creative way to earn money for their families. “Jesús the Singing Mexican” stood under a tree on the Mexico side of the river and sang folk songs he thought Americans would recognize. He had a donation basket (actually an old plastic bottle) on the American side, and a canoe with which I assume he would slip over to empty it occasionally. His friend Ventura had some trinkets, rocks, and fossils on the ground near the trail. They were labeled in pencil on cardboard or rocks. I was about to walk past them when Ventura came running down to greet me and talk me into buying something. Had he seen any federales, I assume he could quickly have gathered his stuff, called for Jesús to bring the canoe, and retreated to the Mexico side very quickly. While I have no desire for trinkets, I really wanted to reward this entrepreneur, who might have been a Mexican and who had not had any business that day, and it was a very hot day. (Note to Border Patrol: I do not actually know Ventura was a Mexican national.) I bought some items, which did not include drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or firearms (please note, ATF and DEA) but which included a couple of wire sculptures for my wife and daughter. My $20 bill must have been dynamite on his side of the river, assuming he was Mexican. He said he had walked a couple of miles to set up his wares. He said that now he felt like running home. (To protect these two men, I will not mention the exact location.) Ventura was a really nice guy. When he found out I was a botanist, we talked about the trees on the tops of desert mountains. We formed the kind of close relationship that people want to have with their customers.

Of course, I have no proof that these two men were Mexican nationals and that our business transaction was illegal. For aught that I could prove to the contrary, they were Hispanic Americans sneaking into Mexico. But assuming that our activity was illegal actually made it more enjoyable. I have frequently commented in my blogs about the state of abject chaos in the American federal government, especially Congress. (The same may be true in Mexico.) I have no respect at all for our government. The feds could have, had they seen us, self-righteously denounced the illegality of our business—the same feds who cannot get anything done except to waste money. That is, assuming that Ventura and Jesús were actually illegal Mexicans.

There is only a thin line, even thinner than the drought-stricken Rio Grande, between me and Ventura and Jesús; there is a deep gorge between me and Congress. I actually respect Ventura and Jesús.

I suddenly realized that I was alone with them, with a pocketbook and an expensive camera. Of course, if they had taken anything, it would have become an international incident and brought their business to an end. But I never felt uneasy in their presence. I am distinctly uneasy in the presence of the IRS, which has still not given me my tax refund, after over two months since filing, and which admits its own horrible work. (The ousted IRS chief said to Congress on the very day that I met Ventura and Jesús, “We provided horrible customer service.”) I have given up expecting IRS to do anything right. I’ll choose Jesús and Ventura any day.

The last thing Ventura wanted was water. Alas, I had only a mouthful left. I wished I had thought about filling my leaky half-gallon jug at the hotel before I left, then I could have just given it to Ventura—whom I, of course, had not expected to encounter. Jesus (not Jesús) said that if all we have to give is a cup of water, to do so. All I had was cash. If I also had water, what nice symbol of mutual respect it would have been. Technically, it would have been illegal for me to give him that water, even if he had been dying in the desert. All he wanted was to not have to drink the green water in the Rio Grande.

Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government considers people like Jesús and Ventura to be dangerous enemies of the United States. I can just imagine the helicopters descending on “The Singing Mexican.” Or more likely a drone. (Okay, I’m exaggerating.) Federal documents say, “Mexican merchants will be arrested for illegal commercial operations which may result in a find and/or additional incarceration while awaiting adjudication prior to deportation.” For poor Jesús, this would undoubtedly mean a very long time sitting in jail before trial, especially since “the sequester” gives the federales an excuse to keep him locked up and leave his family without income for months.

And guess what. The Feds consider me to be an enemy also. “Items purchased illegally will be considered contraband and seized by officers when encountered.” Of course, I do not actually know whether my purchase was illegal or not.

To all this, the U.S. government gives a really bizarre justification. Why are Jesús and Ventura so dangerous? Because when they walk on the trails they will “crush plants along the river and cause erosion of riverbanks, and an increase in garbage and contaminants along the Rio Grande watershed.” What? The government document almost seems to be saying, “Them dirty Mexicans are contaminating everything, their footsteps will hurt the crabgrass and salt cedars, but it’s just fine with us if Americans pull their canoes and rafts up over the riparian vegetation.” By the way, salt cedars are invasive trees that the government spends a lot of money trying to eradicate, and I did not see any garbage that these two men may have left. Maybe they peed in the salt cedar bushes, which is something that Americans never ever ever do.

What advice do the federales give to Americans? They point out, “Lack of water is a life-threatening emergency in the desert.” (I would not have known this had not the wise and benevolent government pointed this out to me.) So what are you supposed to do if Jesús or Ventura asks for water? Jesus (not Jesús) would say, give him some. The U.S. government says to inform government officials of their location. This command comes not in a general location in the park newspaper but in the specific bullet point about what to do if one of the Mexican nationals asks for water. Of course, the nearest officials are many miles away and cell phone reception is poor. So you are supposed to leave Jesús and Ventura behind and drive off quickly to report them so that friendly federales can swoop down and arrest them, then give them water.

As I report in other blog entries, I had plenty of reason to be disgusted with my government anyway. Reading these federal instructions to park visitors filled me with the last full measure of disgust.

Immigration reform is not going to solve this problem. (I refer to the problem of the federal government, not the problem of Jesús and Ventura.) The problem is that our federal government considers us American citizens, as well as Mexican nationals, to be unworthy of basic dignity.

This assumes, of course, that these men really were Mexican nationals. Note: they were not immigrants, just visitors.

The lines separating us are so little that I cannot resist crossing them. They are certainly too small to see from outer space.

So here’s to “Jesús the Singing Mexican” and to Ventura the trinket vendor and to our common humanity.

Do conservatives really care about the poor?

Conservatives claim to care about the poor, and one of their criticisms of Democrats is that progressive policy undermines the “social safety net.” This is, to say the least, very strange. I have no doubt that conservatives think they care about the poor; few if any actually wish the poor to just go away and die. But they do not care enough to endorse meaningful action.

Consider, first, that many of them refer to progressives as “bleeding heart liberals.” They intend this as a criticism, even though the term refers to the bleeding heart of Jesus. They scorn the kind of concern that Jesus felt. I have written about how Studs Terkel pointed this out.

Second, who can forget what Mitt Romney said during the 2012 presidential campaign, about how the 47 percent of Americans who receive some public assistance (even if it is not their entire income but just supplementary help) see themselves as dependents and victims. He simply dismissed them as being lazy. Of course, the memory of this statement is already fading.

But there is one way in which conservatives really do care about the poor. The poor are, for them, political capital. Republicans believe they can gain political capital by talking about the poor. In this sense, they resemble the antebellum Southerners who used slaves as political capital.

The Southerners before the Civil War did not want their slaves to be free, or to have rights and receive fair wages. But neither did they want to harm their slaves. Slaves were the most expensive part of running a plantation. Prices for slaves ran from about $50 for old men up to almost $1000 for a nubile young female, according to a museum display I saw a couple of years ago. This was big money at the time. The slave-owners would have to be crazy to beat their slaves. Of course, some of them were crazy.

During the Constitutional convention, the delegates from Southern states refused to consider an end to slavery. They did, however, consider two limitations upon it. First, they agreed that the importation of slaves would end in the future. They did not, however, foresee any eventual goal of ending slavery. Second, they insisted that slaves be counted in the population census.

This second point makes it look like the slave-owners considered their slaves to be people rather than property. But this is not true. The only reason the Southerners wanted slaves to be counted in the census was so that their states would have more representatives in Congress. The compromise they reached with Northern delegates was that each slave would count as three-fifths of a person. Slaves were political capital, nothing more.

Southerners also used slavery in their propaganda against the North. They loved to point out that Northerners, and the British as well, condemned slavery while profiting from trade in the goods that slaves produced, especially cotton. Sometimes Southern propaganda went to extreme lengths. A tract written by George Fitzhugh, Slavery Justified, claimed, “We love our slaves!” I think he sincerely meant in the fraternal, not carnal, sense. He pointed out that Northerners could just dismiss their servants, and allow these servants to sink into poverty and disease and death, at any time. In contrast, Southerners were obligated to keep, feed, clothe, and house their slaves. Southern black slaves were treated better than Northern Irish servants: this was Fitzhugh’s message.

Of course, Republicans care more about the poor even than the Southern plantation owners did about the slaves in which/whom they invested so heavily. But the process is the same: Republicans use the poor, as slave-owners did their slaves, mainly for political capital. Their message is that making rich people richer will help the poor, a claim that has been repeatedly disproven.

The Meaning of Life

At one time, about 1985, I thought I had figured out the meaning of life. I thought I had figured out why there was suffering in a world governed by a good and all-powerful God. I eventually wrote an article about it, which was published by the American Scientific Affiliation; you can still find it on their website.

It was not a new idea, although I treated it as such. It was simply that blessings arise out of adversity. What made the idea different from what many people already believe is that I saw many scientific examples of this principle too. For example, a great diversity of species emerged on the Earth after the Cretaceous extinction. The extinction was a massive worldwide adversity, but it allowed the evolution of hundreds of thousands of new species of flowering plants, insects, birds, and mammals. (Obviously I was no longer a creationist by this time.) As I recall, I even found examples of this principle on the molecular level. Try not to laugh until you have finished reading this. Blessed chemical reactions occurred only after the harrowing adversity of having their bonds broken. Okay, now you can laugh. This idea is still sitting out there like a coelacanth stranded in the ocean depths, going nowhere but not actually extinct. The idea of “blessings out of adversity” was too vague to actually be disproved. Like some physicists say of string theory, my theory was not even wrong.

The problem with the idea is that there must be just the right amount of adversity in order for blessings to arise from it. You need just the right amount of adversity in your life to get you up off of your butt and strive for success, but not enough to overwhelm you. And I imagined that this was how God ran the world: he gave us just the right amount of adversity. Actually, this is what the Bible says. But we all know it is not true. At least most of us know it. Mitt Romney does not know it; he thinks that the only reason that 47 percent of Americans are not successful is because they are too damn lazy. But even I knew that many people were overwhelmed by bad luck. I just did not want to admit it. I did not want to admit that it was not T. rex’s fault that it became extinct, no matter how many new species of flowers evolved after his demise.

What I needed to understand, but did not, was what Qoheleth wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes. I have written about this in earlier blog entries, to which I will here direct you if you would like to read more. I needed to understand that the race is not to the swift or riches to the wise, but time and chance happen to them all. Only now can I see that Monty Python was closer to figuring out the meaning of life than I was.

A Word about Bias

We all have bias. We all love bias. We all hate bias. We all love to hate bias. We all hate to love bias. But we do not all have the same amount of it. This is because, while we all begin with the same germ of bias, this germ proliferates in some people and some situations more than in others.

We all want to believe that the ideas to which we have devoted our lives are true. I will use myself as an example. I am a scientist, and I want to believe that the scientific method reveals truth. But suppose that I am wrong. Suppose that it is not, in fact, possible to figure out the truth by observing and measuring the physical world. Suppose that everything we see in the universe really is a delusion created by an evil god who enjoys watching us suffer. There is no evidence for this idea, so I reject it. But suppose there was evidence for it. Suppose that unexpectedly, as unexpectedly as that asteroid came by a few weeks ago, this evil god appeared in the sky and told us that everything in our lives and that we thought we knew about the universe was a trick he was playing on us. I would reject this observation, assuming myself to be deluded for having seen this god in the sky. It would take a lot of evidence to make me change my mind.

We also want to believe that the sources of our money are good. I work in higher education. I want to believe that a college education improves the lives of graduates in almost every way, not the least of which is employability. But suppose that it turns out that college education is worthless—that we Americans would be just as well off working in unskilled jobs for companies owned by China or Singapore or Germany as we would be in creating our own innovations. Of course, there is no evidence for this. But suppose there was. It would take a long time before I would admit it.

Bias, therefore, proliferates where there is money. A professor with a doctoral degree at a small university, earning just a little more than the national median, is less likely to be biased than a petroleum engineer with less education but earning twice as much, when it comes to issues such as global warming. Certainly such a professor is less likely to be biased on this subject than oil company executives or the conservative politicians to whom they give uncounted millions of dollars. The money-stoked intensity of bias in conservative politicians blinds them to even the most obvious truths.

So, if you want to know whom to believe on any particular issue, ask not only what the evidence is, but also follow the money.

The Escape

Happy Easter. I really wish I could believe all the Easter stuff, but I simply cannot. Instead, my departure from religion feels like an exhilarating escape.

I can now look back on my life, freed from the shackles of religion. Of course, I still have religious feelings and am open to a God of Love, but am not bound by such feelings. I choose a life of love not because I feel there is a God threatening me with hell but because I see love as the ultimate good in the physical universe as well as the spiritual one, if such exists.

I do not know if perhaps I inherited a certain brain structure that made me susceptible to parasitic religion. My paternal grandfather Jake was extremely religious, an unofficial holy roller preacher. He was, at heart, a nice man; he loved to plant gardens, and to sing. He even made a homemade record in which he sang The Old Gray Mare. I do not know who played the guitar in that recording, of which I no longer have a copy, but it might have been him. But he was psychologically cruel to his family. Why? Because he thought it his religious obligation to be. When he read that “in the latter days” parents would hate their children and children their parents, he took this as prescriptive rather than descriptive. He thought he had to hate his children. At least this is what my Dad said. But the Bible did not require him to hate his grandchildren, so he was always nice to me and, as seen in old home movies, the other grandkids too. My Dad was an agnostic, without actually ever using that term. He simply hated the way he had seen religion practiced in his family, and had no interest in having me learn any religion. My Mom had no such antipathy to religion, but did not feel any obligation to encourage me into religion either.

But somehow I had a hunger for religion. I did not get it from my parents. And when I saw Garner Ted Armstrong on TV, I became a convert to his religion, which was a hybrid of Christianity and a strange form of Old Testament Identity religion. (He said that the United States was the actual descendants of the tribe of Manasseh.) What attracted me was his appeal to evidence, as strange as this may sound. He encouraged people to read the Bible for themselves, and to consider historical and scientific evidence with their own eyes. Of course, none of us actually did so; when we read the Bible, we saw only what he told us we would see there. I never went to one of the Armstrong churches or colleges. I was simply confused when Garner Ted vanished off on a journey of sex and other vices. As described in the report In Bed with Garner Ted, he was nearly a predator on young female students in his college. I was rescued out of this cult by falling into another: a “Church of Christ” cult that pretended by be strictly literalistic in following the Bible but which had its own set of unique, arbitrary, and unquestionable assumptions about what to believe and how to worship God. It was not until I was in grad school that I escaped from this cult by falling into various other conservative churches. Oh, yeah, I was a creationist too for about a decade of my formative years.

I wonder how my brain is still functional after going through such perversions of reality. At least I wasn’t a Moonie. But I can empathize with people who are drawn into cults. I am trying to be objective, and to not react against all religion as I would against its parasitic forms. My desire is not to attack religion, though I sometimes do so; instead, I am just excited to discover the world outside the boundaries of the religious cults, especially the world of science.

And maybe there is a little bit of good residue of my bad religious experiences. I am more excited about science in general, and evolution in particular, as a result of having been deprived of them for so many years. That is why I am so enthusiastic when I teach or write (see my books listed at my website).

Harmony and Countermelody

In addition to the experiences described in a previous essay, there are two other influences that have shaped my attitude of the world. When I recently recognized them, I was quite surprised, for they seem at first to be minor and irrelevant. They are: harmony and countermelody.

When I was in high school, I was a member of and sang in a fundamentalist church. This church refused to use instrumental music, or special performers, including choirs, because the Bible had not authorized them. This meant that the congregation had to do all the music itself. There were song-leaders (although this is not authorized by a literal interpretation of scripture either), one of whom was I. But it was up to the congregation to provide the harmonies and the countermelodies. The members who were not musically skilled droned along or, at most, parroted the melody. But even in our small congregation there was enough musical talent that there was usually someone to sing alto and bass (I was the only tenor). I learned that filling in the harmony was enjoyable, and was almost as important as carrying the main melody. Furthermore, many of the songs had countermelodies, even solos, for the altos or the basses. The “womenfolk” were particularly enthusiastic about singing the alto solos, since they were forbidden to lend their voices to any other function within the church. Countermelodies were also as enjoyable and almost as important as the main melody. I learned that the main melody sometimes had to just step aside and let the other voices carry the banner.

I also played in the school band. I played baritone horn, which often provided the fundamental notes and sometimes countermelodies. The baritone horn is not one of the heroic instruments of the band. What I learned and loved was the support roles, though I must admit I loved the occasional solos as well.

These seemingly insignificant activities prepared my mind to understand altruism. In order for altruism to function, the leaders have to sometimes step aside and let the other voices carry the banner. This is not merely a way for the leaders to let the followers vent their steam. It actually enriches the experience. Anyone who has sung in a choir knows that the best music has harmony and countermelodies that are obvious to the listener. And in our church, we were the choir. As a result, it is now second nature to me to think in terms of other people offering harmony and countermelody even in situations in which I am in charge. Perhaps as a result of these experiences, altruism resonates with my soul.

Despite the extreme fundamentalism of the church from which I emerged, I believe it was far superior to the megachurches led by televangelists. In these large made-for-TV churches, the evangelist is the center of attention—no matter how much he or she may claim that God is the focus. The attendees may clap their hands but the show is on the stage. The cameras focus on the stage, with an occasional shot out into the audience to show a woman crying passively in response to the power of the message delivered by the God-anointed evangelist. (In addition, since these TV-churches are non-denominational, they pretty much do and believe whatever the evangelist says.) Dare I say that the little church of which I was a member was more democratic than any of the big churches today?

An Inquiring Mind

I have always had an inquiring mind. My Mom told me that, when I was a little kid, I would watch our mechanical clock for many minutes at a time, watching to see if the minute hand moved, and looking at the gears and cogs inside. I did not understand how it worked, but I understood that there was a mechanism that made the clock run. I do not actually remember this myself.

When I was in junior high school, I wanted to understand photosynthesis. I read what I could about it, from the imperfect references that our small school had. I really wanted to understand how it worked, not just have a black-box understanding that sunlight and carbon dioxide went in and sugar and oxygen came out of the process. Little did I suspect that the process was too complex for anyone to understand, even to this day.

I wanted to understand how the entire ecosystem worked. I watched birds and thought about the role of each species in the food webs of nature. I knew that some lived and some died, but I did not fully understand it until I watched a blue jay destroy a robin’s nest right outside my bedroom window. It was a very inefficient destruction, to boot: most of the egg fell on the ground, the jay getting only a beakful or so of nutriment. I watched some pond water with mud in a jar, and saw the tubifex worms wiggling their red selves from out of the mud, absorbing what little oxygen they could get. I was learning that, in the words of the writer Michael Crichton, whom I do not admire very much, life will find a way.

I wanted to understand music. I was not contented just to let music give me pleasure, whether it was classical music or the country music (especially Jimmie Rodgers) that my Dad listened to. I wanted to understand key signatures and time signatures, and how composers created the experience that most people encounter as simply a mystery. I bought or copied orchestral scores. I learned to compose. Had I stayed with it, I could have been the twenty first century equivalent of Johann Ditters von Dittersdorf, no great genius but passably competent. Only later did I realize how Jimmie Rodgers was one of the creators of an unlikely, but splendidly workable, form of music: the blue yodel, which combined country yodeling with black blues. Hybrids don’t always work; they usually end up looking like ugly medieval drawings of chimeras. But the blue yodel worked. That’s what I liked about it.

And I wanted to understand languages. I wanted to understand how Spanish worked, not just how to speak a little of it. Later, in high school and college, I studied Japanese, which is very difficult. But I was drawn by the way the language worked: how it was a hybrid of aboriginal Japanese polysyllabic words and grammar with imported monosyllabic Chinese words and symbols, just as Jimmie Rodgers had blended yodeling and blues.

Finally, at long last, I came to understand religion. No longer do I see it as a revelation out of heaven, communicated to my spirit. I see it as a set of ideas that sometimes facilitates and sometimes parasitizes instincts that we all have. I can look back and see how religion took hold of my mind and made me do “its” bidding. And that is why, in this blog, I do not see religion as a good or bad thing, but as a process that operates within a fascinating world of processes, as much a part of the cosmos as clocks, organisms, music, or languages. I am only happy that (as I will tell you later) I was able to escape from the parasitic form of religion.