Thomas More and Communism, part one

As I explained in an essay on another blog, The world appears to be heading toward a nation and world in which rich people do little work, and poor people are desperate. What can we do to prevent this? The only solution just might be communism.

I do not mean Marxist communism. Marx’s ideas have been demonstrated to be wrong. And both Leninist and Maoist communism failed. One important reason that they failed is that they were not really communism. They were simply oppression. Stalin and Mao lived in luxury. The only thing Marxist about them is that they should have quoted Groucho Marx and said that they would refuse to join any club that would have them as members.

No, the kind of communism that I refer to was described by one of the most famous Catholic scholars of all time: Sir Thomas More (St. Thomas More to you Catholics). You have heard of him. He was the scholar who would not consent to Henry VIII divorcing Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Ann Boleyn. Fat King Harry would not just leave More alone in the silence that he maintained on the subject, but had him beheaded. You can learn about this story by watching the best movie ever made, A Man for All Seasons. The Paul Scofield version is infinitely better than the Charleton Heston version.

Catholics have not generally (except for some Liberation Theologians) been associated with communism. Nor, before Pope Francis, were they likely to criticize rich capitalists. But wait till you hear this.

In his 1516 book Utopia, Thomas More described a fictitious land in which life was perfect, something that More said he wished more than hoped for. This book is where the term “utopia” came from, and it could mean either “good place” or “noplace” depending on which Greek derivation you chose. More meant it both ways. More put his opinions into the mouth of the fictitious Raphael Hythloday, rather than to publish them as his own opinion. That way More could claim that he was simply reporting what this man told him about Utopia and what this man said about England. Below, when I refer to what More said, I mean that he said them through Hythloday.

Utopia was a city in which every man has abundance. More modeled the city of Utopia after the Biblical city foursquare but also after Marco Polo’s Hangzhou, with wide streets, bridges and canals. As in Plato’s utopia, nobody locked their doors. At the time, England had 15-hour workdays, from 5 am to 8 pm, but in More’s Utopia they only worked six hours (this is still more than they worked in Oz). Despite such short workdays, all the necessary work got done because nobody was idle—there were no monks or nobles sitting around and consuming resources while producing nothing of value. Only the essentials were produced, nothing superfluous. The recreation of the Utopian people was learning at home. And there were socially-imposed population limits. If a family had too many kids they had to leave Utopia. Everything was free at the markets since nobody took more than he needed. Hospitals were ample and clean, with isolation wards to prevent contagion. They all ate together in cafeterias, because they loved to eat good food together rather than bad food at home. Even in hospitals, women nursed their own children (unlike B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two). Everyone needed permission to travel, but if a visitor stayed more than a day, he had to work where he was visiting. Nobody had much privacy in More’s Utopia (this sounds like Cuba to me). There was no bank credit, only public credit. Gold had no value to them, unlike iron, air, water, and earth, which are useful. In Utopia, diamonds were for kids to play with. Foreign ambassadors would come wearing a lot of gold, and were mistaken for fools. More pointed out that in England someone with the wits of an ass could rule good people because he had gold. More pointed out that Plato and Francis Bacon also said gold is worthless. Why should anyone admire gold, opined More. Everyone can enjoy the sun and stars for free! Why should anyone admire wool? A sheep once wore it. The counterfeit jewel looks the same as the real one. The Utopians did not wear fancy clothes. With fancy clothes, said More, you “do doubly err,” thinking your clothes are better (which is mere convention) and thinking yourself better for wearing them.

In the next essay, I will continue describing Thomas More’s view of a perfect society, and which might be the only society that can allow the world to avoid massive future crisis.

Does Humankind Belong on Earth?

Happy Earth Day. Do we, as destructive humans, have a right to wish the Earth a happy Earth Day?

Is humankind a legitimate part of the natural world, belonging to the Earth’s ecosystems and ecological communities, or is mankind a diseased scab upon the planet? This question is meaningless, because here we are, like it or not. Meaningless, that is, unless you are God and capable of wiping out life on Earth and starting over.

What follows is one blogger’s review of the movie Noah, starring Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins and other very good performers. I review it primarily as a writer and as a scientist who thinks about Big Questions. My verdict is that it was better than the original. The reason I say this is that the original Flood story (Genesis 6-8), which is a gigantic epic even more worthy of immortality than the Odyssey, addressed issues of major importance, but left some questions unanswered. The movie filled in the missing issues.

The major point of both the original and the movie is that human evil had defiled the Earth, and the human stain needed to be cleansed away. In the original, God recognizes Noah and his family as uniquely virtuous on the entire face of the Earth. In the movie, Noah recognizes his own sinfulness, and concludes that his job, and that of his family, is to facilitate the rescue of the innocent animals, and then to vanish into obscurity after the job is done. This is why, as he saw it, only his eldest son was married, and this son’s wife was barren.

But then Noah’s wife implores Noah’s mystical, magical, and still-living ancestor Methuselah (played by Anthony Hopkins; who else?) to restore Mrs. Shem’s fertility, and he does. Thus, while the Ark is floating on the face of the waters, Mrs. Shem becomes pregnant. Noah decides that, since his duty is to bring the human blight to an end, he must kill the child if the child is a girl (a boy would just grow old and die without issue). So what does he do? Wouldn’t you like to know!

As a result of his decision, Noah concludes that he has failed God. This is why, in the movie (something left totally unexplained in Genesis), Noah goes off to live in a cave and get drunk. But Mrs. Shem convinces him that in fact he made the right, not the wrong, choice. Noah returns and is reconciled to his wife. It is a supremely touching scene. Mrs. Noah was working in the garden, so that human life might continue on Earth. Noah walks up to her, places his hand on hers, and then begins gardening with her. You will not be surprised to hear what I did when I got home from the movie. My wife was out in the garden planting delicate parsley seedlings. I did with her exactly what Noah did with his wife in the movie. Then I gently, oh so gently, watered the seedlings, seedlings so delicate that too much water would plaster them to the sticky ground.

The ecological theme was clear. Sinful humankind had created an industrial civilization (a sticks-and-stones version of it, at any rate) that had made the Earth a barren wasteland. And Noah had to save biodiversity—all of it, not just the species Noah deemed useful.

The problems that creationists leave unexplained in their literalistic interpretation of the Flood story are similarly left unexplained in the movie. But that’s okay, since it is just a story. It is the creationists that turn it into a problem. It is a story that reveals deep truths, and might be considered truer than literalism.

Even the little touches were good. Hopkins, playing Methuselah, had a craving for berries, and was out grubbing for berries in the forest. He finally found one (judging from the leaves, I’d say it was a bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) just as the Flood waters overtook him.

So I invite you to leave doctrinal arguments aside and go see this movie, in which a modern reinterpretation of great fiction addresses some of the most important questions in human history and in the world today.

A Good Friday Gospel

How did you spend your Good Friday? I spent the period between one and three pm listening to Science Friday on public radio. This show had lots of interesting things, except for one segment in which a science writer insisted that, as I interpreted it, it is impossible to say that God does not not not exist. Whatever. But even this person, who is creating something of a pro-religion stir in science communication circles, admitted that the God of western religions is mythological. He was defending Spinoza’s and Einstein’s God, a God that or who makes no difference whatsoever in the daily operation of the world or of anyone’s life.

Meanwhile, millions of Christians were reliving in their minds the story of Jesus dragging his cross through the streets of Jerusalem and then being crucified. This is supposed to be what the gospel is about: a man who was supposed to be the son of God getting killed so that all the sin in the world is potentially atoned for. I say potentially, because these Christians insist that a person must assent to a detailed list of beliefs before the Christians will permit the blood of Christ to actually do any atoning. But if you leave out the part about human Christians anointing themselves as the filter to decide whom God can or cannot save, the story itself is quite beautiful, a story of fallen creatures being redeemed into goodness. Who would not want to believe this?

Jesus was also an articulator of one of the most advanced visions of altruism (which is a recurring them on this evolution blog) in the ancient world.

But actually, to thousands of fundamentalist Christians, the supposed gospel of redemption from sin is quite secondary in importance. So is Jesus’ message of altruism. To the fundamentalists, the most important things to believe are: first, that the United States is God’s Chosen and Holy Nation on the face of the Earth; and second, the most important thing in life is that Jesus wants them to do is to collect assault weapons. If you are a liberal or a Muslim, they do not believe that Jesus wants you to collect assault weapons, however. And certainly, if you are a foreigner, your nation is not God’s Chosen Nation.

You may rightly wonder if I am making this up. But a gripey-looking old man left a flyer on my screen door handle a few days ago announcing an upcoming conference at a Baptist church in Durant, Oklahoma. (I hesitate to name names, but I am getting this information from the flyer.) It is called the Patriots Conference. Its avowed purpose is to reclaim America’s Christian heritage (the beliefs of deists such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams apparently do not count, and the religious neutrality of the constitution must be ignored). One of the speakers is apparently going to talk about how accumulating assault weapons helps to prevent “the threat of tyranny.” There is something called the “Black Robe Regiment” about which nothing is said and apparently all the fundamentalists around here already know about. Their declaration of values includes the “use [of] firearms as central to the preservation of peace and liberty” (emphasis mine). And to make the emphasis on assault weapons absolutely clear, the conference organizers are going to give away a DPMS Panther Oracle ATACS .223 16” BBL. 6-Position Stock to one lucky attendee.

Now, if a Muslim group held such a conference, you can be damned sure that there would be an armed uprising in rural Oklahoma. It would widely be considered an open call for terrorism.

Visibly missing from their declaration of values is any mention of peace, either international or domestic. The death and resurrection of the Prince of Peace, and the reconciliation among people of the world that this supposedly made possible, is simply not mentioned. It appears to me that the main work that Christians believe Jesus did on the cross has no effect whatsoever on this conference or the list of values associated with it. To judge from this conference, Jesus came to Earth so that we could all have assault weapons. That is the rural Oklahoma version of the Easter story. (But their list of values does include a rejection of progressive taxation. What this means is that poor people and the Koch Brothers should pay the same amount of tax.)

I actually wish that I could attend this conference as a sort of sociobiological observer. But I will be out of town at an artistic celebration of blood, violence, murder, and passion. I refer, of course, to the Tulsa Opera production of Carmen.

Anti-Altruists

There are some people—the exact number is hard to determine—who care nothing for their fellow world citizens. Some of them are psychopaths, whose brains make them incapable of empathy, but psychopaths are only part of the problem. There are many others who are anti-altruists even though they may not be clinically psychopathic. One example, and I’m sure you can think of many in your own experience, is the people who left beer bottles and cans on the beach and under the trees at the state park where the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences had its meeting last weekend. They left their litter—some of it dangerous broken glass—not by accident but deliberately. They were sending a message to the rest of us. They wanted to make it perfectly clear that they hate the rest of us and the planet that we share with them.

I’m not talking about careless litterers, of which Oklahoma has a large number. A lot of people put trash in their truck beds and seem totally unaware that this trash can blow out of the truck bed and onto the road. One time, as I drove at full speed down an interstate highway, a plastic door lifted up out of a truck bed and slammed against my car. I wonder if, sometimes, Oklahoma drivers lose furniture out of the backs of their trucks (maybe a couch with Granny still sitting on it). Just yesterday someone lost a truck wheel out of the back of their truck and left it on a busy street. Instead I refer to deliberate litterers. Deliberate litterers are on a par with chimpanzees flinging their shit at people. They are worse than if they were children who never grow up.

What do we do about such people? There is nothing we can do. Laws do not stop them. They will not listen to any appeals to reason much less empathy. All we can do is to tolerate them. All we can do is to clean up after them and hope they don’t shoot us. Empathy is one of the greatest capacities that has evolved in the human species, and we must simply accept that there is a margin of losers who do not possess this most important human trait. We are accustomed to thinking of mutations such as trisomy 21 as a deleterious mutation. But Down’s syndrome people are almost always cheerful and nice. The lack of empathy, socially and perhaps genetically influenced, is a truly bad part of human variation. You may have heard about the psychologist who discovered that he was genetically psychopathic but had grown up training himself to be empathetic. We can only hope that some of the kids who have received anti-altruism in their genes and upbringing may be able to similarly overcome this curse. We continue to offer messages and examples of altruism in the hope that this may, once in a while, occur.

Darwin, Animals, and Religion

I just posted a new Darwin video. In this video, Darwin explains that the monotheistic religions evolved in parts of the world where the largest and most noticeable animals were livestock, which have been bred to be stupid. Understandably, people in these regions saw a vast gulf between humans and animals, and thought of themselves more like gods than like animals. But in regions of the Earth where people encountered disturbingly intelligent primates, especially monkeys and apes, they tended to think of themselves as part of a continuum of animals and have polytheistic religions. I hope you enjoy it. It includes a cameo appearance by the world-famous Spooky the Cat, whose first appearance was in my book Life of Earth, which was published in the United States and in Taiwan.

Elmer Gantry

Last weekend I saw the Tulsa Opera’s production of Elmer Gantry, based upon the famous novel by Sinclair Lewis. I read the novel decades ago, so my memory may not be clear. I have a copy of it in front of me, but not enough time to reread it. I also saw the classic Burt Lancaster movie decades ago.

The primary message of the novel is that religion is just a way of getting money from gullible people. (Lewis modeled Gantry after Billy Sunday who, despite the image created by Lewis, was apparently a sincere man, and who did not drink and dally.) Gantry’s principal launch to success in the opera was the generous support of local businessmen, who saw religion as a good source of black ink.

But the opera changes this message ever so slightly. The opera, as the novel, begins with Elmer Gantry (star football player for a Bible college in Missouri) drunk in a bar, in the company of his more level-headed roomie Jim Lefferts. Well, that’s the name in the novel. The opera changed it to Frank something. And changed the character. In the opera, Frank became a preacher, just like Elmer, only he was sincere. There is a long scene in the opera in which Reverend Frank struggles, with intense sincerity, with the fact that he cannot force himself to have the simple faith that his parishioners have. He sits alone at a piano, picking out the tune of “Take it to the Lord in prayer,” with harmony that starts falling apart. If there was such a scene in the novel, I cannot relocate it now. In a move that Sinclair Lewis—in his quest to prove that everyone who disagreed with him was evil—would presumably have never made, the opera presents an honest clergyman. Only he is an agnostic clergyman.

The opera also presents other religious figures as sincere, although deluded. First, consider the evil ones. The president of the Bible college, Quarles (changed in the opera to Baines), was deluded enough to overlook the obvious insincerity of Gantry in order to get him to become a preacher. In both the book and opera, Gantry’s arch-enemy is Eddie Fislinger, a sincere zealot. In the movie, Gantry is framed when he sincerely tries to help the prostitute Juanita with whom he had previously interacted; but in the opera, the bait is none other than Lulu Baines, the daughter of the college president and the wife of Eddie Fislinger. Baines and Fislinger and their women were sincerely religious, but blind to the fact that the ruse they designed to entrap Gantry (in the opera, Fislinger offering his wife as sexual bait to Gantry) was if anything more evil than anything Gantry did. The opera’s Lulu was so primly innocent; or was she more sinful than Juanita?

Second, consider other sincere but deluded religious figure, the evangelist Sharon Falconer, whom Lewis modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson. This character apparently believed herself chosen by God to spread the gospel of love. In the opera, Falconer finally gives in to the amorous advances of Gantry; but she remains sincere to the end about her vocation. The famous climax scene is when the tabernacle catches fire and everybody dies except Elmer Gantry. Sharon Falconer has the chance to flee with Gantry, but chooses to die with her parishioners.

In the movie, Gantry had been an insurance salesman before getting into the religion business, and he went back to selling insurance at the end. But in the opera, Gantry goes off to join an Eastern mystic and, we presume, to eventually turn faux Buddhism into a money-making venture. So the opera presents other religions, not just fundamentalist Christianity, as ways of making money. The novel, in contrast, ends with Gantry continuing to preach about morality from his pulpit, even while ogling the choir girls.

The opera did a good job of focusing on many important ideas. It had a great dramatic structure too: Act One ended with Eddie Fislinger’s rage and his vow to take revenge against Gantry, the perfect way to keep the audience in anticipation of Act Two. There were running gags, also: the sermon topic of “What is love?” kept resurfacing, much to the amusement of the audience; and Fislinger’s anger at the end of Act One took the form of writing a sermon about “What is rage?”

But the impression I came away with was that this was an opera I should have liked. It did everything right. But the music, dramatic at times, just seemed chaotic most of the time. And when it was over I was glad to leave; in the parking garage, where voices boom, I sang operatically and atonally, “What was I think—ing? To come to this opera?” The echoes gave me a feeling of relief. The climax fire scene could have had flames projected on the back screen but instead there were big red mounds that did not look like fire but rather like tubeworms along a deep sea volcanic fault.

During the intermission, I had a book to occupy me: Lame Deer Speaks, the biography of a Lakota medicine man, published in the 1970s. I read the part about how some diseases were caused by gophers shooting porcupine quills and blades of grass into people, and medicine men would cure the people by sucking the quills and blades out of them. I have seen documentaries of this practice, in which the medicine men sneak quills and grass blades in their hands and pretend to suck them out. It would appear that much of Native American religion is also psychological manipulation. But there is a difference. Lame Deer said that the medicine men got lots of gifts in return for their healing, but then they gave these things away, and continued to live in shacks. They were psychologically manipulating their people, but not to accumulate wealth. One could say that they were knowingly purveying placebos. But placebos sometimes work, so long as the patient does not know that they are placebos.

From this juxtaposition, I began to think that even if religion is a placebo, it can do some good. It is just that in many cases preachers use the placebo as a way of getting your money and controlling you. Caution advised.

The Ordeal of the Native Americans

I recently re-read Thomas Fall’s 1971 novel The Ordeal of Running Standing. As far as I can tell, it is the only novel Thomas Fall ever wrote, and it is unavailable in its original form. University of Oklahoma Press reissued it, with a new foreword, in 1993, and this edition is still available for purchase. I consider it to be one of the best novels I have read. As a Native American, I have a personal interest in this type of literature.

It begins on Indian reservation lands in western Oklahoma in the late nineteenth century, where numerous tribes with mutually incomprehensible languages have been thrown together. They have been demoralized by conquest, yearn for the glory days before the white man, and end up accomplishing just about nothing. The only way out seemed to be the Jesus Road: young Indians (such as the incipient lovers Running Standing, a Kiowa renamed Joe Standing, and Crosses-the-River, a Cheyenne renamed Sara Cross) go off to boarding school to become white.

And doesn’t Joe Standing become white! The oil tycoons are interested in hiring him. He does not realize it, but what they want him to do is to go back to Oklahoma and convince his tribe (and his wife Sara’s tribe) to sign the oil rights to them. Now why would Joe Standing want to do this? Because he thought he had figured out a way in which he could trick the whites at their own game, and end up controlling the oil companies in order to benefit, not exploit, the Oklahoma tribes. Of course, they have tricked him, something he learns only after he has used his good graces to steal his people’s land.

He wanted to be white in order to be Indian, and it didn’t work. This was his ordeal. After becoming a white Indian, he tried to reclaim his heritage, and discovered that he didn’t know the first thing about living in the woods, much less about meditating in them.

It is a beautifully-written book, with just enough romance to make us really care about the characters. The Indians aren’t all good nor are the whites all bad.

The climax begins when Joe accidentally kills one of the oil company representatives. A marshal convinces Joe to turn himself in for manslaughter, and when he does, the marshal decides instead to trap, torture, and kill him. This is when Joe realizes that almost all white people—except a neighborly white farmer’s family, and a white doctor—are vicious liars who have no concept of honor. This is when Joe has the opportunity to attack the president of the oil company, who happens to be in town, in a very dramatic and very Indian manner, just before his own death dance.

About the only way that Native peoples can have any sense of release in response to the overwhelming injustice done to them (to us) is to read things like this novel and fantasize about revenge. And part of the total conquest of Native peoples has been the internal conquest by what Fall calls the Jesus Road. By and large, Christianity over the years (in Oklahoma) has taught that God intended the white men to bring civilization to the childlike Indians. Some grade school teachers still take this approach. One of them, who became an Oklahoma state representative, was proud of teaching history the old-fashioned way, without this liberal hogwash of Native rights. She undoubtedly would not approve of the murder of Indians. But that is what happened during the Manifest Destiny of white conquest. This teacher’s creationism was inseparable from her belief in benign white supremacy.

I will close with some quotes. Joe was explaining the White Way to Sara. “The white way of life was a simple but well-made pattern…wherein rich and powerful people controlled the government by putting their own people into the law-making bodies. ‘And they use the Jesus Road as a smoke screen to hide it all from the common people. Haven’t you ever wondered why rich white men give so much money to the churches? We don’t need an Indian state, Sara. We need an Indian business. Business powerful enough to control politics. That’s what the white way of life is all about. That’s civilization…There’s a way. If we take a leaf from the white man’s book. His real book, and not the one with gold edges that he reads in church.’”