A strategy for human goals

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Human goals

A Strategy for Human Ideals and Goals

We seek to be fully functioning human beings who respect all life and search for ways to help all beings find and fulfill their potentials. We recognize that we live within a world of natural struggles between all creatures who strive to achieve their personal survival, health, freedom of action, and the possibility of their forming a family for themselves. We also realize that we humans are presently the dominant life force here on Earth and because we are conscious of the powers we have, we are responsible for the health and well-being of a self-sustaining living planet. We seek to be stewards of a healthy world and not destroyers of it by our overconsumption of the Earth’s natural resources.

We seek to understand how the world works so we may live in greater compliance with what it offers to us for our well-being and we choose to avoid ideas that are not founded in the reality of the natural world because false ideas will bring more difficulties than help to our lives.

We choose to accept our lives as being part of the natural order of the Universe and that we are only a tiny part of the whole, but we as individuals and as humans are infinitely important to one another while we exist. Until modern humans existed, life was guided by nature selecting for reproduction those beings that best fitted the local environment. But, with modern genetic manipulation techniques now available, we must take responsibility for guiding the future of life forms. We can choose to create an environment that will be kind to all of its beings including our future human beings.

Our ethical values naturally expand from our own needs, to those of our family, our community, our humanity, and to the whole living system here on Earth. Each living thing is an important part of the whole interactive and dynamically balanced system,  in which when even the tiniest thing is changed the whole system is changed, in a tiny way, in response.

Our lives become more meaningful when we can find personal ways to interact helpfully with other people and living things. We all have talents which we use to expose the wonders around us and those new visions of reality make each of our worlds more vivid and exciting. Our total human society is brimming with meaningful discoveries and talking with a person from a totally different culture can be a joyful revelation of new views of old things.

We can be careful when relating with children, and adults too, to make sure they are not exposed to dangerous and painful ideas that distort their lives. People who have been injured by other people’s destructive behavior tend to spread those injuries to others around them. However, we can choose to be kind and helpful to other people at every encounter. Sometimes it is impossible to be helpful in a given situation and the best action is to quietly walk away and find someplace where we can be kind and helpful.

Being kind to others becomes a habit and it returns to the person because then they become kinder to themselves. Unfortunately, the people who treat others badly each live inside a person who treats themselves badly too and they can not help but feel miserable. Being kind to others teaches a person to be kind to themselves.

When a person works to benefit all society, then all society benefits and the doer of the good works has the satisfaction of knowing they are being a helpful person on a grand scale. It may be difficult to know what the best thing to do is in a given situation, but it is always clear what a hurtful action is and it is easily avoided by choosing to be kind.

We can choose to make the world a better place by choosing to do kind and helpful acts for other people and for the whole world.

 

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How much stuff do I really need?

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amatorizing of storage cost, Storage of stuff., Too much stuff

I am a modern American man. I can’t help it. I was born here, I grew up here, I worked some here, I spent what money that came my way here. What can I say? I am one of the most fortunate of all one-hundred billion humans who have ever lived because I just happened to live in a place where the public laws were reasonable and usually respected. The economy was stable and almost always growing at a noticeable clip, and I witnessed the technology go from horse-drawn equipment on our farm in the 1930s to driving a new sports car in the 50s, to flying jets for the USAF in 1960. Then having the luck to move to and live in Berkeley, California, for fifty years. For me, all of those things were a welcome part of a civilization I was naturally attuned to and I enjoyed it.

But now in many ways, my life has been cluttered with stuff. I don’t feel any particular need for more books, even though I read a lot. I certainly don’t need a newer car even though my current newer one is sixteen years old. A new car smells nice and might be a bit more comfortable, but my current old car will probably outlast the fuel supply the world will produce and it will outlast me. A nice new car would be more of a disadvantage than an advantage for me, so why bother? It would be a squandering of resources; it would be moving past the point of marginal utility into negative utility. It would cost more than it would be worth!

The books are a bit different. They do have an ongoing utility for me and I do like having them looking at me as I look at them. They are like old friends whom I can turn to occasionally and continue a conversation we had long ago. They do take up space, however, and they do form stacks near the places where I read.

Clothing I already have a closet full of, but of course, they are all old. I have barely bought anything wearable for years. As luck would have it, last month in a free box there were some professional-level kneepads which I unexpectedly picked up and have used almost every day. I have been making my house fire-resistant and it has required a lot of being on my knees sawing at stumps and roots. 

This post was intended as examples of trying to find a balance of utility of everyday things. In a world of abundance, where many people are discarding still useful things, it becomes easy to live a second-hand existence, and the balance point for stuff becomes distorted and limited by storage space more than by retail cost of the items themselves.

An item is useful only if it has a use, but how do we balance the amortizing of storage cost to a possible future use? Space … the final frontier.

Tao Te Ching versus Quadrivium

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DESIGNA, Fire prevention, QUADRIVIUM, SCIENCIA, Tao Te Ching, Wooden books

This wasn’t intentionally planned but I happen to be reading John Minford’s translation of the Chinese classic, Tao Te Ching, and the Classical education Quadrivium at the same time. They were both a major part of the education system of their respective countries in the year 400 BCE, and each of these cultures has had a major impact on the ancient world and even today’s world.

I am more familiar with the Tao Te Ching because I got deep into that worldview back in the late 1960s and 70s. Because of that previous involvement, I found numerous quibbles with this new rendition, but because of his frequent cross-referencing with other translations it is a pleasure to read. It gives a wider view than any given individual’s interpretation. They all got it wrong of course, but every reader would agree and have to say that. It is a spacious book.

The Quadrivium is almost totally new to me except for the fact that I just finished a Wooden books parallel publication, Designa. I so liked Designa that I immediately got Sciencia and Quadrivium. These are challenging books to read because you don’t really read them, you must study them. They are loaded with information that you sort of know already, but don’t. They are the background of seemingly everything we think and do but we have forgotten their roots. I am presently on a quest to regain my Western roots. From my DNA through 23andme, I discovered that I am 100% North European ancestry, yes, including the 4% Neanderthal, and 1% Finnish(?). And yet, even though I read a lot, I have lost my roots and it’s time to catch up. You might consider it too, but it is a challenge.

Aside from my reading, etc. I worked almost two hours on removing some Oregon Grape plants that have been growing under the eaves of the front of my house. They were full-grown when I moved into this house eight years ago and I got along with them just fine until my neighbors started firing off rockets on the 4th of July. I got worried about a forest fire and started removing flammable materials from around my house two years ago, but after the Paradise, California, fire eight weeks ago I got even more concerned. That city looks a lot like where I live. In a forest. It burned! Bend is in such a similar situation I have been stripping my property down to bare dirt near my house. The flammable yard will be replaced with decorative rock and other nonflammables come this spring.

It was a day of morning conversation with friends, walks with Debbie, being an amateur lumberjack, reading and now blogging.

I annoy myself with recognizing an unrecognized fault.

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My human faults, Violation of speed laws

Today I discovered on rereading yesterday’s post that I was accusing some fine human beings of the fault of uppitiness. It read …

“In that section, we discover that people who get active in a special kind of moral cleansing and moral superiority are ultimately bad for humanity. There forms a strange reaction from these people who pursue a moral high ground of ethical foods and ethical behavior. You must toe their line of rectitude or suffer their judgments, or those righteous people will project feelings of moral transgressions upon you.”

I may be accusing those ethical people of something that I also do, but my fault isn’t being righteous about food but about really bad driving habits of people seen here in Bend. Perhaps it is an overly broad interpretation of the ethical behavior expected in the Ten Commandments, but Deuteronomy 5:21 says: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife; and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, his male servant, his female servant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s,” and that coveting seems similar to expecting other people to share the road and exhibit cooperative driving habits, and obey the clearly posted public driving laws. It’s a stretch!

I actually bought a dash cam for my car so I can record people running STOP signs at 20 mph, and driving past SPEED LIMIT 20 MPH signs at 45 MPH and not even slowing a tiny bit. And there is a surprisingly high percentage of people driving with only one headlight. Last night an approaching car had both its driver side headlight and the little driver side light burned out also. It was dark and the part of his car that passed nearest me was invisible until the last moment. Fortunately, they were cautious enough to be driving on their side of the yellow line.

Is it a personality fault of mine to be concerned about the majority of people I encounter violating the simplest of public laws?

Why You Eat What You Eat – Rachel Herz

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Book review Rachel Herz, Rachel Herz, Why You Eat What You Eat

Why You Eat What You Eat by Rachel Herz

This book is a wonderful source of facts about what people eat, and why. It is well researched, sourced, and written. Food is more than a substance we eat with our mouths, it is also an emotional connection to our family, our culture and our whole world. It is also a spiritual connection to those things and our own soul too. In short – food is life. It’s my life. It’s your life. Without food we don’t exist for very long. Food is important!

One of the important things about food for restaurant owners is that it is about the feelings the customers have while they are in their restaurant. This book has a multitude of thoughts on the feelings associated with the infinity of variations of what food can be and become. Many of these go back to Charles Spence, a gastronomic guru whom I blogged about a year ago in Gastrophysics – The New Science of Eating. That book influenced the way I eat because it made more aware of the fact that I am a dabbler, a little of this, a little of that, with quite a few different items on the plate at one time. I like to have lots of variation in the flavors, the odors, the smoothness, the crunchiness, the weird patterns, and colors of my food. Once I became aware of my natural inclinations I was able to exploit them and help to enrich my particular lust for life.

One curious “scientific” discovery that I have felt but don’t remember ever verbalizing is that people who are involved with something that requires their emotional and moral effort become short-tempered with other people who fail to make those same efforts. That concept is discussed on page 278-81 under the sub-title “Green and Mean.” In that section, we discover that people who get active in a special kind of moral cleansing and moral superiority are ultimately bad for humanity. There forms a strange reaction from these people who pursue a moral high ground of ethical foods and ethical behavior. You must toe their line of rectitude or suffer their judgments, or those righteous people will project feelings of moral transgressions upon you.

There is a moral undertone to this book that is covered beautifully with what feels like underpopulated small scientific studies.

What is the best behavior?

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John Shelby Spong, Love frugally., What is best?, What is the best behavior?

One of the basic ideas of the Wallace/Darwin theory of evolution is that the members of a species that fit the environment best are the ones that survive best and reproduce the most successfully. Before that selection can be made means the species has survived, or it wouldn’t have individuals available to reproduce. Because the environment constantly changes means no members are ideally adapted. Species that have survived have thus developed behaviors and genetic actions that include adaptability as a component of their being. 

That general statement applies to humans as a species, as social subgroups, and as individuals. With humans, it is the individuals who can perceive the facts of their environment and arrange those mental perceptions accurately as comprehensible ideas that fit the situation. Those who can do that best survive best. That ability requires having ideas but not having overly fixed ideas about the realities that come before them. They have the ability, either genetic or learned to remain flexible at the opening stages of a new problem. Other members of their group who are inclined to lock on to a fixed idea too early in a situation will obscure their exposure to facts of new realities with their preexisting ideas. The problem, for these individuals, becomes a misapplication of their personal resources because their preexisting ideas of what the reality actually is and what needs to be done don’t fit the situation well.

With that in mind, this next statement is a follow-on to my ongoing series of critiques of John Shelby Spong’s book Unbelievable: … Ultimately those individuals survive best who apply their available resources most responsibly and frugally. They give exactly what is needed for the optimal outcome. One characteristic that is observable from afar is that they never squander resources. But that is exactly what Spong recommends in the concluding sentence of his final book, Unbelievable. In this sentence, he states unequivocally – to love wastefully.

I would insist that love is one of a human being’s most precious attributes and it is to be given freely, but it is to be given frugally even to those who are deserving of our love.

When it is easier to say it, it’s easier to think it.

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Big vocabulary give opportunities., Making thinking easier., To say it is to think it.

In a conversation this morning with a new friend M, I was talking about last night’s post about my new easy-to-say numbering system. I was waxing eloquent about when something is easier to say it, it’s easier to think about it.

M brought up an example of that concept that I had never encountered … There were a group of deaf kids in a country where there were no provisions for deaf people of any sort, but there was now an emerging school system where every kid was required to attend. Thus, there came about a classroom full of deaf kids who had no way to communicate. Apparently, sign languages are not taught to many deaf people in the world as there is no sign language in all of the five thousand spoken languages. American Sign Language (ASL) and other sign languages require some understanding of a spoken language. Because the children had been isolated by time and space from other groups of deaf kids they had no way of communicating. However, because there was a group of them they began playing together and developing their own ways of communicating.

As M’s story developed, and I’m reporting only my remembered secondhand hearsay, these kids over a couple of years developed a fairly sophisticated sign language. There was a problem, however, when talking about past and future events and thus the difficulty in planning group actions.  Somehow, after a couple of years, they did invent verbal ways of compressing a lot of gesturing needed to talk about those important things into a coherent system of brief visual symbols.

This report was exciting for me because that is exactly what I am trying to do with my new base t system for writing and saying numbers. To make basic mathematical ideas simple enough and compact enough that a person can remember and put them into a coherent mental assemblage and thus to understand the idea that the other person was attempting to communicate.

When it is easier to say it, it’s easier to think it, and thus we can become more fully human.

[Update 2018/12/15 – My spouse when reading this post suggested a search on Nicaraguan Sign Language. It has links to several more independently created sign languages.]

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece – line 45

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7 Sages of Greece, Giving empowerment, The 7 Sages of Greece

The 7 Sages of Greece mosaic found buried at Pompeii

The 45th suggestion given by the Seven Greek Sages at Delphi was …

“Help by giving empowerment.”

“In the 6th century BCE, the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece carved the 147 suggestions, rendered here in English, in stone stelae at Delphi, Greece, and sent them for display in public places throughout the world known to the Greeks. If a person could speak the Greek language and went to a public square and heard lectures about these stelae, they could learn the alphabet and thus learn to read. That permitted almost all Greek speakers to communicate with one another through time and space.” It was an early form of internet.

Earlier this evening I was engaged in a conversation with a group of eight people who were considering calling themselves Humanists. It was a wide-ranging discussion of soul-searching questions, and challenges to the meaning of words such as: soul, being, meaning, the meaning of life, purpose, purposelessness of life, etc., and our relationship to these ideas.

The word Humanist has some associations of meaning that are not exactly what we were seeking to discover. I suggested that we are all interested in the idea of helping other people and that our core idea appeared to be greater than just respecting humans. It was about being kind to all people including ourselves. It was about being kinder to other people than we are to ourselves. It was giving empowerment to others. It was about helping people to move further along the path of their already self-chosen life trajectory.

By giving our thoughts, actions, and habits to this kind of empowerment of other people we would be creating the habits to help our own selves to grow into a higher state of being. We would, by helping other people to fulfill their deeper needs, learn how to fulfill those same kinds of needs that are our own personal needs. It is easier to see in beings external to ourselves, but who are similar to ourselves, our own needs. By helping them we help ourselves.

I seek to help you along your self-chosen path because it will help me find my way along mine.

What good is religion?

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Discussion of religion, John Shelby Spong, What good is religion?

In an organized book discussion with about sixteen guys who are reviewing John Shelby Spong’s book Unbelievable, the question came up several times, “What good things does your religion give to you?” There were quite a few responses which made good sense because they made the person saying them feel good.

Their church gives meaning to their life because they become part of something much greater than their self. Their religion existed before them and will continue to exist after they die. It gives a stability and meaning to their routines. It gives a whole family a structure and a feeling of unity which helps them focus their family values and thus it stabilizes their relationships to one another. It provides a way to help the greater community that they are immersed within in a more visible way than they could do as individuals. It gives a spiritual link to God through the group’s prayers that feel more meaningful because of the group’s harmonized unity of feeling while saying the prayers. It gives a structured way, in words and actions, to say prayers that bring about the feeling of being in communion with God. It gives plausible reasons for our human existence and for the evils that surround us at times.

In general, the group gave the feeling that they are happy to be alive and are comfortable with being part of the existence of life in the more expansive evolutionary sense. There were expressions of being comfortable with their mortality, and they hope for an afterlife, but even if that doesn’t happen, they are happy with being given the opportunity to have lived as long as they have in the world they are immersed within.

Although I am not a member of this group on Sundays, I do routinely participate in their excellent Monday afternoon book discussions. I generally agreed with what was said but submitted that I feel best about going to the UU church because it gives me a chance to do some good actions that help other people. I quoted John 10:10 “To help them live and live more abundantly.” I shovel snow, and carry rocks, and fill the water bowls for the animals. I did say that I am comfortable being alive and with the matter that constitutes whatever it is that I am and whatever it was before it was the living me. When I think about life in those terms I feel comfortable with being made up of incomprehensible subatomic particles.

Some people may think I am weird, but now I can say, “Of course, I am made up of quarks.”

I stepped forward.

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A spontaneous event, Am I a raconteur?, What do you know for sure?, What don't you know?

I have had the habit for many years of stepping forward when others don’t. It seems to happen when it might be embarrassing because it is taking a chance in public in front of friends. The situation is always one of improvisation on an undefined field of what is to be done. It differs a little from stage improvisation, where anything is acceptable and there are no wrong behaviors. On stage, the other actors in the events are there to help you, and to make you look good. The rule of those fellow improvisers is to respond with a hearty “yes and…” to everything you say and do. You can do no wrong because they are there to pick you up if you break a leg and fall on your face.

In other, perhaps more real life-like situations, the other people there are more motivated by attempts to prove that you are wrong. In those more common scenarios, the common polite phrase is, “Yes, but … ” followed by an attempt to make the way you have just said or done something look wrong, or foolish, or absurd, or even stupid. That is much closer to the environment I spent my fifty adult years in Berkeley coffee shops immersed within. Thus, my training isn’t as an improviser, or a debater, or as a psychiatric confidant, but as a raconteur.

What is a raconteur, you may ask? Usually, it is defined as one who is skilled at telling stories, or when not so skilled, as a bullshitter. In my self-chosen environment of trying to reach a little beyond the undefined but bordered-veil of a conversation, in an attempt to find a deeper meaning in those cloudy places, I lose the positive virtues of the raconteur because I break contact with my interlocutors’ visual imagery and then appear to them to be a bullshitter or worse … crazy.

The more willing I am to step forward past the social veil and into the unknown murkiness of the realm just beyond accepted social customs, the more likely it is that I will lose contact with whoever is there to potentially participate.

There was a call today to an audience of over a hundred people for someone to come forward and be a sub-audience for a little story about to be told that might require some participation. I was near the back wall and furthest from the potential action when it became apparent that no one was willing to step forward. So, I did. While I was walking up the aisle I motioned to people in the audience to join in and a few did. We were asked to sit on the rug at the front of the crowd.

While we were sitting there, the whole audience was asked several difficult questions, like “What do you know for sure?” and there were a few answers, “What don’t you know?” and a few answers. Then, of course, the mike was in front of my mouth and I hadn’t had a chance to think, as had the other members of the audience who had raised their hand.

I had been thinking about something absolute, like a number, and was mentally going over pi. That is 3 point 14. But, I knew that was wrong … only a rough approximation. Did I know that for sure? Not really, but I had been told many years ago that it was an infinite number. What’s the proof? I don’t know. A web search gives pi = 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286 – but what does that mean? It is only an approximation.
So, there I was distracted by the thought of something I simultaneously knew and didn’t know. And, I knew that I knew and didn’t know. My head was slightly turned down when I noticed the mike a few inches in front of my face. I don’t know why I said …

I know that I should treat others better than I treat myself.