My Tribe.

One of the difficulties with being human is that every once in a while the world around you provides you with overwhelming evidence that you too are human, even in the ways that you would prefer you weren't. For me this tends to happen when I realize that my reactions are emotional, irrational, and that I have covered this up by telling myself a nice story that isn't necessarily entirely true.

However, recently I have come to the realization that I am more tribal than I had thought. This is unfortunate since what I consider the most important aspect of civilization is the expansion of the moral circle, or the circle of compassion. This circle is essentially the dividing line between who you consider fully human, and therefore worthy of the same rights, privileges and protections as yourself, and those who aren't fully human and therefore aren't worthy of the same rights, privileges and protections. So, for example, within my circle is my wife and my sister and my mother, but outside of my circle are cows. I think it's absolutely wrong for someone to kill my mother for meat, while I am completely fine with killing and eating cows. On the other hand I think my mother should be allowed to own property, live with maximal freedom and make decisions about the government under which she lives, but I absolutely think we should not give the same rights to cows.

The course of the progress of humanity has been the expansion of this circle, originally from family members (and then probably only some of them) out to a band, then a tribe, then a nation, until there is the view of universal human rights. Many people are serious about expanding this circle beyond the species of homo sapiens sapiens to apes and cetaceans. I think it's a good method of telling how morally modern someone is by seeing where the circle ends. For many people the circle ends with your country, so that it's an enormous crime for Americans to be bombed while at work, but it is OK for residential neighborhoods in the Middle East to be bombed in order to try to prevent further attacks on Americans. Citizenship is actually a legal example of this border between fully human and not.

Some people think that the circle occurs at the edges of your religion, and so that people of other religions are "of the devil" and must be fought and obstructed and stopped. In history it has been very common for an elite of some sort (nobility in medieval aristocracy, philosophically trained in Plato's Republic, racial for much of the history of the USA) to consider themselves as superior to others based on this elite status.

Anyway, I wish that my circle would simply extend to all humans, and I think in an intellectual manner it does. Unfortunately I have found that I have an emotional bond to a group of people to whom I feel that I am a part, that is superior to other groups of people, and to whom I feel an automatic emotional bond that increases my acceptance of them, makes me feel automatically that I want to support them, makes me wish for them to have increased power and influence beyond those of other people. This is my tribe.

My tribe are the scientists. This doesn't just mean those people actually doing science, it also means those who use science, read about science, learn about science, and use rational thinking to make decisions. My tribe thinks that believing something based on faith is something you should be allowed to do because people are human, but it's a really silly method to actually decide the truth about anything, and should be useless at convincing anybody else about a subject. My tribe believes that human beings can do amazing things, and can make the world better. My tribe believes that learning is fun, that creating is fun, that knowing how migratory birds navigate is worthwhile even if it provides nothing useful for humanity.

My tribe contains at least 90% of the Rush fans in the world. My tribe wears a lot of corduroy. My tribe are not hippies, if anything they might tend to fascism because they know they are better and smarter than all the morons in the rest of the world. My tribe has no leader but has icons, like Feynman, Pinker, Dawkins, Einstein, Stewart. My tribe talks a lot. My tribe has a tendency to mock. I believe my tribe has done more good for humanity than all the other tribes combined, and they are the reason why I am hopeful.

Intuition and Decisions.

Over the last couple of years I have talked in this blog about making decisions as my wife and I have been faced with life-changing decisions about where and how to live. During this time I have emphasized rationality and principles in order to make good decisions. I am still fully in the camp of making decisions through the process of rational thought but I want to bring up the other side of the coin, intuition.

To start I must define what I mean by intuition in this case, which is perhaps not quite the dictionary definition. I am defining intuition as thought processes that are not rational. That is that there is not a logical course of thinking that can be followed throughout. Most of our thinking is of this nature, we react emotionally to places, people and things immediately and these reactions come about without a conscious thought process. With everything from looking at art to catching a ball our brains have some method for producing an effect that leads to decisions without us having any idea of how this happens.

To put it more practically, when I think of a cruise there is an immediate emotional reaction in my mind. It is probably different from your reaction, for me I have a feeling of being trapped surrounded by people I don't like. If I think of soccer, or traveling, or chores, emotional results are produced. These are real responses, and in the end they are the most important thing about life. How we feel about our situation is far more important than any other measure of that situation.

So we have the issue here, a tension between a belief in rational decision making and the vital importance of our intuitive emotional responses. This problem is resolved if the intuitive responses are used as a potential measure for outcomes. Our intuition gives us our best internal measure of how we will feel about future situations. If we ask ourselves whether we want to see an action film tonight our immediate emotional response is probably the most valuable tool in determining if that is a good decision.

However, this doesn't mean that intuition is a great tool for making good decisions about complicated subjects. This is because intuition doesn't supply any reference points to you when making a decision. If you just trust your intuition completely on any subject you won't plan for the future, you will avoid hard and unpleasant tasks that might have a good reward, getting up and going to work or school will often be hard. You think about a hut on the beach and it intuitively sounds great, but you don't think about the lack of plumbing in that hut, or whether you will have anyone to talk to, or whether beaches become boring after six months. You think about going for an interview and you think of the awkward questions from strangers, being judged, the strain of new things. You don't think about all the possibilities of meeting a whole set of new people, in a new place, or whether that place will lead to further new places. Intuition just reacts by association.

I think the key is to use intuition, how you feel about something, specifically as information with which to inform a rational decision. This requires one to rationally assess what are the various possibilities in a decision, and even the various components of that decision, and then pay attention to how one feels with regard to each point. Often people either simply just go with their first emotional reaction (I'm not going to go for that job interview because they'll make me feel stupid; I'd love to go abroad to help the poor and be a hero) without considering the alternatives (if I don't go for an interview I'll be stuck here; I'm an accountant and could go help the poor down the street or by sending money) and without getting emotional reactions to all the components of a decision (how would I feel if I got offered the job? do I have to take the job? how much does it matter if they think I'm stupid if my wife thinks I'm smart? or; could I cope without showers? how will I deal with not being fluent in the language? in six months will I feel like a hero or just have a really crappy job?)

I think it rational to understand that the difference between a good decision and a bad decision isn't measured in dollars, or degrees, or in the opinions of others. The difference between a good decision and a bad decision isn't even measured by the final result of the decision. The difference between a good decision and a bad decision is how you felt throughout the path that resulted from the decision in comparison to how you would have felt with a different decision.

I would also say that a good decision can be made that even results in a bad outcome. With decisions you are making predictions about a future that cannot be perfectly known, and when viewing outcomes you are only reviewing your mistakes against other predicted outcomes. In the post I made a little while ago about mistakes I still think that at the time that the decisions were made they were good decisions. All decisions have risks, and sometimes you are betting with the odds in your favor and still lose.

So, my view on making good decisions is that intuition is vital. Angst is not something to be dismissed but something to be studied. It is really important to listen to yourself, to get a really good idea about what it is about a prospective future that makes you nervous, to compare that future with other possible futures. When making these comparisons it is important to imagine both the possible good things in a future but also what might go wrong. In the end what will matter are your intuitions, that is your intuitions rather than the intuitions of others.

In the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the site of the most famous oracle in the ancient world, were inscribed the words, "Know thyself." When you wish to know the future in order to make a decision the best place to start has always been with yourself. Who are you? What makes you happy? What makes you sad? Why do I have these feelings when I think of things? Once you know how you feel about things you can make a rational, sensible decision but you have to know how you feel about all of the possibilities before that can be so.

So, when making a decision listen to yourself but don't stop there. Stop, listen, imagine, think, and don't worry so much.

Chapter 1.1

On the excellent advice of my darling wife I am inserting more chapters in before chapter 2 in order to reduce reader-shock.

It was said by some that Alyami came from the womb singing an ode to childbirth and his mother. Others said that this is ridiculous, no child could know how to sing a song before he had been born. No, they said, Alyami's cries were simply so beautifully toned that the birds wept and flowers bloomed and the sun came out. Whatever the truth of the matter it is certain that from the earliest of ages Alyami was beautiful music.

A dark eyed, olive skinned child, born to doting parents (a miller and his wife) Alyami grew up in the sometime dusty, sometimes lush, sometimes muddy village of Dalheenya at the base of the foothills of the Roof of the World. In the summer the sky would be an infinitely distant, shimmering cyan bowl, blasting the parched land with heat. As a toddler Alyami would wander away from his mother resting in the cool of her hut, across the baked dust of the street into the shade of the huge banyan tree and warble intricate melodies that weaved like the many trunks of the tree. He would run his chubby little hands in the dust and clap them together, delighting in the clouds of dust, his laughter like a thousand chimes in a rustling breeze. When his mother found him each time she would prepare herself to scold him for getting himself so filthy, but he would call, "Mama" with such evident delight that her heart melted and she held him to her heart with utter joy.

When the first rains came, showers and brief storms seemingly out of nothing, the trees and bushes would awake from their torment, reaching towards the offering from the sky. Alyami would cry aloud in triumph and joy for his beloved banyan tree. Each brief pattering of raindrops greeted with its own song. Alyami's mother would carry him at her hip as she went out into the forest for firewood (it was a great sin to cut a living tree down for firewood) or for fruit. The birds and monkeys high up in the trees would call their greetings to Alyami, and he would answer in kind, causing them to scuttle down the branches to see who this fine new fellow might be. Alyami would clap his little chubby hands together and give his tinkling laugh at the sights of the silly creatures, with their heads tilted sideways in curiosity.

When the monsoon came Alyami would sit on the verandah just out of reach of the splashes from the monstrous drops. He would collect a pot, a stool, and perhaps a spoon, and play a percussive symphony to the thrumming, drumming rain, the plink, thwup of the dripping roof, and cascading glory of the thunder. After a while his family just heard everything as music, and the sounds soothed them in their lethargy as they waited the long, lovely, beautifully wasted weeks of the monsoon.

Alyami grew to be a handsome boy, quick witted, with a sly smile and a dreamy air. He was always slightly plump, a rarity in the village and probably because the mothers all couldn't seem to stop themselves from giving him little treats. Oh, but he was a lazy boy, prone to forgetting his chores by staring into the forest, or up into the mountains, his lips moving in silent song, or his hands wandering in the heavy air, pointing out the high points of a melody. Somehow he managed to not get beaten very much for this slackness, for everyone could see that he had been touched by the gods and was not made to toil in the fields.

When he became twelve years old, the time for his childhood to be over and his apprenticeship to begin, the village presented him with a beautifully carved rabab for him to play, and assisted him in the repair of the old hut that stood on the hill just a little above the village that had been used by those who wished to perfect their spirit in meditation towards the end of their days. Here Alyami would rise with the dawn to feel the rush of sunlight and the chorus of the forest, then take a nap. Sometime in the afternoon he would sit on his verandah, plucking the gut strings of his precious rabab and dreaming. Then he would take a nap. As the sun fell into the west he would rise and go into the village to entertain, gossip and flirt.

Alyami would take long, slow walks through the beautiful forest, chattering with his friends in the trees, swimming in the pools, absorbing the intricacies of the droning, humming, buzzing insects. As he became a little older girls of the village would also find themselves on extended walks within the forest, meeting with Alyami as he bathed, but neglecting to mention this to their parents when they returned with blushes and a scant harvest. Mothers started to set off into the forest to catch their mischievous daughters, and also seemed not only to have no success in this at all, but also returned with rosy cheeks and empty hands.

During the next couple of years a round of sweet, dark-eyed babies, with olive skin and musical laughs were born within the village. Some to scandalously unwed maidens who were rapidly married to an available young man of adequate stolidity, but some came surprisingly to the wives of solid, sensible, established farmers. By the age of seventeen the village decided, or at least the council men decided, that it was unfair for their little village to keep this god-given gift of music for just themselves. Alyami was equipped with a fine pair of walking shoes, a solid walking stick, a beautifully embroidered dhoti, and a bag of dried nuts and berries.

With many, many, and again many tearful goodbyes Alyami strapped his beloved rabab to his back, clutched his walking stick and strode up the path up the valley and away from the only place he had ever known.

Gone From The Band

So, I left the band this week. This is therefore the end of the sixth band with which I have been involved. As with most occasions the end of my involvement was largely a result of personal issues.

A band is an interesting thing, a group of possibly disparate people having to work extremely closely together in order to achieve a goal. The risk is that you will look stupid in public, and the gain is that of being part of a team making something beautiful. It gets to be a personal thing, and it's a vast amount of work.

The other thing about a band is the vast amount of work that goes into it in comparison to the stated goal. For example, I attended practice every week for three hours over the course of six months in order that our band could do a mediocre job of fourteen songs, or about 45 minutes of music. I would practice probably half an hour or more a day in between practices. That's a total of something like 200 hours of work for an hour of performance. This is a little high in the long run, but practice is always many times longer than performance in music.

So a band is something that happens in a close, personal environment, whereby the nominal reward is a very small proportion of the work involved. This means that for it to be worthwhile, you have to really like doing it. You have to want to show up to practice, you have to enjoy the people with whom you are playing, and it needs to make you feel better for having played together.

The band that I became a part of had met in church or had been friends with each other since high school. I was an addition to this group, and definitely someone from a different outlook. I am a liberal, atheist guy who has lived in several places in the world, traveled to different countries. These were generally conservative, religious people, who had spent their time in the South and thought this was the best place on Earth. At least this was true from what I could tell. There was a caution to what could be said, I felt I had to censor what I said, and I'm sure that was true in the other direction.

The point that things became difficult was, of course, at a bar with just one of the other members, the singer, and the youngest person involved. I was going to give him a ride home, and so there were just the two of us left. He decided to take this opportunity to really have an intellectual conversation. He explained that he didn't belong to any particular church bu that he was a Truth Seeker. Then he said he didn't buy evolution because no-one had seen an increase in genetic material. I replied that that's what Down's syndrome was, an extra chromosome, and I should have stopped there.

But the conversation continued for an hour or so. He brought up a number of objections, I answered them, he said he would need to see proof to believe it. I was my overbearing self when faced with obstinate idiocy, he was indignant and defensive. I drove him home disappointed at the prevalence of wilful ignorance, that I really couldn't have reasonable conversations about interesting things in Texas. A couple of days later I spent an hour finding about fifteen links that backed up the points I had made and sent them in an e-mail. I thought a Truth Seeker would be able to deal with an uncomfortable conversation and would be interested in information about the truth. I was told that he was proud of himself that I left the bar with all my teeth and bones intact, that if I was ever insulting like that again there would be consequences.

I quit the band. I decided that playing in a band that plays music of which I am not fond was not worth having to put up with physical threats if I don't watch my mouth. The last time I was told to watch my mouth was by my dad when I was a teenager, and he wasn't right either.

So, I wasn't a saint. I wasn't patient, or understanding, or kind. I was irritated by living among idiots and I just said what I thought. I think all of you have seen me saying what I think, and I thank all of you for managing to not threaten to break my teeth.

After I left the band I felt a weight lifted from me, not a great weight, but I felt better as a result, which surprised me.

Rights.

In the United States recently there have been three cases of groups of people doing controversial things. The most noticeable one at the moment is that of a group wishing to build a Community Center near the Ground Zero site in New York City. The group is predominantly Muslim and as a result people are connecting them with the hijackers of 9/11/2001 and the majority of citizens of the USA are against the building of the center. While this position is moronic, the Cordoba Center and Al-Qaeda being identical is like saying Bishop Tutu and P.W. Botha were part of the same ideology because they were both Christians, people are idiots.

Another group, a 50 member church in Gainesville, Florida, ridiculously named the Dove World Outreach Center is planning a "Burn a Qu'ran Day" on 9/11/2010. It should be noted that Gainseville, Fl is about as redneck, hick, and ignorant a place as you can find in the US of A, possibly more frightening than Alabama, but even their Mayor is opposed to this event. However, it has been publicized to such an extent that the Pope has condemned the action, and Afghans have burned the preacher of the church in effigy.

The third group, the Westboro Baptist Church, believes that the deaths of military personnel abroad is a result of God's condemnation of America for tolerating homosexuality and other "filth." As a result they have taken it upon themselves to picket the funerals of servicemen with signs and yelling about this sort of stuff. If you ever want to be really appalled go to their web site, it is truly astonishing.

This blog post is about rights, and I have brought up these three examples in order to talk about rights. In the USA it is without a doubt that all three of these groups have the legal right, protected under the law, to carry out these activities. The freedom to publicly assemble, speak, and practice your religion are all protected under the Constitution of the United States.

The question that clearly springs to mind at this point is whether these activities should happen or not?

I'll start my reply to this question with an outline of what rights are. A right is an ideal, it is not a real thing. You can't touch it, feel it, weigh it. It is a thought, a concept. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." he was talking a bunch of tosh. The very idea of rights are relatively recent. For the vast majority of history, pretty much anywhere in the world, the concept of owning someone else was taken for granted. Owning someone is entirely inconsistent with the concept that everyone has rights. When a husband is beating up his children it seems quite clear that if The Creator has given these children the right to life, liberty and happiness then those rights are useless things without meaning.

Rights are ideals by which a society judges itself, but those rights only matter when they are upheld in practicality through the application of power. The United States was a signatory to the Geneva Convention, has as a founding document the above stated belief in human rights, and through Congress authorized combat in Afghanistan, yet hundreds of men with their inalienable rights have been deprived of liberty and the pursuit of happiness without recourse to trial despite the clear claims of every human rights organization in the world that this is illegal and a violation of rights. When the power in the USA, that of the government and military, decided that certain people did not have rights, then they did not have rights. There are many other examples of such actions. I myself have been illegally stopped and searched in direct contravention of my rights by a sheriff in Michigan, but we both knew that if I kicked up any fuss he was going to beat me up, put me in jail and make up a charge (probably assaulting an officer).

Rights are ideals for a society to live by, but societies don't always live by their ideals. In the above three cases I find one of the proposed activities (the Cordoba Center) to be largely a laudable one, a good thing. The majority of my fellow citizens disagree.
The second activity, that of burning Qu'rans is in itself entirely harmless, it's just burning paper. That a bunch of idiots in Gainseville Fl are cheering themselves up by burning something shouldn't be news. What is upsetting and egregious about the whole thing is that it has been done to upset a billion people around the world. That's what I am against, the sheer rudeness of telling the media about it, and the idiocy of the media to think that the information should be passed on. In the USA I would guess that the split on burning the Qu'ran or not would be close to 50/50, but that's just a guess.
The third activity, that of protesting military funerals is almost universally derided, but has been allowed to stand in a court case.
Should these activities be allowed to happen? In a democratic society should not the majority view be the guide to what should and should not be allowed? Should my opinion actually be the decision for what is right or wrong?

The idea of a right is that it supersedes public opinion. That is that if you have a right to do something, you can do it even if every other person in the country is against it, and even if your government would like to pass a law preventing you from doing it you can still do it.

So, if you believe in the rights under the Constitution then you believe that all of these activities should be allowed to go forward. Now, you are allowed to have an opinion about whether the activities are good activities or bad activities. You are allowed to state your opinion on the matter. But here is the sharp point of the matter. If you believe that your opinion should make any difference at all in whether the activity happens or not, you are against the concept of rights. If you think being offended by the activities should influence whether they happen or not, you are against rights.

This is the hardest thing about tolerance, the hardest thing about having the ideals of freedom. it means that you must support the ability of people to do things you despise to the point that your opinion is irrelevant.

This is very far from an ideal thing, which is the problem with ideals. Any idealism is less complicated than reality. Any right that you can think of will have unpleasant consequences when put into practice, and when faced with these complications. But I think these consequences, the cost of rights, is well worth the fantastic rewards that come from being able to live in a place whereby the mob do not decide what your life will be.

A Gig.

Last Friday my present band and I (The Tomfooligans) played our inaugural gig in the backyard of Dave's (rhythm guitar) house. We had fourteen songs, and we played to perhaps 25 people, and I believe most people had a pretty good time. The most important thing was that Dave, who had never played in a band before, had such an exciting time that he stayed up for hours after even Christina and I had left (somehow I am always the last to leave), the exact same experience I had after my first gig. So, it was a success.

My view on the gig was somewhat different from everybody else's. I had a nice time, I'll do it again, but I wouldn't consider it a magic, life affirming experience. It was a gig, we did OK, there was no embarrassment and I think a number of the people who watched us would turn up again providing there was no cover and they knew someone in the band. So why was this not a great experience for me? Other gigs have certainly been great, and some of them have been of equal or lower quality, some of them have been for small numbers of friends. Some of them have been with the same songs in the same venue as the week before.

I think there are a couple of possibilities for my reaction. The first may well be that right now I am inaccurately describing how I felt. I think I probably had a pretty good time while playing, but the rest of the event was less fun than a bar in Portland. Being nice to granny who has told me that the band is God's will takes some of the joy out of an event for me. Having everyone leave by about eleven doesn't help either. But I think actually playing on stage is still really fun, except when I make mistakes.

The second may well be the role that I have in this band. I play mandolin and sing back-up vocals on some songs. I have no more input on the sound of the band or the songs we play than anyone else. I am not the front man, and what I am playing is harder for me to play than anything previously, it takes up more concentration. I think this means that I am not playing a role for the audience, and pretending to be a musician is much of the fun of being a musician. Doing something harder, that requires more attention, and produces a less direct reward will probably reduce the fun of something.

The final reason is probably that the music is not entirely to my liking, in truth, I find it something of a joke band. There are four other people in the band who want to play something between punk and heavy metal, just with irish tunes. Then there's me, trying to play a folk melody through the song to give it some varnish of respectability. It isn't what I would choose to listen to myself.

The above seems something of a negative post, which is a shame. It's good for me to be in a band, it's good to play gigs. this was a positive event, something that made my life better. And the most important thing about it all is that it gives me the reason, and therefore the motivation, to get better at the mandolin. I still think in five years I should actually be able to play the thing properly.

I'll put up a couple of tunes once I work out how to do that.