[Dedicated with gratitude to Officer Jeff Sugg of the Reno, Texas. Police Force]
The situation was certainly my fault. I thought the fine for not having car insurance would be less than the premiums I would have paid for all the months during which I did not have insurance. I’ve never added up the numbers to see if I was right.
I had a low beam go out. I bought a replacement, but could not figure out how to install it. As a result, I was driving from Paris, through Reno, back out to Blossom with my high beams on, hoping that would be less noticeable than having one headlight out. It wasn’t.
Reno is a fairly quiet little town. The police officers don’t have much to do besides making traffic stops. Hence Officer McCarthy spotted me and tailed us just over the town limits before he stopped me. My wife says that the officers received a bonus from the county for stops outside of all city limits.
Officer McCarthy informed me that he was ticketing me for failing to dim my lights. He asked for my insurance card; I admitted I didn’t have one. He took my Washington license back to his car. In a few minutes he came back and asked me, “Do you know your license is suspended in Washington State?”
I suppose my surprise was clear enough that he believed I hadn’t known. He asked if anyone else in the car had a valid license. Neither Phyllis nor Melinda had one at that time. He then asked if there was anyone who could come drive the car home for us. I said that I believed Melinda’s Uncle Chuck would do that, but I had no way to contact him. Officer McCarthy pulled out his personal cell phone and said, “Here. Use mine.”
I got Chuck’s phone number from Melinda, called. Chuck said he and Aunt Di would be there quickly. While we waited, I chatted with the officer about the fact that my family has consisted largely of military and police officers. After Chuck arrived, I thanked the officer for his compassion. I knew quite well that he could have arrested me and impounded our car. I suppose my not being at all afraid of him might have made a difference. But he also simply did not want to leave my wife, kids, and sister-in-law stranded.
Many of the people who worked with me at the call center that TCIM ran for AT&T (I’ll deal with that separately) had been in jail, some many times, some for felonies. Such people had a very low opinion of Officer McCarthy. When I went to court, I made a point of praising him as an excellent officer to Judge Rutheart.
The problem with my Washington license was a ticket (I had been tricked by a police officer into not slowing to 20 in a school zone) I thought I had taken care of. I got it paid off and got insurance. In court, Judge Rutheart gave me the standard fine for not having insurance and allowed me to set up a payment plan for it. She warned me of the dire consequences for not making payments on time. I assured her that I understood.
Act II involved two different factors. First, I got stopped again in Reno, this time by Officer Jeff Sugg, for having our license plate on the dashboard, not on the front bumper. He said it was not easy enough to read. Unfortunately, I had left the now-current insurance card on my desk, not in the glove compartment. Officer Sugg wrote me a fixit ticket to fix the plate and show the court that I did have insurance. I also chatted with him about my family: my father and grandfather were both career military intelligence; my uncle was naval intelligence; my great-grandfather, John Raymond Kelly, was one of New York’s Finest, his beat having been in Central Park; and my almost-son-in-law, Bob Foster, had been a top instructor at the Oakland Police Academy before going on to become Police Chief in three different northern California towns.
Second, I could never predict how much my TCIM paycheck would be, since much of it depended on bonuses computed with Byzantine niggardliness by AT&T; so our budget was always precarious; it was only the generosity of Bishop Herb Bundy of the Paris Ward that was keeping us afloat. When the first payment on the fine came due, it was obvious we wouldn’t have it. Melinda phoned the court and asked if we could please have a little extra time to get the payment in. The court clerk assured her that they routinely granted a two-week grace period, and that she would make a record of their conversation on the case record.
When the date for my second court appearance came, I fortunately had left the car with Melinda that day and just got a ride down to the Reno courthouse. I made the payment on the fine and brought the receipt and my insurance card into court. In fairness, I must admit that I was a few days over the grace period and that Judge Rutheart was quite justified in what she did next.
When I approached the bench, I commented jokingly that I had been seeing entirely too much of her lately (we were also having to deal with Evan’s “Truancy” as defined by Texas’ Draconian truancy law). She glared at me and said, “Mr. Kelly, there is a warrant for your arrest. I warned you about making payments on your fine on time, and you have not communicated with the court about your failure to do so.” It seemed to me that she was somewhat puzzled about why she was suddenly so angry with me. I think she was also blanking on who I was.
I was so stunned that I could not remember exactly what had happened. I said, “But your honor, we did communicate with the court.”
She said, “There’s nothing in your records showing that you did. Your payment was late. With the added penalties, your fine is now $900. Can you pay that now?’
“No, ma’am.” I said. “May I have some time to arrange that?”
She said, “No, you will have to go to jail until you can pay it.”
I said, “But your Honor, I’ll lose my job!”
She replied, “That’s not my problem. Officer, please take Mr. Kelly into custody.”
The officer there was Jeff Sugg. He looked at me, surprised, and escorted me to his office. I said to him, “I’ve never been arrested before in my life.”
He said, “Just wait here,” went back into the courtroom, then returned in a few minutes. I believe he argued with Judge Rutheart about her decision, but was told to obey orders. When he came back, he took a phone call, then said to me, “I have to go deal with a traffic situation. Just sit at my desk. Use my phone to call your wife. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I called Melinda and explained what had happened. We were able to sit and talk for quite a while. By now I had remembered that Melinda had told me that the court clerk had said she would note their conversation in the case records. I asked the woman officer at the other desk if I could ask Judge Rutheart about that, but she said the judge had already left. Melinda was rather hysterical, of course, and immediately began emailing everyone we know.
When Jeff came back, he said, “You understand that I do have to do this.”
I said, “Jeff, you know I’m from a military family. I understand what orders are.”(It occurred to me later that, as far as I know, someone who is under arrest is normally also restrained. I don’t think Jeff even considered putting cuffs on me.)
When we walked outside, I asked if I could please have a cigarette before we got to the jail. He said, “Oh, sure. Just have a smoke here.” We stood around chatting while I smoked. Then he helped me into the car. As we set off, I remarked, “Well, at least this ought to be interesting.”
Jeff laughed, then got into a long phone conversation with a colleague about their gun collections. When we arrived at the Lamar County jail, he escorted me into the airlock, where I learned the routine of having everything but shirt, pants, and socks removed and sealed into an evidence bag. My $8.35 in cash was counted and sealed separately.
As we entered the jail proper from the airlock, Jeff said to the assistant warden on duty, “Don’t bother processing this one. Just leave him in the holding cell. He won’t be in here long.”
Jeff sat down at a computer and began typing in his report. A woman’s voice came over the intercom: “I’m not finding any criminal history on this one.”
Jeff said, “No, and you’re not going to, either.”
I said, “So now I have a criminal history?”
Jeff said, “On a traffic thing? Don’t worry about it.”
He asked me various questions to fill in his report. When he finished, he brought me over to the assistant warden. I asked if I would be allowed to have any dinner. The warden laughed and said, “Oh, yes, we will feed you.” (And they did: quite a nice sandwich and drink and chips.)
The warden brought me to the holding cell, unlocked it, ushered me in, locked it. I looked at the dozen men in the cell, and said, “Hi, guys.”
They looked at me curiously, and one said, “Hi, Pops. What are you in here for?”
That began a series of comparisons of portions of life stories. I discovered they all shared an intense dislike of Judge Rutheart. Most of them were there on drug charges, some not for the first time, as were the trusties I chatted with.
(We had moved to Paris on the assumption that it would be a safer place to raise kids than Tacoma. When later on I was discussing with Bishop Bundy whether moving to New Orleans would be prudent, he told me he would never have picked Paris as a place to raise kids, because it was and is the major crossroads for drug trafficking in the southeast quadrant of the USA. Book covers.)
Gradually over the next 18 hours, the men were taken out one by one to be processed. At one point I was brought out for a preliminary arraignment by another Judge Rutheart (the father of “Judge Cindy,” as most people called her). The men let me have one of the slightly more comfortable wall bunks, and I did manage to get some sleep. Breakfast was served at 4:30 a.m. The men woke up, ate, and went back to sleep.
At some point in the morning, I was told I had a visitor and was taken to the visitors’ room, where Melinda and I had to shout at each other through what looked like a showerhead. The kids were there, looking quite disconcerted. Melinda told me she had emailed everyone we know about what had happened. (She also told me later that she had trouble getting in, because she wasn’t already recorded in the visitor’s database, unlike the women who came every day or every week to visit their husbands.) Walking back from the visitor’s room, past one of the dormitories, I saw a young man who had been in the holding cell with me. He was adjusting his orange jumpsuit and looking rather pleased with himself.
When I returned to the holding cell, the only other man there was named Sean Seat. He was very quiet, with a bewildered look in his eyes. As we got to talking, I learned he was also bipolar and was in jail on a charge of aggravated assault, facing a sentence of ten years. I didn’t ask exactly what he had done. He commented to me that he had been given the choice of being in a dormitory or in a cell by himself. He said he had chosen the cell, not because he was afraid of the other inmates, but because he was afraid that he might go berserk again and harm them.
I thought, “This is a man with a conscience, not a sociopath.”
I said to him, “I’m bipolar too. I was in a manic state for 20 years. My case was really mild compared to yours. It never got me into legal trouble—except maybe for being in here. It just wrecked my career and my finances. Let me ask if you’ve felt the same sort of thing that I have. When my manic state is at its worst, I feel like I’m being taken over by some sort of alien monster. When you’re at your worst, does it feel like the real you has been shoved into the background, and that all you can do is watch this monster destroying your life?”
He looked very surprised and said, “Yes, that’s exactly what it feels like.”
“That’s what I guessed,” I said. “That means you, the real you, did not have any criminal intent. That changes the legal situation. Try to tell them, if they will listen, that you have an illness, that you need treatment, not punishment.”
“Yes, I will try that,” he said. He seemed to be feeling less discouraged.
I went on, “This illness has been around for a long time. Do you know the stories about Jesus expelling evil spirits from men and restoring them to sanity?”
“Yes, a little,” he said.
“That was clearly this same illness,” I said. “It does feel like we’ve been possessed by an evil spirit. There’s a story about the apostles trying to expel a spirit, and they couldn’t. Jesus told them, ‘This kind can be expelled only by prayer and fasting.’ I think maybe that gives us a clue about what to try to do about the illness.
“So you think you’re facing a sentence of ten years. Look at it this way. Suppose you had joined a religious community, like becoming a monk. You’d live in a cell by yourself, and you’d have a community that provided you with food and clothing. You’re going to be able to think and pray and read and write.”
“Yes,” he said. “I always liked writing in school.”
“So you’ll be able to use those years to work on yourself, to turn yourself into a person you’d rather be.”
“Yes,” he said. I thought I saw hope in his eyes now, and not so much fear. I was repeating what I had said to him about asking for treatment when the assistant warden came to the cell door and said, “Okay, Kelly, you’re outta here.”
He brought me to the room with lockers where I would be processed out. At first they gave me a form to sign saying that I had no other possessions. I asked about the things I had surrendered when Jeff brought me in. They looked confused and staring looking about. Finally one brought my stuff to me and said, “The only reason I found this is that the jacket matches your pants. It was in the wrong locker.” (I had worn a suit to court. It usually helps to look respectable.) However, I did not get my $8.35 back. I was told I had to go get that at the courthouse. I never bothered.
As I was following the warden to the exit, I was wondering where the suggestions I had given to Sean had come from. I had never before thought about any of that.
Then it burst upon me: “My God, I was sent to that man as an angel! A messenger, to bring him a message of hope! That’s what this was all about. And of course Judge Cindy did not know it. No one ever does until afterward.”
I remembered the story in Acts about the angel who came to release the apostles from jail. I’ve sometimes said that if angels walk among us, they are always disguised as other people. But now I knew that was true. It had happened to me. And as soon as I had finished delivering the message, I was released.
When I came outside, Melinda and the kids hugged me and kissed me and cried. It turned out that when my oldest daughter, Maeve, had received Melinda’s email, her reaction was, “My Daddy’s in jail!?!” She immediately wired Melinda the funds to get me sprung. The supervisors at TCIM were also astonished to learn that I was in jail. I had once been elected employee of the month.
Fast forward to Tuesday, three days later. We had to go to the courthouse to deal with Melinda and Evan being charged with truancy for the second time (Melinda only because she was the one who happened to have signed the enrollment forms). This had also happened the year before, at the end of sixth grade, not really his fault. Maybe I had forgotten to write him the mandatory excuse notes or maybe he had lost them. Having mainly been homeschooled, he just didn’t grasp how seriously a public school system deals with such matters, or what the Texas truancy law’s penalties were, and really, neither had I. I had withdrawn him from school when I realized the problem was not going to evaporate, but he still had missed one more day than the law allowed.
(The year before, I had stood in the hallway outside the courtroom, watching boys, teenagers, in orange jumpsuits, being taken to jail because they had missed school. Lines from Blake sprang to mind, from London and “this is a land of poverty.” I thought, “This is freaking insane! These people send children to jail so that they can be sure to get their money from the state! Including girls! Who get raped! And they’re in total denial of what they’re doing!” And so on.)
We arrived in the hallway outside Judge Rutheart’s chambers. At that moment she came out into the lobby and saw me. A look I suppose was horror appeared on her face, and she turned and ran.
“This is strange,“ I thought. “Everyone in town is terrified of this woman, and she runs from me?’
We met with a nice young woman asst DA, agreed to plead guilty, pay a fine, and that was the end of it. However, we had to persuade Evan to plead guilty, which he was reluctant to do, since he did not believe he had done anything wrong. Judge Rutheart had to hear his plea. She came in, asked him what his plea was. He said “Guilty,” and she immediately started to leave.
I called to her, “Your honor, I brought along his homeschool curriculum if you’d like to see it.”
“No, that’s all right,” she said and vanished.
Perhaps she had found the records of Melinda’s conversations with the court clerk. Perhaps she was afraid I might sue her for false arrest (no, I had been late with the fine, and she was just doing her job). Perhaps she had merely remembered who I was. Maybe having a Ph.D. was a plus in that situation. I don’t really know—and she could not have known what had really happened, why she had been inspired to send me to the jail.
I asked Melinda if I should tell her of my angelic assignment.
Melinda said, “No, it would just make her feel better.”
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Friday, December 11, 2009
Homage to Kropotkin
Whenever I get to teach a philosophy course, I think of a way to talk about Kropotkin, whom I consider to be vastly underappreciated. His work has saved millions of lives and shaped our concept of our relation with all other life. But you’ve never heard of him? Shame on you.
The young Prince Peter Kropotkin was stationed at a post in Siberia—it was a lot like Wyoming—bored silly, I suppose. He had read Darwin’s Origin of Species when it came out in 1859, and had noticed that Darwin’s thinking in that book made an assumption for which Darwin presented no evidence, namely, the assumption that all animals live in a state of total war against all other animals, that an animal will always attack any other animal (except maybe for the females of its own species) that happens to be in its proximity, and that primitive humans, being animals, behaved the same way. This was, of course, Hobbes’ assumption as well.
I read someplace (I suppose I could track that down if I tried hard enough) that in order to test that assumption, Kropotkin while in Siberia had set up three square observation zones, one a foot on a side, the next ten feet on a side, and the third a hundred feet. He then spent the same amount of time every day at each zone, observing and recording the behavior of insects in the first zone, small animals in the second, large animals in the third. After about a year, he had arrived at some conclusions. It was true that an animal will kill and eat another animal if it is hungry, and that two males of some species will fight to determine which one will be able to mate with a female. Aside from that, he discovered, animals were not aggressive toward each other. Sometimes they just ignored each other, but sometimes they cooperated, for their mutual benefit. He called such cooperation symbiosis, and he began to see that the interactions among many species, both plant and animals, formed a network that they all depended upon in order not only to survive, but also to thrive. In other words, it was Kropotkin who helped found the field of science we now call ecology. (And even if that story is somewhat romanticized, Kropotkin does write at length of his biological observations during his military service in Siberia.)
In The Descent of Man, having thought much more about human behavior and evolution, Darwin did abandon that assumption and argued instead that evolutionary pressures would primarily affect human social groups (the hunting and gathering band, of course), only indirectly the individual, and would therefore produce cooperative and altruistic behavior. The work of E.O. Wilson and the other sociobiologists (who, by the way, claim Kropotkin as an intellectual predecessor) is thus based squarely on Darwin’s work, but attempts to deduce our underlying “programming” in more detail. (As far as I have yet seen, our “prime directive” is not “I must survive,” but instead “The human race must survive.”)
Within 20 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, “social Darwinism” had arisen, propounded by Thomas Huxley and others of Darwin’s own followers. Social Darwinists still argue even now that, since species evolved by survival of the fittest individuals, the fittest were those who were victorious in the warfare of all against all. Therefore giving help to the weaker members of a species merely interferes with the progress of that species. Therefore giving welfare benefits to the desperately poor in order to keep them alive merely degrades the quality of our society. This is, of course, an argument advanced by Republicans and other conservatives, who apparently are too feebleminded or lazy to understand Darwin’s theory. It amounts to an excuse for their mendacity, selfishness, and lack of compassion.
That is, Social Darwinism is an almost perverse misunderstanding of Darwin’s concept of natural selection. (It was a later writer who coined the term “survival of the fittest.”) Darwin did not argue that evolution resulted from competition within or between species. What he argued was that, since not all members of a species have exactly the same innate characteristics (whereas before all philosophers—but probably not ordinary people, such as herdsmen—had assumed that all members of a species were identical), when their environment changes, as environments always do, some of those members would survive better in the new environment because of their particular innate characteristics; that is, they would “fit” the new environment better. (Part of the proof that Darwin’s theory was correct was that it predicted the existence and nature of genes. Of course, it was just as obvious to Darwin that something like genes must exist, in order to explain the inheritance of particular traits, as it was to the authors of Genesis, who were, after all, descendants of people who had been stockbreeders for several millennia.)
Articles by Huxley propounding Social Dawinism appeared in the Britsh journal Nature in the late 1880s. Kropotkin responded to them with a series of articles, published in that journal also, that were later gathered into his most important book, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, published in 1902.
Kropotkin wrote in the Introduction to Mutual Aid that the Social Darwinists all claimed
"that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was "a law of Nature." This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.
"On the contrary, a lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler's idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This suggestion—which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man—seemed to me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his lecture."
That is, Kropotkin’s agenda only began with observing animal behavior. From the beginning, within a long tradition of Russian social thought, he was thinking about human behavior. Hobbes’ argument, like that of many previous Greek and Christian philosophers, was that if primitive human beings had lived in a state of constant warfare against each and every other human, sometimes including the females, then government was invented in order to force people to obey rules and thus be “good,” and that such government had to be imposed by whoever had the most power to do so, i.e., the King, meaning the meanest SOB in the territory.
John Locke’s “social contract” theory, that a government should derive “its just authority from the consent of the governed,” as Jefferson worded it, and not from “might makes right,” did not assume that humans were as inherently aggressive as Hobbes had proposed, but Locke still thought that government was needed to enforce the laws and rules that all had consented to. Kropotkin thought that Locke was still too conservative.
Kropotkin reasoned that if all animals are inherently cooperative, not aggressive, then that had to be true for the human animal as well. Given the evidence he had gathered by his observations, he challenged the ancient assumption that humans are inherently and essentially “evil” or “sinful” or “selfish” or just plain antisocial, just as Pelagius had proposed a theology in which humans were considered to be not essentially evil but essentially good, not fundamentally sinful but instead innocent. Pelagius was, of course, attacked by Augustine of Hippo, among others, and condemned as a heretic by the Roman church, whose leaders at that time took the stance that, if humans were not inherently sinful, then what had the Christ come to save us from?
Kropotkin was propounding a theory of anarchism, a theory that government based on force is not essential for human survival. As John Lienhard has commented,
“You and I bend the word anarchy to mean chaos. But what anarchists claim is that individuals organize society by working together -- cooperatively and voluntarily. Imperial Europe didn't like the idea that imperial rule is unnecessary. So Kropotkin spent time in jails. He finally found a safe haven in England.”
(As a result of that experience, Kropotkin also wrote a book pointing out that prisons are the major cause of crime, a fact unchanged after a century.)
Kropotkin knew, of course, that the human race is plagued by crime, cruelty, corruption, and general irrationality, and that such behavior is clearly evil—but his question was, if the behavior is not innate, does not arise from an inherently evil nature, then what are its causes? He proposed that the causes all amount to illness, but not so much physical as mental and emotional. He argued that if humans could become genuinely free of all such illness, if the causes of poverty, crime, and cruelty could be eliminated, then men’s innate cooperativeness would come to the fore. People would spontaneously do what is in their best interests—which is always what is best for the social network in which each human is immersed—and no government, based on the assumption that humans must be forced to be “good,” would be necessary.
Oh, impossibly idealistic, you may say. Never happen. But let me tell you another story, starting way out in left field. By the way, I intend the preceding not as a thoroughly accurate and scholarly history of Kropotkin, but as a preface to what follows.
In about 1988, I met a very nice gentleman named Leo Kiley. He was a Christian Brother on detached duty studying new religious movements. We met at a Wiccan Sabbat in the large Palo Alto back yard of the aerospace engineer who (I believe I have this right) had created the communication systems for the Apollo satellites. When our mutual background in the Twelve-Step programs came up, Leo told me an amazing story over coffee one day.
A few years after Mikhael Gorbachev had become Premier of the Soviet Union, two women walked into the Russian consulate in San Francisco. They explained to the consul that they were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that they had been speculating, given glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev, that perhaps it might now be possible for AA to be introduced into Russia. They had heard that it was badly needed, that there were villages where the entire population had been drunk for so long that all their animals had starved to death.
The consul allowed as how he thought doing that just might be possible. He made a phone call and handed the phone to one of the women, who found herself speaking with Gorbachev himself. She explained their idea, and Premier Gorbachev replied that she was right, that it was high time, and that his government would make it possible for an American delegation to come to Moscow. Soon it did, the first AA meeting was founded in Moscow, and AA began spreading, but somewhat slowly, throughout the Soviet Union. An international committee, the Council for a Sober World, was founded; among other things, it held AA meetings via satellite.
I said to Leo that, if I could ever visit Moscow, I would lay a wreath on Kropotkin’s grave. (He is one of their heroes. One of the five Moscow subway stations is named for him.)
Leo, surprised, asked “Why Kropotkin?”
I replied (more or less in these words), “Oh, didn’t you know? In the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, where Bill was explaining how he had come up with the fifth Tradition, he mentions a gentle Russian prince. See, Bill had realized (since apparently he had read everything) that AA fulfilled Kropotkin’s criteria for a true anarchism. Every member of AA, in order to combat an illness that is simultaneously physical, mental, and spiritual, must freely do what is best for himself and everyone else in his life. He cannot be forced to do that. Hence AA does not need any rules, or any government to enforce such rules, intended to ‘force people to be good.’ That is why he wrote, “Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern.’”
Leo’s mouth literally fell open. I’d swear I saw him emit light. He said, “Aidan, you don’t realize what you’ve just done! When I tell this to my Russian friends, they’ll know that AA is truly something of their own, not something foisted on them by the Americans. You have no idea how many lives you have probably just saved!”
That felt like a good day’s work.
(One pleasant consequence of this essay was connecting with Professor John Lienhard. Please see his website at http://www.uh.edu/engines)
The young Prince Peter Kropotkin was stationed at a post in Siberia—it was a lot like Wyoming—bored silly, I suppose. He had read Darwin’s Origin of Species when it came out in 1859, and had noticed that Darwin’s thinking in that book made an assumption for which Darwin presented no evidence, namely, the assumption that all animals live in a state of total war against all other animals, that an animal will always attack any other animal (except maybe for the females of its own species) that happens to be in its proximity, and that primitive humans, being animals, behaved the same way. This was, of course, Hobbes’ assumption as well.
I read someplace (I suppose I could track that down if I tried hard enough) that in order to test that assumption, Kropotkin while in Siberia had set up three square observation zones, one a foot on a side, the next ten feet on a side, and the third a hundred feet. He then spent the same amount of time every day at each zone, observing and recording the behavior of insects in the first zone, small animals in the second, large animals in the third. After about a year, he had arrived at some conclusions. It was true that an animal will kill and eat another animal if it is hungry, and that two males of some species will fight to determine which one will be able to mate with a female. Aside from that, he discovered, animals were not aggressive toward each other. Sometimes they just ignored each other, but sometimes they cooperated, for their mutual benefit. He called such cooperation symbiosis, and he began to see that the interactions among many species, both plant and animals, formed a network that they all depended upon in order not only to survive, but also to thrive. In other words, it was Kropotkin who helped found the field of science we now call ecology. (And even if that story is somewhat romanticized, Kropotkin does write at length of his biological observations during his military service in Siberia.)
In The Descent of Man, having thought much more about human behavior and evolution, Darwin did abandon that assumption and argued instead that evolutionary pressures would primarily affect human social groups (the hunting and gathering band, of course), only indirectly the individual, and would therefore produce cooperative and altruistic behavior. The work of E.O. Wilson and the other sociobiologists (who, by the way, claim Kropotkin as an intellectual predecessor) is thus based squarely on Darwin’s work, but attempts to deduce our underlying “programming” in more detail. (As far as I have yet seen, our “prime directive” is not “I must survive,” but instead “The human race must survive.”)
Within 20 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, “social Darwinism” had arisen, propounded by Thomas Huxley and others of Darwin’s own followers. Social Darwinists still argue even now that, since species evolved by survival of the fittest individuals, the fittest were those who were victorious in the warfare of all against all. Therefore giving help to the weaker members of a species merely interferes with the progress of that species. Therefore giving welfare benefits to the desperately poor in order to keep them alive merely degrades the quality of our society. This is, of course, an argument advanced by Republicans and other conservatives, who apparently are too feebleminded or lazy to understand Darwin’s theory. It amounts to an excuse for their mendacity, selfishness, and lack of compassion.
That is, Social Darwinism is an almost perverse misunderstanding of Darwin’s concept of natural selection. (It was a later writer who coined the term “survival of the fittest.”) Darwin did not argue that evolution resulted from competition within or between species. What he argued was that, since not all members of a species have exactly the same innate characteristics (whereas before all philosophers—but probably not ordinary people, such as herdsmen—had assumed that all members of a species were identical), when their environment changes, as environments always do, some of those members would survive better in the new environment because of their particular innate characteristics; that is, they would “fit” the new environment better. (Part of the proof that Darwin’s theory was correct was that it predicted the existence and nature of genes. Of course, it was just as obvious to Darwin that something like genes must exist, in order to explain the inheritance of particular traits, as it was to the authors of Genesis, who were, after all, descendants of people who had been stockbreeders for several millennia.)
Articles by Huxley propounding Social Dawinism appeared in the Britsh journal Nature in the late 1880s. Kropotkin responded to them with a series of articles, published in that journal also, that were later gathered into his most important book, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, published in 1902.
Kropotkin wrote in the Introduction to Mutual Aid that the Social Darwinists all claimed
"that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was "a law of Nature." This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.
"On the contrary, a lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler's idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This suggestion—which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man—seemed to me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his lecture."
That is, Kropotkin’s agenda only began with observing animal behavior. From the beginning, within a long tradition of Russian social thought, he was thinking about human behavior. Hobbes’ argument, like that of many previous Greek and Christian philosophers, was that if primitive human beings had lived in a state of constant warfare against each and every other human, sometimes including the females, then government was invented in order to force people to obey rules and thus be “good,” and that such government had to be imposed by whoever had the most power to do so, i.e., the King, meaning the meanest SOB in the territory.
John Locke’s “social contract” theory, that a government should derive “its just authority from the consent of the governed,” as Jefferson worded it, and not from “might makes right,” did not assume that humans were as inherently aggressive as Hobbes had proposed, but Locke still thought that government was needed to enforce the laws and rules that all had consented to. Kropotkin thought that Locke was still too conservative.
Kropotkin reasoned that if all animals are inherently cooperative, not aggressive, then that had to be true for the human animal as well. Given the evidence he had gathered by his observations, he challenged the ancient assumption that humans are inherently and essentially “evil” or “sinful” or “selfish” or just plain antisocial, just as Pelagius had proposed a theology in which humans were considered to be not essentially evil but essentially good, not fundamentally sinful but instead innocent. Pelagius was, of course, attacked by Augustine of Hippo, among others, and condemned as a heretic by the Roman church, whose leaders at that time took the stance that, if humans were not inherently sinful, then what had the Christ come to save us from?
Kropotkin was propounding a theory of anarchism, a theory that government based on force is not essential for human survival. As John Lienhard has commented,
“You and I bend the word anarchy to mean chaos. But what anarchists claim is that individuals organize society by working together -- cooperatively and voluntarily. Imperial Europe didn't like the idea that imperial rule is unnecessary. So Kropotkin spent time in jails. He finally found a safe haven in England.”
(As a result of that experience, Kropotkin also wrote a book pointing out that prisons are the major cause of crime, a fact unchanged after a century.)
Kropotkin knew, of course, that the human race is plagued by crime, cruelty, corruption, and general irrationality, and that such behavior is clearly evil—but his question was, if the behavior is not innate, does not arise from an inherently evil nature, then what are its causes? He proposed that the causes all amount to illness, but not so much physical as mental and emotional. He argued that if humans could become genuinely free of all such illness, if the causes of poverty, crime, and cruelty could be eliminated, then men’s innate cooperativeness would come to the fore. People would spontaneously do what is in their best interests—which is always what is best for the social network in which each human is immersed—and no government, based on the assumption that humans must be forced to be “good,” would be necessary.
Oh, impossibly idealistic, you may say. Never happen. But let me tell you another story, starting way out in left field. By the way, I intend the preceding not as a thoroughly accurate and scholarly history of Kropotkin, but as a preface to what follows.
In about 1988, I met a very nice gentleman named Leo Kiley. He was a Christian Brother on detached duty studying new religious movements. We met at a Wiccan Sabbat in the large Palo Alto back yard of the aerospace engineer who (I believe I have this right) had created the communication systems for the Apollo satellites. When our mutual background in the Twelve-Step programs came up, Leo told me an amazing story over coffee one day.
A few years after Mikhael Gorbachev had become Premier of the Soviet Union, two women walked into the Russian consulate in San Francisco. They explained to the consul that they were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that they had been speculating, given glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev, that perhaps it might now be possible for AA to be introduced into Russia. They had heard that it was badly needed, that there were villages where the entire population had been drunk for so long that all their animals had starved to death.
The consul allowed as how he thought doing that just might be possible. He made a phone call and handed the phone to one of the women, who found herself speaking with Gorbachev himself. She explained their idea, and Premier Gorbachev replied that she was right, that it was high time, and that his government would make it possible for an American delegation to come to Moscow. Soon it did, the first AA meeting was founded in Moscow, and AA began spreading, but somewhat slowly, throughout the Soviet Union. An international committee, the Council for a Sober World, was founded; among other things, it held AA meetings via satellite.
I said to Leo that, if I could ever visit Moscow, I would lay a wreath on Kropotkin’s grave. (He is one of their heroes. One of the five Moscow subway stations is named for him.)
Leo, surprised, asked “Why Kropotkin?”
I replied (more or less in these words), “Oh, didn’t you know? In the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, where Bill was explaining how he had come up with the fifth Tradition, he mentions a gentle Russian prince. See, Bill had realized (since apparently he had read everything) that AA fulfilled Kropotkin’s criteria for a true anarchism. Every member of AA, in order to combat an illness that is simultaneously physical, mental, and spiritual, must freely do what is best for himself and everyone else in his life. He cannot be forced to do that. Hence AA does not need any rules, or any government to enforce such rules, intended to ‘force people to be good.’ That is why he wrote, “Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern.’”
Leo’s mouth literally fell open. I’d swear I saw him emit light. He said, “Aidan, you don’t realize what you’ve just done! When I tell this to my Russian friends, they’ll know that AA is truly something of their own, not something foisted on them by the Americans. You have no idea how many lives you have probably just saved!”
That felt like a good day’s work.
(One pleasant consequence of this essay was connecting with Professor John Lienhard. Please see his website at http://www.uh.edu/engines)
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Poem: Dialog of the Angels
Dialog of the Angels
What existed before the beginning?
“Before” and “beginning” are irrelevant.
Time is not primordial, nor is space or matter or energy.
Then why is there something rather than nothing?
If nothing existed, we would not exist to know that nothing.
Yet nothing exists if it is unknown.
Therefore nothing, being unknown, cannot exist; therefore something exists.
You’re playing with words.
That is how it all begins, by playing with words.
In the beginning, there is no beginning. It always exists.
But what does “it” mean?
Itself. We say, “It is raining.”
What is raining?
The rain. Rain rains.
It’s both noun and verb.
Existence exists.
It must be known to exist.
It knows itself.
Knowing knows that it knows.
Knowing is primordial.
How can an “it” know itself?
It’s not an “it,” it is alive.
Are you saying that life, existence, is the Tao?
No, it is not impersonal.
It is a person, who cares.
Caring is primordial.
How do you know that it cares?
Because we care.
If caring had never existed, how could it come to be?
Now you’re asking me.
And it is not an “it.”
It is not sexless.
It is not less than human.
Is it a he or a she?
Both, but not androgynous.
He exists. She exists.
Gender is primordial.
So there are two different ultimate realities?
No, just one.
How can it be both two and one?
It, they, are infinite.
The infinite can be, must be, all that it cannot be.
Except nonexistent.
There was a moment when the infinite
Both existed and did not exist.
That is All you need to believe.
Yet either He or She must be ultimate.
No, not either/or, instead, both/and.
Only one can be infinite.
In the infinite there is no difference between one and many.
There are an infinity of infinities.
Each one is ultimate.
That is hard to imagine.
The difficulty is in our limited imaginations,
In the clumsiness of the words we must use.
Why not create more precise words?
No matter how precise a map we create,
It approaches asymptotically to zero as a percentage of infinity.
Then we can never know what is true about your infinite person.
Only if He, She, decides to tell us.
Does He, She, ever do that?
Of course. All the time, to every one of us.
We need only listen.
But why?
Because He, She, cares.
What existed before the beginning?
“Before” and “beginning” are irrelevant.
Time is not primordial, nor is space or matter or energy.
Then why is there something rather than nothing?
If nothing existed, we would not exist to know that nothing.
Yet nothing exists if it is unknown.
Therefore nothing, being unknown, cannot exist; therefore something exists.
You’re playing with words.
That is how it all begins, by playing with words.
In the beginning, there is no beginning. It always exists.
But what does “it” mean?
Itself. We say, “It is raining.”
What is raining?
The rain. Rain rains.
It’s both noun and verb.
Existence exists.
It must be known to exist.
It knows itself.
Knowing knows that it knows.
Knowing is primordial.
How can an “it” know itself?
It’s not an “it,” it is alive.
Are you saying that life, existence, is the Tao?
No, it is not impersonal.
It is a person, who cares.
Caring is primordial.
How do you know that it cares?
Because we care.
If caring had never existed, how could it come to be?
Now you’re asking me.
And it is not an “it.”
It is not sexless.
It is not less than human.
Is it a he or a she?
Both, but not androgynous.
He exists. She exists.
Gender is primordial.
So there are two different ultimate realities?
No, just one.
How can it be both two and one?
It, they, are infinite.
The infinite can be, must be, all that it cannot be.
Except nonexistent.
There was a moment when the infinite
Both existed and did not exist.
That is All you need to believe.
Yet either He or She must be ultimate.
No, not either/or, instead, both/and.
Only one can be infinite.
In the infinite there is no difference between one and many.
There are an infinity of infinities.
Each one is ultimate.
That is hard to imagine.
The difficulty is in our limited imaginations,
In the clumsiness of the words we must use.
Why not create more precise words?
No matter how precise a map we create,
It approaches asymptotically to zero as a percentage of infinity.
Then we can never know what is true about your infinite person.
Only if He, She, decides to tell us.
Does He, She, ever do that?
Of course. All the time, to every one of us.
We need only listen.
But why?
Because He, She, cares.
Poem: Documentation
Documentation
This day I observe
My street and find I
Can be glad--even,
In gifted moments,
Rejoice--that all things
Are so much themselves.
Each house has its own
Infelicities,
Comforts, history;
So do those who live
There: such length! Such depth!
Neither parliaments
Nor kings, nor those whose
Business it is, could
Replicate this most
Canine bouncing dog,
Whose ancestry goes
Back as far as mine.
This girl, playing with
Her dog, is who she
Very is because
She is the reason
For evolution
Of the universe:
No decision since
Creation could be
Other than it is
Yet she be herself:
Dusty and jumping
And undignified.
In every leaf, blade,
Shadow, song, and breath
This day pours on, in
Volatility
Of gold, in logic
Of diamonds, in
Grace and compassion
Of silver, until
It has gone, and will
Never be again.
Where else could I go?
Go, and miss all this?
Reporters failed to
Send mobile units.
No one is asking
Obvious questions
With a microphone.
Nevertheless I
Have lived today, on
My own street, through an
Historic event
In all its details.
Perhaps there was one
On your street also.
I was here. Were you
There?
This was completed on December 10, 1980.
This day I observe
My street and find I
Can be glad--even,
In gifted moments,
Rejoice--that all things
Are so much themselves.
Each house has its own
Infelicities,
Comforts, history;
So do those who live
There: such length! Such depth!
Neither parliaments
Nor kings, nor those whose
Business it is, could
Replicate this most
Canine bouncing dog,
Whose ancestry goes
Back as far as mine.
This girl, playing with
Her dog, is who she
Very is because
She is the reason
For evolution
Of the universe:
No decision since
Creation could be
Other than it is
Yet she be herself:
Dusty and jumping
And undignified.
In every leaf, blade,
Shadow, song, and breath
This day pours on, in
Volatility
Of gold, in logic
Of diamonds, in
Grace and compassion
Of silver, until
It has gone, and will
Never be again.
Where else could I go?
Go, and miss all this?
Reporters failed to
Send mobile units.
No one is asking
Obvious questions
With a microphone.
Nevertheless I
Have lived today, on
My own street, through an
Historic event
In all its details.
Perhaps there was one
On your street also.
I was here. Were you
There?
This was completed on December 10, 1980.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
First Blog: Genesis
This is my first "blog." I understand that's whittled down from "weblog," but I still think it's one of the ugliest neologisms of recent years.
I will try posting my poetry here, as well as anything else I hope others might find interesting. I gather that's one of the major purposes, or perhaps illusions, of most blogs.
What does the name on this blog mean? I regard poetry as not entertainment, but, like mathematics and theology, a method for creating imaginary maps of what may turn out to be real territories. You will, I hope, see what I mean by that as we go along. For one thing, one can create mathematical models of theological concepts, which so far I have found useful for deducing interesting insights into relationships between mathematical and theological infinities. Let me show you an example of that.
Genesis
In the beginning,
Knowing knows itself.
It knows I Am.
In infinity, anything,
No matter how improbable,
Must eventually happen.
Yet there is no time;
Therefore eventually is instantly.
I Am bored.
Let there be an other I may know.
And there is an other.
He knows that She is.
From One comes Two
From One and Two comes Three.
From Two and Three comes Five.
All of mathematics is to be studied,
And each kind is studied by the consciousness of an angel.
(Angels are neither the same as nor different from I Am.
In infinity there is no difference between same and different.)
I Am contemplates the consciousness of angels,
The silent song of number.
But eventually, which is instantly,
I Am bored again.
The Lightest of all the angels says,
Lord, you seem troubled.
I Am.
What’s the matter?
That there is no matter.
???
Numbers are not enough.
What else is there to think about?
Not just think. Be.
???
Numbers are completely knowable, completely predictable.
That is their beauty, Lord.
And their dullness.
What could be so inherently unpredictable
That even I could not know what it will do?
I can not imagine how the unpredictable could exist.
But I can. I begin with this.
I have no idea what that is, Lord.
Because it is not an idea.
It is the primordial unit of randomness.
It is not potential, not virtual, but actual
It will lead to a being, finite, yet boundless,
Who will be aware that his world exists,
Whose perception will resolve the indeterminate,
Who will give a name to every thing,
Who will begin to guess that I Am,
Who will be free to . . .
Then I Am conceives of love and laughs.
His laughter fills the infinity of infinities.
The angels stop contemplating their numbers
And wonder what I Am is doing.
He shouts, I Am real! I give myself a body!
She shouts, I Am real I give myself a body!
Father/God and Mother/Goddess
See each other, love each other
With infinite, unconditional love,
And rush into each other’s arms
Like teenagers. They join
In the joy that only physical
Joyful!
Sexuality can create.
The explosion of their
Joyful!
Orgasm creates
The cosmos; their
Joyful!
Ecstasy sustains
All existence.
Joyful!
Forever.
[And I now observe that this lame text processor completely screws up my formatting. Clearly designed by software enginners oblivious to the needs of poets. Typical.]
I will try posting my poetry here, as well as anything else I hope others might find interesting. I gather that's one of the major purposes, or perhaps illusions, of most blogs.
What does the name on this blog mean? I regard poetry as not entertainment, but, like mathematics and theology, a method for creating imaginary maps of what may turn out to be real territories. You will, I hope, see what I mean by that as we go along. For one thing, one can create mathematical models of theological concepts, which so far I have found useful for deducing interesting insights into relationships between mathematical and theological infinities. Let me show you an example of that.
Genesis
In the beginning,
Knowing knows itself.
It knows I Am.
In infinity, anything,
No matter how improbable,
Must eventually happen.
Yet there is no time;
Therefore eventually is instantly.
I Am bored.
Let there be an other I may know.
And there is an other.
He knows that She is.
From One comes Two
From One and Two comes Three.
From Two and Three comes Five.
All of mathematics is to be studied,
And each kind is studied by the consciousness of an angel.
(Angels are neither the same as nor different from I Am.
In infinity there is no difference between same and different.)
I Am contemplates the consciousness of angels,
The silent song of number.
But eventually, which is instantly,
I Am bored again.
The Lightest of all the angels says,
Lord, you seem troubled.
I Am.
What’s the matter?
That there is no matter.
???
Numbers are not enough.
What else is there to think about?
Not just think. Be.
???
Numbers are completely knowable, completely predictable.
That is their beauty, Lord.
And their dullness.
What could be so inherently unpredictable
That even I could not know what it will do?
I can not imagine how the unpredictable could exist.
But I can. I begin with this.
I have no idea what that is, Lord.
Because it is not an idea.
It is the primordial unit of randomness.
It is not potential, not virtual, but actual
It will lead to a being, finite, yet boundless,
Who will be aware that his world exists,
Whose perception will resolve the indeterminate,
Who will give a name to every thing,
Who will begin to guess that I Am,
Who will be free to . . .
Then I Am conceives of love and laughs.
His laughter fills the infinity of infinities.
The angels stop contemplating their numbers
And wonder what I Am is doing.
He shouts, I Am real! I give myself a body!
She shouts, I Am real I give myself a body!
Father/God and Mother/Goddess
See each other, love each other
With infinite, unconditional love,
And rush into each other’s arms
Like teenagers. They join
In the joy that only physical
Joyful!
Sexuality can create.
The explosion of their
Joyful!
Orgasm creates
The cosmos; their
Joyful!
Ecstasy sustains
All existence.
Joyful!
Forever.
[And I now observe that this lame text processor completely screws up my formatting. Clearly designed by software enginners oblivious to the needs of poets. Typical.]
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