Gopher: Pioneer of Split Estate

It must have been the gopher that inspired the split estate law in the West. If you ever tried to plant a garden anywhere there are gophers, they eat it out from under you…literally. That’s what the split estate law [a combination of the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 (SHRA) and the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 (MLA)] has wrought. Today, an oil and gas company can lease the land under your garden and “drill, baby, drill” until your well, health, and property values are ruined beyond repair. Unlike the gopher, legally, the mineral leaser’s interests trump your surface rights. You can try to trap, poison, drown, or otherwise dispose of the gopher, but you can’t touch the driller.
“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920’s not long after the two acts mentioned above were passed. It has been business as usual ever since. That peculiar expression of hubris that resulted in the Great Depression was revived by the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street in the last decade and resulted in the Great Recession of 2007-9. But to many a capitalist the bubble and bust cycle of business is just natural, not something to fix. There are always winners and losers, so why worry about crashes and bankruptcy: they are all part of the market system that always self-corrects.
A lot of these true believers in the market-as-God also believe in property-as-God. They like to trace their arguments to the concept of natural rights. John Locke was one of the first “modern” thinkers to come up with a threesome of them: life, liberty, and property. According to Locke, men are born with certain natural rights that no government can ever take away. Since the founding fathers of the United States, taking Locke’s lead, came up with three of their own (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) this idea of natural rights has had a legacy here in the USA. What makes them “natural” as opposed to legal remains debatable, unless, of course, you see them as the equivalent of appendages or body organs as in everyone has a natural right to a liver and liberty.
What’s interesting is that the Locke natural right of property got left out of the founding fathers’ list. In its place the concept of the pursuit of happiness was added. Maybe property got left behind in 1776 because America promised so much available land at the time that the founding fathers believed land would never be an issue. Or maybe they were worried the Indians would realize that they also could “own” property and hold the founding fathers accountable for large scale confiscation of their lands. In any case, property was not highlighted as a natural (inalienable) right in the Declaration of Independence.
However, as the West was being settled thanks to the Gold Rush of 1849 and Manifest Destiny, the religious thrust behind further confiscation of land by Anglos, as well as the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigrants that came to America starting in the 1840’s, the U.S. Government eventually came up with not only a property right but a “two fer” lease: the split estate. Maybe politicians began to feel that property was something to pay more attention to because not only did industry need more resources and ranchers more land, men were being forced by law to share political power with women the same year that the Minerals Leasing Act was passed (Women’s Suffrage, 1920). MLA passage may be just a coincidence or it may have been a way of placating the men-folk who were eager to have some kind of compensation for their loss.
The split estate seemed like a good idea at the time, just as slavery or denying women the vote seemed like good ideas at an earlier time. There was so much land out west it never occurred to the power brokers in Washington that surface use and sub-surface use could ever come in conflict. Today, now that we are beginning to see the greater interconnectedness of life through ecology, the idea of split estate is obsolete. No knowledgeable person could go along with the continuation of such a law knowing what we now know. Ecology is the thrust behind the abolition movement of the 21st Century. Sooner or later, justice and rightness will prevail. The split-estate law will be abolished, and the idea that mineral rights can take precedence over surface rights will go the way of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is not only ecologically insane; it is morally wrong.
How can it possibly be morally wrong?
I hear a lot of talk coming from the conservative camp that the national deficit is the greatest threat to the prosperity of future generations of Americans. It is not the GREATEST threat. The greatest threat is environmental degradation by current high-impact, low-cost, expedient mining and drilling practices as well as excessive hydrocarbon use throughout the United States and the planet as a whole. Water quality, air quality, and fertile land quality are far more critical than our need for hydrocarbons. Moreover, if hydrocarbons are so important a finite resource, we should be preserving as much as we can for use by future generations. You cannot argue about the threat of national debt, a reversible liability, and ignore the conservation of resources if you are concerned for future generations. It simply does not make sense. The present generations should turn to alternative, sustainable, non-hydrocarbon sources of energy now so that future generations won’t have to use energy to cool the planet.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll go out to the garden and try to figure out how I can get rid of those gophers that keep undermining my organic dream.

God in America

While watching the second part of the PBS special God in America last night, I was struck by how blindly drawn to certainty a large segment of the country has always been. Better to be dead right than maybe wrong. Both sides of the Civil War believed God was on their side, but as Lincoln concluded, both could not be right and possibly neither was. Then Lincoln went from being Deist (God set in motion this mechanism called life) to Evangelical (God told me what to do) in a sudden revelation which resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation, the just cause the North needed to win the war.
America pretends to have one God but in practice has many. There are personal gods, sectarian gods, and secular gods. What the people who believe in them all have in common is a faith that their god will deliver “the good” and sometimes the goods.
For many the belief starts with absolute trust in a text. The trust is so absolute that every word in the text is sacred. Even though the text has been translated and modernized over time, every word somehow remains sacred to those who buy into fundamentalist teaching. This tendency to see certain texts as sacred (Bible, Torah, Koran) helps explain how some also view The Constitution as a static document to be preserved at any cost as opposed to a living document that is subject to adjustment according to the needs of the people and the times. Literal interpretation of texts, it is assumed, requires no interpretation. It is simply ingesting. You swallow whole, never chew.
This tendency or proclivity to absorb wholly and directly is carried into our economic lives as well. There are those believe in the Market as if it were a god. Just trust in the Market to take care of business. We need not any tinkerers or adjusters or certainly not any government bureaucrats messing with our god. In God We Trust to these purists means In Market We Trust.
America has had an element that wants to purify or sanctify something ever since the Puritans landed in 1620. It also has had an element that has always felt uncomfortable in the stiff clothes of doctrinaire thinking and texts. Printed words and human institutions are not chiseled in stone. They are created by man, not dictated by God to man. God has never exclusively endorsed a specific text as his word and has never left a note to say he had.
Belief is a “time out” from thinking. It is the product of the anti-intellectual’s unwillingness to venture into the arduous world of reason. It is the surrender to assumption and blind belief, not the victory of truth.
True believers are inevitably skeptical of science because science is so skeptical. Science has hypotheses and theories, probability and statistics, not absolute truths. It is the very uncertainty of science that horrifies the true believer. We can’t trust science to give us truth on a platter, only carcasses of old ideas left on the dissecting table and new theories tentatively offered in their place. How messy and unsatisfying it all is.
On the other hand, moderately religious people who focus on service and helping the needy are good to have around. They keep their religion to themselves and simply do good deeds. There are no strings attached to their efforts.
However, our nation suffers from an inordinate lack of faith in the power of reason to sort out our difficulties. Instead, we have our centers of power polluted by a preoccupation with preponderant principle over pragmatic progress. Some true believers are paralyzed with fear because they consume the fast food of facile belief containing empty spiritual calories rather than exercise their mental capacities toward solutions. Thinking is hard work, but a certain portion of America has always shunned it because it might disturb the literal narrative it has always blindly trusted.
However, the chief reason Americans hang onto their beliefs is the ever broadening heterogeneity of the country. We have always been a nation of immigrants and continue to be so. We are also the most religiously diverse nation in the world, but unlike the foods we bring to the American table, we do not embrace each other’s religions the way we enjoy each other’s ethnic dishes. New foods are a lot more digestible; new beliefs are not.
True believers see other beliefs as a threat to their own, not a complement. It leaves them “thinking” that they must reinforce their own beliefs rather than question them. The notion of turning to reason simply does not occur. It’s in a different realm of being.
Meanwhile, absolutist belief will continue to be the sacred cow that wanders through and disrupts American progress such as stem cell research while engineers of growth elsewhere in the world (China, India, for example) will pass us on their freshly constructed by-passes and freeways. Their de facto separation of church and state will trump our de jure separation any day now.

Chillin' in Chile

Now that the 33 miners trapped in the Chilean mine are about to ascend to freedom, let’s not let this disaster go to waste. A lot of money and effort has gone into constructing the escape route. Why not, when all the dust settles on this harrowing experience, turn this construct into a whole new form of eco-tourism? The Chilean government, in conjunction with, say, the United States or even the United Nations, could “invite” some of the latest and worst ecological offenders who perhaps will suffer only minor financial setbacks at best or maybe a little time in a cozy and lush country club style detention center, to spend some time in the space vacated by the Chilean miners.
They would not have to spend a long time down there, but just enough to give them time to contemplate their sins. It would be a kind of “time out” for corporate executives. Those in charge of the “eco-lodge” could market the experience as a kind of innovative VIP rehab or an Executive Appropriate Transcendental Synergistic Highly Intensive Transformation to be known as EATSHIT.
Some of the candidates that come to mind are Tony Hayward of BP and the CEO of the aluminum factory in Hungary that recently sent a sizeable cocktail of hazardous waste toward the Danube. Certain to make the exclusive list would be Don Blankenship of Massey Energy who ignored all sorts of infractions before one of his mines blew up killing 29 miners last spring. Perhaps he should be the first to attend this exciting adventure.
On the other hand, it might be a great rite of passage for any national leader from any country that develops energy or mineral resources. A visit to the site and a trip down the shaft might keep national leaders from giving their people the shaft by not enforcing sound protocols pertaining to energy and mineral extraction. Better that they experience firsthand what it is like to survive a mine disaster so that others may survive as well.
Eco-tourism to this point has been altogether tame and precious. It has amounted to no more than an opportunity for ecology converts to strengthen their beliefs…a form of “preaching to the choir.” The people who tend to do eco-tourism are limousine liberals. Isn’t it time the world and business leaders are exposed to an experience that might give them pause to continuing the reckless exploitation of the world’s ever-shrinking resources and the cavalier disregard of sound protocols that save lives?

The Endless War

I bet you think this piece is about getting out of Afghanistan. It is not. It is about another war that has been hot and cold since the founding of the United States. Of late it has heated up again, taken on the nuances of the 21st Century, and raged like a forest fire in the Rocky Mountains. Its essence is two conflicting narratives about the direction America needs to take.
One narrative is espoused by environmentalists, liberals, and climate change adherents. It is best encapsulated in the treatise called The Tragedy of the Commons first named and described by Garrett Hardin in 1968. The other narrative embraced by conservatives, free market enthusiasts, and libertarians is probably best articulated in Matt Ridley’s latest book, The Rational Optimist, the thesis of which I would suggest is represented by the phrase The Comedy of the Infinite.
Hardin uses Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of tragedy: “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things…This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.” I am using a simple literary definition of comedy: a work that ends happily.
Until I had read Ridley’s book, I had never run across a more complete, comprehensive articulation of the conservative perspective on why we should not concern ourselves with so many of the fears that liberals are constantly fussing about, like coal-mining, gas drilling, off shore oil extraction, greenhouse gases, nuclear energy, population bombs, or genetically modified crops. Ridley is not only firmly but absolutely convinced that the combination of technology, free markets, and his perception of human nature will lead the world toward greater prosperity and well being so long as governments and pessimists don’t get in the way. Even Africa will prosper sooner or later.
From the beginning of the book I tried to float along with the flow of his argument as well as I could, leaving all of my usual liberal snags to puncture my raft of hope another day, and by the end of the book I was actually asking myself, what if?…what if Ridley is right? Then I began to have my doubts. My old liberal cautions kicked in, the BP disaster in the Gulf surfaced in my mind once more, and I was back to hosting a panoply of fears I have about the future of the planet and the human race.
Then I recalled Garrett Hardin’s thesis, The Tragedy of the Commons, and realized that it represented one of the most distilled forms of the liberal-environmental perspective. It also stood nearly in direct opposition to the optimism of Ridley. First and foremost, it insists that there are no technical solutions for some problems. He uses the example of the conclusion reached by Wiesner and York about the nuclear arms race: “It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution.” Hardin then goes on to say that population is one of those problems. He cites Malthus, the finite planet, and the “fact” we must somehow plan to make better use of diminishing finite resources and meanwhile begin to develop sustainable ones.
Ridley, on the other hand, disputes Malthus. Ridley believes that there is sufficient evidence scattered around the planet today that by increasing prosperity through free markets and global economic development we are seeing a leveling off of population growth in countries or regions that have attained a level of prosperity and education well above subsistence. All we have to do is encourage or invest in those regions that have yet to achieve such a level, and all will be well. The big IF for Ridley is getting rid of political corruption that interferes with the natural tendency for people to develop market economies. If governments can be brought to focus primarily on improving infrastructure and avoid interference, then they will literally and figuratively pave the way for progress.
As far as resources are concerned, Ridley has nearly absolute faith in technology. He believes we will develop better sustainable sources of energy in the future, but meanwhile we should continue to drill for gas and oil, mine coal if we can find a way to make it clean, and especially get back in gear with nuclear energy. He believes it is safe, clean, and cheap in the long run. Continued use of all of those resources will buy time for technology to evolve to make solar power efficient. On the other hand, he has little use for ethanol from crops or wind power.
As far as climate change is concerned, Ridley thinks it may very well go the way of acid rain after the 1970’s and 80’s. He also cites the “fact” that polar bear populations are actually increasing. However, he may be confusing actual polar bears with polar bear club membership, and perhaps he himself has taken a few too many dips in frigid water. Nevertheless, his optimism, regardless of the prevailing scientific data, does not have room for fears about climate change. It is at worst a blip on the cosmic screen of inevitable progress.
In The Tragedy of the Commons Hardin cites Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) as the book that “contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society.” He then goes on to explain his famous tragedy of the commons using cow herdsmen and a common pasture. Sooner or later, as each cow herder grows his herd, the capacity of the common pasture is exceeded. The individual freedom of each herdsman to expand his herd ultimately destroys the commons. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
The Comedy of the Infinite, on the other hand, presents a different world view. Ridley not only cites Smith as a primary initiator of his thesis but turns to Friedrich Hayek as the author of the defining term which Ridley adopts: catallaxy. Catallaxy is “spontaneous order created by exchange and specialization.” It is this concept on which Ridley and Hayek base their optimism. Ridley insists that “[i]t will be hard to snuff out the flame of innovation, because it is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon in such a networked world.”
From recalling Hardin and reading Ridley, I am left with the notion that perhaps we should stop being so pessimistic and trust in our capacity as human beings to make the world a better place. We simply need to be smarter about it and not reckless and cavalier. Neither pure self-interest nor pure environmentalism is the rational answer, although both camps claim reason as their guide. Warring camps of ideological purity will get us nowhere. We need the best minds from both sides of this endless debate to work together, not win at all costs. One side by itself will lead us to resource depletion and planet desecration; the other will lead us back to subsistence. Neither alternative is a wise path.
Accepting that Adam Smith’s “guiding hand” that leads self-interest to naturally contribute to the greater good is as comforting to a liberal as asking NFL football players to call penalties on themselves. There need to be referees to make sure unnecessary economic disasters don’t occur because someone cheated or got greedy. The recent debacle on Wall Street is a case in point. There were no actual referees.
On the other hand, too much regulation can stifle economic growth and innovation. There need to be enough rules to keep economies pointed in a positive direction without benefiting the few at the expense of the many as happened on Wall Street in 2008. Keeping the spring of innovation bubbling and the prosperity trickling down is what government should be promoting and often accomplishing by actually getting out of the way.
It seems we should follow the old Quaker proverb: Proceed as the way opens. And we should do as much as we can to anticipate the unintended consequences of our deliberate as well as spontaneous evolution. To err is human, but to evolve is natural. Pointing all of our useful human institutions toward the greater good is the noble task before us.
The concept of sustainable growth is the hybrid term that best describes the ideal merger of environmental and economic principles. Enterprises that pursue genuine sustainable growth are those that will be the fittest and survive in a knowledge-based world. All others will fall away. It is the only path remaining. Sustainable Growth addresses both The Tragedy of the Commons and The Comedy of the Infinite by focusing on long-term large scale thinking rather than short term or selfish thinking. Saying that the market or the individual is enough to bring this about is to throw logic and knowledge under the bus. It does not rule out competition; it does not put growth in the hands of government. It simply says that, as a primary operating principle, sustainability and growth must be symbiotic if the human species is to have a future. Getting everybody to think that way is everybody’s job, not IBM’s or the Government’s. It is taking Adams Smith’s principle of self-interest and simply educating it to have greater reach and scope. It is about always putting long term sustainable growth ahead of short term gain.
Finally, making this ageless debate into a war of conflicting certainties is no way to behave or accomplish anything. Both sides are right to some degree, and wrong to some degree. Neither side has absolute truth in hand. If you think the war in Afghanistan needs to end, this ideological war between the right and the left needs to de-escalate back to a statesman-like debate with each side recognizing the essential goodness in the other’s perspective with the goal of finding common ground.
After all, I am word processing this piece on a Toshiba laptop and not etching it on the side of a smoke-filled cave.

The Mob and the Other

Given the outbreak of bedbugs across the country, you would think that the bedfellow index would be down. But no: we have found the Other again, and this time the group target is Muslims. In the 50’s it was communists among us. Thanks to the leadership provided by Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, America was treated to a witch hunt that brought down a good many otherwise respectable folks who were arbitrarily painted with the communist brush. While the red brush was not slapped on a particular ethnic group, it was enthusiastically supported by Roman Catholics who had experienced their share of suspicions by long-settled Protestants as waves of Catholic immigrants coming from all sorts of European countries and speaking all sorts of languages landed on American soil during the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century.
However, the immigrant Catholics had only a religion in common and therefore created their own churches organized by ethnicity. Poles went to their own churches; Irish went to predominantly Irish churches; and Italians went to Italian churches. Catholics dug no secret tunnels to connect those ethnic churches nor did they dig any to the Vatican.
The same human tendency that enables us to make constellations out of random stars drives our propensity to see conspiracy where there is none. Unlike the scientist, who collects vast quantities of data to test the validity a hypothesis, the all too common man can develop a certainty out of coincidence. Once the common man latches on to an idea, he runs with it beyond belief, especially if his fellow travelers or friends believe the same certainty. Doubt is for sissies. Skepticism is for Doubting Thomases.
And that is how we, as humans, have invented gods as well as constellations. True believers would personify or deify certainty in order to give it even greater power rather than trudge the slow road of the scientist who must learn to live with the fact that his hypothesis is seldom a safe bet, that today’s truth may be tomorrow’s mirage.
The truth about Muslims is that they represent even more diverse ethnicities than the Roman Catholics did. They come from all over the world, not just Europe. They speak more diverse languages and represent more varied cultures than the Protestants ever dreamt about the Catholics. If attributing conspiracy to Catholics turned out to be a herding-cats enterprise, then doing so with Muslims is as logical as counting on unanimity happening at the UN.
Religious faith conditions the mind to stop thinking. And it enables the mind to accept as truth notions that have no provable basis. After all, that is what faith is all about. Faith is a sort of blindness cloaked in the disguise of light. Darkness is a placed called Hell, a place to avoid, not an obscurity in need of intense illumination. The conspiracy-inclined mind can generalize false assumptions without evidence because evidence can contradict belief. Never doubt; just believe, and you shall carry the light. The scientific mind works inductively: it gathers facts first and then reaches a tentative conclusion, seldom a certain one. Scientists are proved wrong by discovery. True believers are right by fear-driven, self-contained, hermetically sealed belief. It is the common, everyday, Immaculate Conception. Any contradiction only detracts from the purity of thought, however wrong.
Seeing a bear in a cluster of stars poses no threat; attributing terrorist ideology to a mainstream world religion does*: it gives power to those few like Al Qaeda who would use the religion for its own evil ends by persuading the religion’s mainstream believers that they are demonized. Al Qaeda merely says to the mainstream: “See? I told you so. They are bent on destroying you, so join us in destroying them first.” That does not mean the mainstream will join them en masse, but it does invite the young and easily radicalized to join the extremists.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” said Emerson. Small minds tend toward conspiracy theory. They want to see cause and effect where coincidence lies. And they firmly believe coincidence lies, for everything is the intention of someone or something: God, if you are a religious believer: the government or the corporation, if you are not.
Let’s give Muslims the benefit of our inevitable doubt, for inevitable it will be. We got over fear of Catholics and then fear of Communists, although we have lately, thanks to fear-mongers in the Republican contingent, experienced a recrudescence of anti-socialist rhetoric aimed at that Muslim-born, foreign-born, socialist, community organizer named Barack Hussein Obama. They are trying to make him the Other. Recently, they have gained some ground in doing so, thanks to fear-driven faith of the vigilante minds that shoot first and ask questions never.
* All the religions of Abraham have outrageous pronouncements tucked away in their hallowed texts which both inspire extremists and abhor critics. That’s the problem with literal interpretation of texts of any kind, including the Christian Bible. Literal interpretations can be recipes and justifications for heinous crimes against humanity, all in the name of God.

Swallowing More Than We Chew

America is now fearful enough to make blessing counters seem almost obsolete. There is the fear of global warming, the fear of Al-Qaeda, the fear of the growing deficit, the fear of unemployment, the fear of inflation, the fear of deflation, the fear of rising taxes, and the fear of fear itself. There is, in fact, enough fear out there to make a fear-monger blush.
The latest news polls indicate that the American public, in increasing numbers, fears the President of the United States is a Muslim, even though he has insisted he is a Christian over and over again. Well, they don’t exactly fear it: they want to make him a Muslim so they can loathe him. It’s not as if we have to invent fears in this fearful age in order to keep the fear index uncomfortably high. There are enough fact-based fears to keep us rational folks busy as it is. But there is something contagious about fear: the more we fear, the more it seems to spread. When FDR proclaimed: “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself” he was stating as absolute truth our tendency to exaggerate. Most of our fears are unfounded or at least much greater than reality would suggest.
Fear is the most effective self-fulfilling prophecy humankind has ever adopted. We have a greater capacity for fear than almost anything else. Once fear gets going, it is hard to control it. It is like a hot air balloon on a windy day. When it takes off, you have no idea where it will land.
One such fear being fanned by certain believers is the fear of national debt. Thanks to the Bush tax policies, the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, the bank bailouts, the government takeover of GM, the stimulus package, and the Great Recession, the American national debt is now measured in trillions of dollars, not just billions. For those with valuable assets, the debt is the greater fear. For those who are unemployed, the lack of available jobs is the greater fear. To the environmentalist, global warming and continued degradation of the environment are the greatest fears. Since we cannot seem to agree what the greatest fear is, perhaps what we need is a national fear inventory or poll to assess what our fear priorities really are and begin addressing them accordingly. Otherwise, we will remain in a paralyzed state of generalized fear with no prospects of working our way toward some degree of fear reduction. I realize a state of national serenity is a utopian dream, but efforts toward fear reduction are the practical steps we can take as a country, once we have identified our fear priorities.
America has always been a faith-based nation. Not only is it still highly religious in nature, it puts faith in the beliefs of various economic philosophers who offer contradictory solutions to man’s economic problems. Some American economists insist that Keynes is the guy to follow while others worship Adam Smith. Whatever economic philosopher you align with, their theories are simply beliefs wrung through the uncertain wringer of rational thought and assume an uncertain understanding of human nature. If human behavior were predictable and rational, we would not have the need for philosophers, who, along with scientists, give us the best available tools for understanding ourselves and our world. And yet, we are a far cry from fully understanding human nature any time soon.
Our inclination to put faith in something is our national propensity. Our faith, in turn, sets the stage for an outbreak of fear. Rather than doing the hard work of honing rational tools, we rely on faith and fear to govern our lives. They are two of the most primitive and irrational behavior modes that trace their roots back not only to the cave but to the species that gave birth to us. We would rather throw our hat into the ring of perceived purity and perfection than do the hard rational work of incremental progress. Scientists do the latter; faith-healers do the former.
Right now one issue America is grappling with, and one driven in some circles by irrational fear, is the building of a Muslim cultural center near Ground Zero in New York City. Rather than dealing with the fact that Al Qaeda does not represent mainstream Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan represents mainstream Christianity, some Americans find it easier to demonize the entirety of a world religion and thereby play into the hands of Osama Bin Laden rather than do the relatively easy task of separating extremist elements from the otherwise benign elements of the mainstream faith. But no: those who put all their eggs in one basket will gladly do the same for others.
On the other hand, one could argue that all religions represent an irrational response to life’s vicissitudes and therefore should be avoided in favor of a more rational approach. But a ban on religion would be as successful as the War on Drugs or Prohibition. Taboo has never served as a deterrent but rather as a magnet. People need to choose to be rational, not forced.
Smart people diversify their investment portfolios. They would be wise to do the same with their beliefs and ideas. Rather than latch on to the next fad, the next faith or fear monger, the next fabulous offer, or the next fib sold as fact, maybe we ought to start educating ourselves using the best available information gleaned by the use of rational tools rather than continue to backslide further down the evolutionary track through lazy and listless reliance on faith and fear. That starts with broadening our sources of information beyond those which give us false comfort and exercising the tools that a lot of hard work exercised by previous generations has honed and made available to our brains.
One of the greatest epidemics of our time is physical obesity. Reason would dictate that getting fat is a bad idea. Our lives are shortened, our health is compromised, and our health care costs are rising as a result of this epidemic. No reasonable person would choose to be obese. I would contend that we are also suffering from an obesity of mind. We are becoming a nation of fat-heads, full of false certainty and empty thoughts, just as our bodies are full of fast food and empty calories. The next generation of children will be at even greater risk of suffering from both physical and mental obesity. We need to start exercising our whole beings, not just our bodies, and start feeding ourselves with truly wholesome food as well as truly wholesome food for thought. A diet of faith and fear is just another form of fast food. In more ways than one, we are what and how we eat.

Monotheism and the Culture of Absolutes

I have been reading James Joyce’s Ulysses with a small group of retired men in the small western town of Crestone, Colorado. Crestone used to be a mining town in the 19th Century. Today, it is the locus of spiritual retreats representing most of the world’s religions. Some of the men have connections with one or more spiritual organizations while others do not. The discussions have turned out to be one of the highlights of each week for all of us.
Because the novel follows loosely the story of ancient Ulysses (or Odysseus, if you use the Greek rather than Latin name) the notion that man, in ancient Greece, interacted with many gods and often found himself in conflict with them or having to please more than one made life more complex and confusing at times. Seldom did ancient man find himself serving or reacting to one god alone. He had to adapt to the demands of various gods as he encountered them. Man had to be flexible and inventive in order to survive his hostile world. His religion reflected that “reality.”
Today a large percentage of the world has concentrated the powers of the gods into a single entity, a single god. Although there are a variety of those single gods, for the most part the monotheisms (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, for example) believe in a sole god. They believe their god is the only god, and that any others are either imposters or nonexistent. They may tolerate the existence of someone else’s god, but they do not believe in it.
What happens when you put all your spiritual “eggs in one basket “is you make yourself vulnerable to the concept of the Absolute. One way becomes the only way. Things become black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. Power gets concentrated into an absolute power. Once this concept of the absolute takes root, it is able to spread to all other spheres of thinking. An absolute religious god can give rise to an absolute economic or social one. The mind set can be transferable. This notion is the thesis of a great little classic by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer.
The founding fathers of America saw this problem of concentrated religious power. They saw that America was composed of all sorts of religious sects, many of them allegedly escaping persecuting regimes in Europe, but in reality they themselves were often so “pure” in their beliefs and practices that they had little tolerance for any other beliefs. Even Roger Williams’ colony of Providence Plantations which opened its doors to Jews as well as various Protestant sects would not admit Papists (Catholics). (Ironically, it turns out Catholicism is the major religion represented in Rhode Island today.)
Most of the founding fathers were, to one degree or another, Deists, a term which is foreign to most 21st Century Americans. Deists were not Christians. Deists believed that a supreme being created the universe but that by using reason and the observation of nature man could ascertain truth without the need of faith or organized religion. While the Deists were technically monotheists, they did not organize and codify around that concept to the extent that a hardened religious doctrine evolved from it, as has happened with orthodox aspects of monotheistic religions. In other words, it was a way of thinking about the world rather than a doctrine. Those founders who either claimed to be Deists or were influenced by Deism were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, possibly Alexander Hamilton as well as less famous figures like Cornelius Harnett, Gouvenor Morris, and Hugh Williamson.
In short, fundamentalist Protestant thinking did not play a major role in the construction of the U.S. Constitution. It was reason that dominated the discussion. The whole balance of powers and checks and balances that were woven into that document was intended to ensure that no concentration of power could take place in any branch of government. Absolute power of any kind was something to be avoided or held in check.
Today in America there are no dominant religious gods except perhaps in the Bible Belts of the South. As an example of how the South is different, the Texas state school board just recently decided to subtract Thomas Jefferson from the list of influential figures that inspired revolutions in the 18th and 19th Centuries because he introduced the phrase “separation of church and state.”
During the 19th and 20th Centuries the Protestant god dominated the country and was used to inspire such fervors as Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s and Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s Joseph McCarthy latched on to an issue which initially and fervently appealed to his fellow Roman Catholics: the communist witch hunt. That issue brought the 20 percent of Americans who were Roman Catholic into the mainstream of religiously inspired causes embraced by a large segment of the Protestant mainstream and paved the way for the country’s acceptance of its first Roman Catholic President, John F. Kennedy in 1960.
However, although there are no nationally dominant gods, that does not prevent groups of Americans from promoting their gods as absolutes whenever possible. Whether it is the god of fundamentalist Christianity, the god of free enterprise, the god of government regulation, the god of anti-abortion, or the god of medical marijuana, America is full of folks who try to push their gods to dominance. Therefore, the founding fathers knew what they were about. Let us hope that this cauldron of vigorous monotheisms can still be transformed into a melting pot of ideas and a living, responsive but responsible set of laws rather than reducing itself to a one stock soup of narrow belief.