The Good News and Some Thoughts On Current Events

Had a couple of things I thought about writing here. This article, from a conservative perspective, brought up quite a few thoughts on my end...

But now that it's time to post, I'm just not feeling it.

It just feels like... I dunno. Like there are forces at work that are determined to take us down the worst path, and they don't want to listen. Nobody wants to hear it.

So I'll write about the other thing.

Anyone who has been reading my blog has probably picked up on my interest in history (among many others, but those are less relevant to this post.) It's interesting to try and imagine what life was really like in the past, because we have a tendency to project onto it our own experiences... so it's hard to really understand what life was really like back then. Like Rome - most of us know Roman myths and legends, but our understanding is not the same. Romans apparently took their religion seriously, were devout in their own way, and it's hard for us to think about their beliefs that way. To us, legends of Jupiter, Minerva, and the like (more commonly, to me at least, known by their Greek counterparts Zeus and Athena) are more like folktales. Myths and legends. Ancient stories that have been passed down for centuries, but not beings that we believe in.

I never claim to be an expert, of course, but I filter various things I've read through my own understanding of people, and one of the things that has struck me is... how do I put it?

In the Old Testament, Abraham (or Abram at the time) asked his wife Sara (later Sarah) to say she was his sister in order to avoid trouble.

Think about that. Think about a world where someone was likely to murder you in order to take your wife. A threat that was commonplace enough that Abraham expected it and came up with a plan to avoid it. (A plan that involved letting a powerful man claim his wife for his own.)

It reminds me of all the strategizing and calculating that we think we need to do in order to make it in this imperfect world. Machiavellianism. Realpolitik. The attitude that "I got mine, how you do?" and "If you were in their position, you'd do it too."

So for Christians, Jesus came and overturned all that. He said that "the first shall be last, and the last shall be first."

He didn't succeed in a conventional and worldly way. He didn't make himself rich, or overthrow Roman rule and become a worldly King of the Jews (though apparently that's what some of his followers at the time expected, and our religion was shaped by some of the reconciliation we went through when it didn't happen).

He died like a criminal. Crucified on a cross.

And then you get the resurrection... and suddenly his disciples (who had mostly seemed interested in that worldly success, and kept missing the point of his sermons; who just a few days earlier had all fled, with Peter denying Jesus three times... ) were going around spreading the Good News.

From a historical perspective, there's no real evidence of what happened back then. It does make me think, though, of Napolean alleged quote that -

I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me . . . but to do this is was necessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence of my looks, my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke to them, I lightened up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts. . . . Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. 

Something mysterious happened, something that turned ordinary men and women into apostles willing to risk their lives... and their message was welcomed, was greeted joyously....

And I know all the Christian ways of saying what that message was, but I think at the heart of it was this:

Nice guys don't finish last.

Okay, that's the catchy way of summarizing it, drawing on the rather familiar saying that "Nice guys finish last", and it's meant to be far more inclusive than that.

And perhaps 'heart' isn't the right word, since the commandments Jesus said were most important were

Thou shalt love thy Lord, thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind

And

 Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

But important though that is, it's not the part that made people go crazy for the story. (I mentioned early Christianity and fanfiction, and if you want a sense of that... look up the stories that never made it into the Bible. People were sharing and telling Jesus stories like crazy, though only a few were accepted into the Bible.)

So yes, we should all strive to love our neighbors as ourselves (and heal the sick, and hang out with prostitutes and tax collectors. You know, like Jesus did.)

But we're supposed to remember to be good people, to strive for that... and when the real world rears it's ugly head, when it seems like we just have to do wrong in order to survive - to practice realpolitick, or do whatever it is we're trying to justify because 'those evil _____ are winning and we have to do this  or all is lost' we're supposed to remember that Jesus won despite 'losing' and dying like a criminal.

We're supposed to have faith, and resist worldly temptation.


Which is why I find the current state of affairs so horrifying, as the article I linked to above touches on.

When you think the battle "must be fought by any means necessary", when they are willing to overlook all the signs that someone isn't a good Christian because they think that's what it takes to win...

They've pretty much missed the entire point of the Book they claim to revere.

Some Thoughts Related to the Holocaust and Current Events, Part III

I've seen a lot of people discussing exactly how Germany turned fascist, seen them try to draw parallels between current events and the rise of Nazi Germany.

I do not have the background to make any such comparisons.

Instead, I wanted to talk about something else. I wanted to talk about dehumanization. In the book Hitler's Willing Executioners, the author makes the claim that Germany was "pregnant with murder" towards Jews. That the anti-semitism that ultimately led to the Holocaust was deeply rooted and murderous, and Hitler merely tapped into that. There are, again, many scholar debates over the historical accuracy of this claim, but dehumanizing rhetoric is, I think, irrefutable. (They just argue over how much that rhetoric differed from any other anti-semitic rhetoric, and how much it was responsible for subsequent behavior, and so an and so forth.)

Dehumanization is, I think, something we should always be wary of. Mostly because it is never true. Given the spectrum of human nature, even the worst of the worst is still human... and we can - and should - have an honest debate over just what that means. What is owed to that worst of the worst, simply by virtue of our shared humanity? If you believe in God, what obligation do we have towards the part of God inherent in our fellows? (But that's for another time.)

Dehumanization allows us to unleash the worst in human nature. To step over our limits towards violence and murder. Things we would never do to our colleagues are somehow justified when faced with someone we consider subhuman.

And so, well, I think that explains why I find comments about DemocRATS or ReTHUGlicans so disturbing. It shows a willingness to demonize your opponents to such a degree that they are subhuman. If there's a spectrum for mass human behavior, similar to the one for individuals, the 'good' side would probably be living in peace and harmony... and the 'evil' side would be genocide. Dehumanizing rhetoric falls somewhere closer to the genocide side of the scale than the 'peace and harmony' side.

I've seen the memes, where someone jokes about how horrifed they are to discover their pregnant with a Democrat (or Republican).

Somehow it carries a depth of feeling that's greater than the joke/memes about Ford vs Chevy, or Cubs vs. Cardinals. Those rivalries are generally good natured, both sides able to joke around and relate to each other even as they 'oppose' each other...

It's not like that with the Republican and Democratic memes. There's a real sense that anyone of the opposite party is the lowest of the low, not worth the normal consideration you would give to a random stranger.

(This is not to say they're both equivalent. I do have my biases, and as an analogy in an earlier post showed I can understand why at least one side feels the way they do. And, as someone taught that Jesus said "love thy neighbor as thyself", "judge not lest ye be judged", "first remove the beam out of your eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye", who praised the Good Samaritan and exemplified spending time with prostitutes, tax collectors, who was killed as a common criminal, etc... I find it disturbing that people who claim they follow that self-same Jesus can be so uncompassionate, unmerciful, and judgemental. But then, there I am again... judging others. At the same time, I'm disturbed by the willingness to punch Nazis, by the widely accepted belief that debating them is pointless and just gives them more power, and that it's perfectly justified to hate on and demonize anyone who isn't on the 'right' side. It's a very dangerous mentality, yet another example of dehumanization, and it's worrisome no matter what the political affiliation.)

Btw, this dehumanizing rhetoric goes for more than just political affiliation. Mexicans and 'illegal immigrants' are talked about in a similar fashion, to the point where many people don't even seem to distinguish between illegal immigrants and regular immigrants. 

As someone pointed out once - the immigrant caravan is not full of illegal immigrants if they're trying to go through the legal process of requesting asylum. And if they're not trying to cross the border illegally, or tried to cross it legally first and got told the checkpoint was closed, then the crisis requires providing enough manpower to sort through all the claims in a timely fashion. (And how many of the current detainees tried going through a normal border crossing, vs. were caught after they'd tried, were told the border was closed, and only then tried to cross our border illegally? And while I haven't yet had the discussion on what we owe our fellow human beings, even if/when they do wrong, someone coming to our border to request asylum has not actually done anything wrong in the first place... so none of those arguments should be relevant, and we should treat the perfectly legal asylum-seekers with decency and courtesy as we process their claims.)

But we all know all that. The issue, the part that should raise red flags to everyone, is that some Americans aren't really worried about the legality of these immigrants. They're concerned about the whole browning of America, and the loss of a white majority, and they see any non-white potential immigrant as a threat. Even if they're immigrating legally.

Never mind our long and proud tradition of accepting immigrants (after all, there's also a long and not-so-proud tradition of resenting them and fearing them.)

Anyways.

What led to this series of posts was that I, yet again, came across a report discussing terrible conditions at the detention facilities. I saw someone on twitter asking for people to call a detention center and pressure them to give treatment (or release) an elderly grandfather with Alzheimers. I've heard reports about pregnant women having miscarriages because of poor treatment (and if you're pro-life and not disturbed by that then you're a hypocrite.)

I wrote this post because I've been hearing various such stories, off and on, for a while now. Kids in cages, more or less. People held in facilities lacking in beds, separating families and trying to place the kids with white families, and other things.

And... and I'm trying to find a job right now, I'm worried about making a living. I live hundreds of miles from the border...

And so I try to fight the urge to, well... to feel that sense of something wrong, and then forget about it a minute later.

It's not right. I don't really know what to do about it. I mean, I vote, of course. But it's not like I've got a detention center near me to go protest at. And (as the job hunting bit ought to imply) I'm not really in a position to go sending money to a human rights organization or anything. (Also, I'd want to research any charity I donate too, as there's a nasty record of people getting rich and not really helping anyone... but research like that takes work, too.)

It disturbs me. The dehumanization. The detention centers... which, as the Stanford prison experiment shows, is a situation just ripe for abuse. You need strong leadership to prevent that.


The tendency for all of us to turn a blind eye to it. You see stories, on occasion, but they don't really seem to get much traction. Too many people have dehumanized immigrants (illegal or not) to the point where they're willing to look the other way, no matter what horror stories they hear.

They'll justify it as "the detainee shouldn't have tried coming here in the first place. Shouldn't have brought their children. Shouldn't have gotten pregnant."

Never mind that, when you choose to detain someone... to prevent them from seeking out the medical care they might otherwise have... you have an obligation to them.

Do we even know how much of this 'crisis' could be managed by providing more judges and lawyers to process anyone coming through the perfectly legal border checkpoint?

But above and beyond all that, why are so many Americans willing to forego our principles and values and look the other way when it comes to human beings who are trying to immigrate, many of them legally.

Some Thoughts Related to the Holocaust and Current Events, Part I

I've generally tried to avoid comparisons to Germany in WWII. Most such posts tend to be alarmist, imho, and much like 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf', it's become too easy to tune such things out. (I do generally click on them anyway, though. In order to evaluate the arguments for myself - and in some cases I do learn some interesting bits about the time period.)

It's been a while since I'd read up on the topic, and I'm by  no means a historian or dedicated scholar to the topic. What's about to come up is the (rather typical, for me) musings that combine a variety of different sources into my own understanding of the subject. In other words: Reader Beware, Enter At Your Own Risk.

WWII and the Holocaust are important for a variety of reasons. It's the most recent 'Great War', in which nations truly rose or fell upon the consequences. It had a clear sense of good and evil (once word of what was going on got out), so that soldiers who fought against Germany could legitimately take pride in doing so. That sense of good vs evil transcended the more normal historical trend in which each side paints their opponent in the worst colours and makes horrific claims about how evil they were, and most of the time neither side is any better or worse than the other. This time the other side truly had done terrible things.

It's also interesting, because most of the people involved were - well - ordinary. If humanity has a spectrum of good and evil...

If saints illustrate the best of human nature, and serial killers and other sinners the worst...

Then it's shocking that so much harm could have been carried out by people who, in other circumstances, are no better or worse than any of us.

The history of the Holocaust reminds us that evil doesn't come in with claws, fangs, and devil horns, it generally looks just like us.

Studying the history of the Holocaust (and the other dark elements of human nature) is important for a variety of reasons. Only one of them is because, if we're honest with ourselves, we all have the same innate potential for good and evil as anyone else, and we could easily be complicit in the Holocaust, just as many Germans were. In hindsight it's easy to see that they were wrong, easy to think that if we were living in that time period we would somehow be different... but unless we understand the forces that led to it, we're probably wrong.

So what are these forces? Well... scholars have been debating that for a long time now, and I don't claim to have the one true answer here. Just some basic guesses based on my understanding of human nature.

To start with...

To start with, I think it's important to revisit some classic experiments in social psychology - the Milgram experiment, Stanford prison experiment, as well as the Asch conformity experiments.

Taken altogether, they remind us that we are social beings. Being part of a group matters, and we will often ignore or dismiss anything that threatens our sense of agreement. We'll lie about which line we think is correct if we hear everyone else pick a different one. We will obey an authority figure, even if it feels wrong. And there's just something about giving one group of people power over another that leads to very, very, disturbing behavior.

If you think you'd stand up to the Nazis in Germany, you have to ask yourself - can you bring yourself to speak up when you disagree with what everyone else is saying? Are you willing to stand up to your boss if they order you to do something wrong? Would you, and be honest with yourself, pay attention to that nagging feeling that something is off, or wrong? Or does it make you uncomfortable, and you forget it as soon as you can?

That wikipedia article on the Asch conformity experiment included this statement from a subject who yielded to the majority and chose the wrong answer: At the other end of the spectrum, one "yielding" subject (who conformed in 11 of 12 critical trials) said, "I suspected about the middle – but tried to push it out of my mind."

And that's what we do, when confronted with something that challenges us. That's why we have to study these sorts of things, so we can be aware when we're trying to push something we don't want to face out of our minds. (And this, ultimately, is why I'm writing these posts. But I'll get to that towards the end.)

Germans committed horrific mass murders during WWII, and historians debate just how complicit the average person was. Yes, there was the SS, and various police forces. And then there were those who helped send trainloads of Jews to the concentration camps. Who processed the paperwork. Who were, in so many ways, utterly banal. One of the books I'd read pointed out that if there wasn't a widespread perception that Jews were a problem, and agreement with the need to get rid of them, that there would have been more reports of Germans letting Jews go when nobody else was around to enforce it. (The wikipedia article on the book also mentions some questions and concerns about the historical validity, but most of that seems to center around the role antisemitism had on this behavior, and whether or not the Germans acted differently when dealing with opposition from other groups. Like Polish Catholics. From what I can tell, those concerns don't have much to do with the main point... which is that if support wasn't widespread there were numerous opportunities to display that disagreement, and they mostly didn't happen. I actually think it's probable that once German forces were willing to massacre Jews, it wasn't much of a stretch to do the same for other 'enemies' like the Polish Catholics mentioned here, but I don't claim to know the history well enough to argue anything here and I'll get into the reasons for that belief shortly.)

Current Events, We Didn't Start the Fire, Don't Know What to Say (But I'll Say a Lot Anyway)

It seems like the world is spinning out of control.  Gone crazy.  (And yet...everyone always feels that way, and the world has always been like this.  Right?)

Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City, and now two cops are killed.  In revenge?  Retaliation?

Slogans and t-shirts abound.  "Black Lives Matter"  "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" "I Can't Breathe" "Breathe Easy, Don't Break the Law"  "I Can Breathe"  "Hands Up, Don't Loot"

So many of these have an undertone of anger, hatred, and an unwillingness to see the other's point of view. 

Someone got in trouble for saying "All Lives Matter", because the slogan is "Black Lives Matter", and changing it detracts from the main focus. 

Yet all lives DO matter, it's just that we're particularly concerned about black lives at this moment.

I don't really know what I could say that would be little more than hot air.  Something said to show I've picked my side, something anyone on the other side will automatically dismiss. 

I imagine how someone whose mind is already made up would tune me out the minute I start to say something they can peg into a slot.

Oh, here's the argument that _____.  That people who aren't breaking the law have nothing to fear.  Or that black people feel particularly abused by the police, and have reasons to be less trusting. 

They've heard it all, and dismissed it already.  What really matters, to them, is that the dead men committed crimes.  Or that the police were protected by a system that didn't even seriously investigate the incident.

And now, with this cop-killing, it makes it even worse.  (Aside from the tragedies of their losses, and the pain inflicted on their families and loved ones.)