IN ADAM’S FALL

In Adam’s Fall

We Sinned All

            These are the words that begin the New England Primer, written in the late 17^th century. This is the book that taught children their ABCs. It is at the same time a statement about human nature. We were all born in sin, and sinfulness is our natural state.

            We can find a lot in our own experience to support that view of humanity. We don’t need to reach very far to the great evil doers of history, the Hitlers and the Stalins. We can find examples in our own lives. Even the best of us sometimes fail to live up to our own ideals. We have all done things that we knew were wrong, wrong by our own standards. We knew this even as we committed these wrongful acts, yet we went ahead and committed these sins. All of us have indulged in at least some of the Seven Deadly Sins.  

            Did those old New England Puritans have something? Is human nature depraved to the core? Are we at best, at least some of us, kept to the relatively straight and narrow because of the strictures of society? Do we obey the rules of society mainly because we fear the punishment of disobeying?

Trailing Clouds of Glory

            While human imperfection is undeniable, not everyone believes that we born in sin, that our very nature is sinful. The English poet William Wordsworth believed that each of us had an existence before our birth. He wrote about this belief in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

            In this view we are not born in sin. On the contrary, we are born trailing clouds of glory, from God.

            If we are not born in sin, how does one account for our many failures as human beings? How do you explain the difference between our lofty aims and our ineffective accomplishments? Where do those clouds of glory go? How does the innocent child become a despot, a murderer, an egomaniac? What has corrupted this child?

            According to the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, society is the corrupter. Society with its artificial rules takes the child molds him into something that is unnatural. The further we get away from nature, the more imperfect we become.

            These two views of human nature mark the fundamental difference between the political views of conservatives and liberals.

            We no longer use things like The New England Primer to teach young children that we are born in sin. How, then, do people acquire a sense of the quality of human nature? How do they decide whether people are fundamental good or basically bad? We derive these opinions inductively from our experiences. We all have had experiences where other people treated us badly. We have also witnessed many acts of goodness from our fellow human beings. The way we encounter these actions determine the way they shape our outlook. 

            Our opinions on human nature are not derived as conclusions based on logical considerations. Rather they are attitudes that we are barely aware of having considered, but they are attitudes that influence our thinking most of the things we do.

            Few, if any, people think of themselves as evil. Or their close family members or best friends. If the people they know best seem like decent human beings, how can they think of the vast majority of people as being fundamentally bad? Most people follow most of the rules most of the time. But we weren’t born following the rules. In so many ways society teaches us the rules. In effect it civilizes us. We learn the Golden Rule. We learn the ways we are dependent upon one another.

            We learn that if we apply ourselves in school as children, we will be able to get into college and learn a career that will help us succeed as adults. These opportunities are available to everyone. Of course we can’t deny that opportunities are more readily available to some than to others, but we can all think of members of minorities who have made great successes of their lives.

            It is virtually impossible for someone who violates too many of the rules to succeed. If a young woman has several children, all by different fathers, she is going to be unable to be a fully functioning member of society. If a young man drops out of school before graduating and joins a gang rather than take a minimum wage job, he is unlikely to ever hold a “good” job. While people like these clearly do not have the opportunities that most of us have, they do have some opportunities.

            We may not be born in sin, but we are born as little narcissists. As we grow, we have a responsibility take advantage of whatever opportunities are available to us and allow society to civilize us. That is the bad that some see as infecting large numbers of humanity. It’s not that that we are born in sin. The bad is the failure of some people, not just members of minorities, to make the effort required to become functioning, productive members of society.

            If some people are too lazy to follow the rules and take care of themselves, the conservative asks, why should I donate some of my hard-earned money through taxes to take care of such people?

            Some people have a more sanguine view of human nature. Most people, they believe, are basically good. Obviously there are some bad actors among us, some truly vile human beings. If we are born fundamentally good, how do so many of us turn out to be less than sterling characters?

            Conservatives may feel that we need society to civilize us and make us conform to appropriate patterns of behavior. Liberals, on the other hand, may feel that society itself is the culprit. Society might corrupt the innocent soul and force it to be an unthinking conformist.

            Two iconic books, both published in the 1950s, illustrate these two views of human nature. In Lord of the Flies a group of English schoolboys are stranded on a desert island. Without the guidance of adults to civilize them, the boys descend into savagery.

            In Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden Caulfield, is not sure what the phrase “coming through the rye” means. He envisions innocent children playing in a field, and someone is there, a catcher in the rye, to catch them if they fall off. Playing in the field is innocence. Falling off is losing that innocence, becoming phony, like most adults in Holden’s view. Adults, society destroy the innocence that we are born with.

            There is more to this question than the view of humanity of liberals and conservatives. For example, one wonders why so many evangelical Christians embrace a man as morally deficient as Donald Trump. We also wonder why Republicans are more likely to ignored the science in issues like climate change and the coronavirus.  We will look at these questions in later writings.

           

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will people buy self-driving cars?

WORKING FROM HOME

The COVID 19 epidemic has changed the way we do many things. Some of these changes will become permanent. One of the big changes we have seen is in working from home. To protect their employees from the virus, many companies have been allowing employees who can do so to work from home. The big tech companies have been doing this and plan to continue at least through the end of this year. So much work is done these days on computers and over the internet that tasks can be done at home as easily as they can in a corporate office.

Working from home has advantages to employees, to businesses and to society at large. Because of this, the change in work procedures is likely to become permanent. Employees can save the time and expense of a long commute to work. They can also save the cost of business clothes because they can wear anything they want on the job done at home. Businesses that allow work at home save money on office space. During the partial shutdown in this country, those who do go out have observed much less traffic on the road. Scientists tell us that atmospheric pollution has gone way down in recent months because there are fewer cars on the road.

Several members of my extended family have been working from home during the crisis. One of them is my daughter, who works for a small internet company. They serve their customers over the internet, so workers can do this easily at home. Several employees live in states far from company headquarters. My daughter has been able to work from home occasionally when it is convenient for her to do so.

People who work from home save of the expense of commuting and office clothes. They also save on lunches because they’re not likely to go out for lunch when they are home. They also have more choice about where they will live if they don’t have to live within commuting distance of the office.

If working from home becomes widespread, it will affect many areas of modern life. The money that employees save on commuting, clothes, and lunch, is money that someone else will not earn. People who do not drive to work will not need to get newer cars as often, and they won’t buy as much gas. Recently the price of petroleum dropped so low that producers had to pay storage facilities to take the excess off their hands.

As for saving money on business clothes, several old-line department stores have filed for bankruptcy in recent years. The stores are not only feeling a lowering demand, they are also facing competition from online sellers like Amazon. While J C Penney files for Chapter 11, Amazon’s business grows larger. Companies like Walmart and Target are surviving the crisis because they emulate Amazon. Customers don’t have to go to Walmart to buy stuff. They can order it online. Indeed, during the crisis, online ordering has often been the only way people can purchase things they desire. Customers have found how convenient it is to look up merchandise over the internet, make comparisons and order the product. Increased online shopping is going to be one of the long-term effects of the COVID 19.

Restaurants operate on a small margin at best. They are feeling the effects of the COVID 19 very strongly. For several months they could not operate as they usually did. They tried to keep afloat by offering takeout meals. Now they can serve on tables outside, as long as the tables are far enough apart. Both of these techniques might help the restaurants keep their heads above water, but they are not going to be as profitable as traditional restaurant methods have been. Several fast food chains have been considering Chapter 11. When things start to recover, some restaurants will not be among them.

Real estate will be affected by the changes that have been brought about by the epidemic. Right now New York City is losing population. Well-to-do people who have a second home have been fleeing to those homes to escape the contagion of the big city. Workers who have lost their jobs have been moving out, perhaps to live with family members in other places. If working at home becomes a more readily available option, many people will choose to live someplace less expensive.

No one knows of course what life will be like after we have recovered from the pandemic, but we know there will be major changes in the way we do many things. And the handwriting is on the wall for many of these changes.

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Electronic People

Dmitry Ikskov is a Russian billionaire. He is the founder of the 2045 Initiative. The goal of the project is "to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society." In other words, the goal is to allow people to live forever.

It sounds wonderful, too good to be true. With this technology you can go on enjoying life forever. When an electronic copy of your brain is placed in some sort of robotic body, you no longer have to worry about the slings and arrows that flesh is heir to. Instead of leaving your money to some ungrateful heirs, you can continue to enjoy it. You'll be able to eat rich food, drink champagne, make love to beautiful people.

Wait! Robots can't eat or drink—anything. And love? Only in the platonic sense. Will your money last for centuries? If you don't have a pile of money when you pass on, how will you maintain yourself in this life after life? Have you thought about those things?

Before you sign up to have an electronic copy of your brain made to be put into some kind of robotic body, you need to ask yourself a lot of questions. First of all, will this procedure be available to everyone? Obviously, it will not. The process will take a lot of time and will cost a lot of money. Many people already are resentful of the privileges that are available only to the affluent. It will not seem fair that well-to-do people, who already have so much, will add extended or even eternal life.

If the practice becomes widespread, what will we do with all these electronic people? How will they support themselves? Will they keep biological people from the best jobs? Will they want to continue working? How will ordinary people react to them? If ePeople continue to work, they will hold most of the senior positions in their field by virtue of their seniority. Do we want our businesses and institutions run by people whose thinking is decades out of date? Do we want to keep our talented younger workers from moving into leadership positions?

If these electronic people choose not work, what will they do with their time? Will they just sit back and complain about what a mess the younger people are making of things?

Where will they live? Will the typical family include the robotic parents of both husband and wife? And in time, maybe the parents' parents? Or since their needs will not be the same as those of biological people, maybe the ePeople will live in special housing units or even special communities, like those that exist now for senior citizens.

Most retired people live on a combination of Social Security and a pension. Will these income sources dry up after people cease to be alive biologically? Will the people who run Social Security and other pensions say, “Sorry, you have died. You can't expect this money to be coming to for eternity”? If pension plans continue to pay out, they will eventually run out of money. If they don't continue to support ePeople, how will they pay for their needs? If they continue working they will take away the earning of biologic prople.

Will ePeople be accepted by biological people, or will they be regarded as some grotesque Frankenstein monsters by real people? How will electronic people respond to seeing most of their friends pass away?

Will the ePeople still be considered citizens? Will it be legal for them to vote or run for office?

Will this extension of the natural life be pleasant, or will it be a burden to the electronic people as well as to the biological people around them?

According the Psalm 10:90, The days of our years are three score years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Maybe there are some things that people should not fool around with.

Open letter to GOP Members of Congress

Despite his lies, his incompetence, his corruption, his lack of class, his destruction of previously forged agreements with other countries, you have gone along with President Trump. You have done this presumably because he has delivered many long-time conservative goals. Under his watch Congress passed a huge tax cut. He has appointed scores of conservative judges to federal posts. He has made it much more difficult for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free to enter the United States.

Let me ask you: Was it worth it? Was it worth it to have this unprincipled, weak, authoritarian, impulsive man make uninformed decisions over twitter rather than heeding the advice of military and foreign policy experts? Was it worth it to have this crude, low-class ignoramus litter the news with his tweets, his outrageous charges, his scurrilous attacks against his critics?  Was it all worth it?

In his latest betrayal, he has deserted the Kurds in northwest Syria, the fighters who bore the brunt of the battle against ISIS. He stood back to allow Turkey to attack these people  even as they prevented ISIS from rising again, even as they guarded 10,000 ISIS POWs. He said he pulled American troops back to get us out of endless wars. Instead his actions have unleashed more war with even more participants involved.

Do America’s promises mean nothing? Can they be cast aside on whim? America was once the hope of the free world. Now our allies have no faith in our word. We once saw ourselves and we were seen by others as a shining city upon a hill. That is no longer true.

Tell me, what will it take for Republican members of Congress to help cut this cancer out of the heart of America?

An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

Every day brings new lies and new outrages. By his own admission, the President of the United States put pressure on the head of a foreign country to find some dirt on Joe Biden, who is one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination. What does this man have to do before the House of Representatives takes action to impeach him?

Some may feel that impeachment is a futile action because the craven Republicans in the Senate will not uphold the impeachment. That is probably true. Mr. Trump will likely be able to hold onto his office until the end of his term. However, there is a matter of principle involved. The legislative branch has a responsibility to say, “No more! The kind of things Mr. Trump has been doing and saying are not acceptable in a President of the United States.”

In the last election We the People elected a majority of Democrats to the House because we wanted someone to stop Mr. Trump before he can do any more damage. If the Republicans in the Senate do not vote to sustain the impeachment, their failure will be remembered in the next election. We the People will also remember the Democrats who failed to rein in a president who is so unfit for his job.