New day’s resolution: S-p-R

By Moristotle

[Originally published 10 years ago, on December 29, 2011]

Moristotle, you recently said that you’d be more mindful how you spend your time. Are you spending it better?
    If you’d asked me that yesterday, I don’t think I could have answered coherently—and not sure I can yet. Apparently, the challenge to be more mindful went deeper than I realized. It raises lots of difficult questions.
    For example?

Reflections on personal values

By Moristotle

An entry in our back pages directory in sidebar caught my eye the other day, and I clicked on its New Ten Commandments link to revisit them and see whether I even remembered them. (When I formulated them, ten years ago, I hadn’t put up a stone monument of them in my front yard to remind me, and, even though I did inscribe them in my back pages, I don’t read them every Sunday, let alone every day.)

Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better

Richard Dawkins

Revising the Ten Commandments

By Moristotle

[Author’s Note: Originally published on July 8, 2008.]

When I took Richard Dawkins up on his suggestion in The God Delusion that the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament needed updating to align them with the advances mankind has made in understanding what’s what (and what ought to be what), I rather slavishly followed him in retaining the number 10 when I developed “My ‘New Ten Commandments’.” Of course, he was only following Moses, so why not?

New day's resolution: S-p-R

Moristotle, you recently said that you'd be more mindful how you spend your time. Are you spending it better?
    If you'd asked me that yesterday, I don't think I could have answered coherently—and not sure I can yet. Apparently, the challenge to be more mindful went deeper than I realized. It raises lots of difficult questions.
    For example?
    Well, first, I got off on questions of how humans in general could make better use of their time. Thinking about "obvious truths" such as that people ought to choose to eat healthier foods (when such choices are available to them) made me realize that I have virtually zero influence over other people's choices. As I said the other day, who's going to enforce them? And on what basis? Maybe it would be "better" overall for some people to eat as unhealthily as they possibly can—so that they'd die sooner and overpopulated Earth could get on with recycling their bodies.
    That sort of thinking would be a distraction.
    Indeed. My "new ten commandments" (or Christopher Hitchens's or George Carlin's, or anyone else's—except perhaps God's, if some new "God" should come along and bring Scripture up-to-date) will make next to no difference whatsoever.
    How could an update from "God" be an exception?
    Simply that millions of people believe that commandments that enjoy "God's" endorsement deserve fealty, even when they contradict clearly superior ethical principles.

Ah, so it really comes down to what "better" means? And maybe that comes down to each individual's having to decide for him or herself—at least in a more or less free society, if not in places like North Korea, where the State decides for you, or in an Islamic theocracy, where the local mullah tells you what to do?
    Right. Just yesterday did I finally come around to the realization that perhaps the main way I could spend my time better would be to stop thinking (and writing) about how other people could better spend theirs. They're going to spend it how they will. Even principles with "God's" endorsement for how people spend their time won't cut it with someone who won't buy into them.

So, what did you do this morning to spend your time better on a strictly personal level?
    I took a book to the restroom after breakfast rather than a Sudoku puzzle. Doing Sudokus is absorbing (and may even have health benefits in terms of "sharpening the brain"), but I'm sure I get more out of serious book reading.
    As simple as that?
    Yes, quite. Simple might be the operative word. Another distraction I was having besides thinking about how people in general could better spend their time was the fact that some questions run so deep they could overturn my life—like, Why not live somewhere else? Why not find new friends? We need to let some things lie. At any rate, we can't reasonably make huge changes all at once, unless we're in a very dangerous situation and need to extract ourselves from it at once. Someone I know recently fled a man who had been beating her and she thought might be planning to kill her.

Okay. So, what else did you do this morning?
    Well, something I've actually been doing for several days—"pencil push-ups" that my neuro-ophthalmologist mentioned again recently for strengthening my eye muscles for reading. (I do thirty reps of following the eraser on a pencil as I move it to and from my eyes.) I'd neglected this exercise of late, but became mindful that perhaps I should be doing them. Also, I stretched before even getting out of bed. I got myself more fully awake before stumbling into the kitchen, if only in order to be more self-aware of what I was doing so that I could do it more efficiently—and maybe even enjoy it more. (I think I did.) And when I was turning on my computer to do my "daily" blog (this is the first one since Sunday), I got out my new cell phone to finish ripping an audiobook to it. And while I was waiting for the computer to be ready to rip, I started updating my contacts...It actually started to seem ridiculous. I was afraid I would forget some of what I wanted to say in this web log.

So, even just "doing the simple things" can get pretty involved?
    Indeed! It made me realize that trying to make better use of my time can get me off into yet another distraction—the idea that there's an absolutely best thing to do, right now. That kind of thinking tends to paralyze me, throw me into confusion.
    So, have you found something solid now that you can more or less rely on?
    I think so. Actually, it's something from more than half a lifetime ago, some advice I heard from a traveling lecturer. Simply to pause before responding to stimuli (of my own choosing) in order to think of alternatives and inject a bit of "free choice" as to what my response will be. Stimulus-pause-Response.
    Why did you put air quotes around "free will"?
    Are you sure your will is actually free?
    Ah, right. I see what you mean...Anyway, may we call the pause-before-responding maxim a "new day's resolution"?
    Sure, why not? You know how I dislike holidays.

A Declaration of Animal Rights

Sunday. Yesterday, when I published the draft below of the opening for a statement of the rights of animals, I stupidly cast it as a revision of the historical document, our Declaration of Independence. I did so thinking wrongly that I would be imitating the way my New Ten Commandments attempted to bring the Mosaic original up-to-date and replace it with a more enlightened set of ethical principles. I thought I'd be imitating the way a rewrite of "Twas the Night before Christmas" would dissolve the saccharine fantasy of Clement Clarke Moore's original lyrics and reveal some of the sordid underbelly of real Christmas as it is "observed" by most Americans.
    Neither imitation applies. Yesterday's opening should have been presented simply as inspired by the Declaration's opening assumption of the rights of man. Then go on from there.
    I still think, though, that a useful parallel might be developed with the 1776 document's declaration of independence—even if, in the case of animal rights, independence is a more complex concept than political independence from England. For in the case of animal rights, from what would independence be declared? And for whom or what?
    It's not simply a question of animals' independence from something (cruel treatment at our hands, for one essential thing), but also of our independence—from a variety of things: our meat-eating tradition, the market power of the meat industry, perhaps even our inner demons (in contrast to the "better angels of our nature")? A serious obstacle to achieving our "independence" from those (and other) things is that most of them would require a giving-up of something most of us now value—even value so highly as to consider necessity.

I've given the article a new, more accurate title. Its original title is shown below. Despite its being misleading, I'm glad I made a start, however halting and tentative my first step.
 

New Declaration of Independence

A couple of years ago, I wrote an alternative version of the Ten Commandments¹. And the other day, I suggested that, on behalf of animal rights, the poem "Twas the Night before Christmas" needed updating to show that all was not peace upon Earth at that time of the year:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

    My impulse to revise the creeds by which we ought to live has been extending for days to our Declaration of Independence, which declared in writing the "unalienable rights of man."

Other animals, too, I do believe, have rights. And if "the rights of man" existed before they were championed by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and codified in the Declaration of Independence, then so, too, perhaps, did those more fundamental rights of animals. Or, if the rights of man didn't really always exist, but came to exist only by the essential act of a people's pretending that they did and proclaiming them in writing, then a similar pretense and proclamation could be made on behalf and for the sake of animals who cannot speak for themselves.
    It is from that understanding and in that spirit that I propose a New Declaration of Independence. It might open like this:

When, in the course of animal events, it becomes necessary for the animals with a voice to speak for those that have none, and to assume among the powers of the earth the station to which their place in cultural evolution calls them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to speak for the unspeaking.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all animals are created equal with respect to certain unalienable rights, that among these are life....

The recognition of human rights took time, and so will the recognition of animal rights. Conscience calls upon me to begin speaking for the unspeaking, now rather than later.
_______________

1. My statement of the New Ten Commandments needs further revision, mainly to reduce their number so as to avoid redundancy. That was the motivation for the late George Carlin's radical reduction of their number to two.

Why commandments, anyway?

A reader's recent question about my "New Ten Commandments" occasioned my reading them afresh to reconsider doing something about the fact that several of them can be combined.¹ The only reason for specifying precisely ten originally was of course an allusion to The Old Testament (ignoring Mel Brooks's suggestion, in his 1981 film, History of the World, Part I, that Moses had actually received three tablets from God, with fifteen commandments, but had clumsily dropped and shattered one of them). And, as I admitted on July 8, 2008, George Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better by pretty cogently (for a stage entertainer) boiling the ten down to two. I don't propose to compete with Mr. Carlin, however.
    In fact, I'm still very much in cogitation mode about this. Why have commandments anyway (over against civil laws)? What purpose could such a list serve, if little general assent could ever be gained for them, in competition as they would be with a multitude of local customs variously at odds with one another, even if they shared some common evolutionary features? In what sense would they be commandments, anyway? I suspect that this whole business of Mel Brooks's and George Carlin's satires, as well as of Richard Dawkins's revisionist suggestion in The God Delusion [p. 263], is about coming to terms intellectually with human cultural history. We want to understand who we are, in the best (truest) terms we can. And we want to help by sweeping out discredited understandings and recommending progressive insights. (And, of course, the folks rabble-rousing for displaying The Ten Commandments in our court houses want to continue to rail against us progressive upstarts.)

    By the way, the accompanying pictures are of The Georgia Guidestones, a large granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia. Says Wikipedia:

A message comprising ten guides is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages, and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient languages' scripts: Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

For example, Guide #4:"Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason."
    The monument has been attacked by Christian fundamentalists as "The Ten Commandments of the Anti-Christ." Of course, a self-reinforcing principle of fundamentalist belief is that the less sense something makes, or the more difficult it is to believe it, then all the more glorious is the faith that it is true.

My Commandment #1, Imagine that "God" exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you, but don't fall down and worship it, was my wry, finger-in-your-eye take on belief in God, implying that nothing that followed emanated from "Him" because "He" didn't exist and so never issued any. That Book of Moses was brilliant creative writing, though.

My Commandment #2, In all things, try to do no harm, is suspect from the get-go with its "try," revealing that doing no harm is practically impossible. Even the Jains occasionally step on a bug, try as they might not to. Someone who trys to do utterly no harm surely harms himself occasionally in his attempts, if only in inner turmoil.

With #3, Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you, I was opting for the negative version of the Golden Rule, but I personally like the positive version better, with its call to take action (positive) rather than refrain from action (negative). I like to "do good," to help others, more than I like to simply avoid harming them. Obviously, both versions are worthy and have an august history (not that I'm intimately familiar with it). But it may make more sense to command avoidance than to command commission. I think that Jesus wasn't commanding people to do good (positive), but mainly trying to show them a way to live better, to realize "the Kingdom of Heaven" within. He didn't command anyone to love, he was giving them loving advice for personal betterment.

In the case of #4, Don't rush to judgment but give everyone the benefit of an open mind, I overlooked that mammals have evolved to act automatically, for self-preservation, to not give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm not sure I can advise anyone to try to reason with a desperate person who has dynamite strapped around his (or her) torso, whether for religious or other reasons. People do tend to be more closed-minded than they "ought" to be, however, for living harmoniously and progressively in civilized society.

About #5, though, Formulate laws as if you didn't know what your position in the pecking order would be, I cannot be too enthusiastic. Political philosopher John Rawls's principle of the "original position" was a brilliant concept for social justice. But who of us here on the street ever formulates a law?

My #6, Treat all living creatures humanely, is as noble a principle as there is and, in our age of caged animals raised for the commercial food industry, more dishonored than heeded. To stand on a corner with the principle lettered on one's sandwich boards would be a foolish use of one's time and energy. If "God" actually created the food chain (and was thus the first entity to dishonor this principle), then the captains of the food industry are his devoted disciples.

Ha, #7, Always be willing to revise your beliefs according to evidence and reason! Don't we wish! Few of us are able to cast the first stone. At sixty-seven, I've won my beliefs by effort and have waning energy and power to continue revising them, although I have read (in a science article in The New York Times) that "continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you 'bump up against people and ideas' that are different." Still, I hope I have the sense, until the minute of my death, to change my mind because of new evidence or consideration.

#8, Do not indoctrinate your children, but teach them how to think for themselves, is the chicken or the egg of significant cultural advance. If the huge majority of parents could and would stop indoctrinating their children against reason and evidence, religion could die a painless death in a generation or two. But what are the chances of that? Crying The Eighth New Commandment is pissing into the wind. No one is listening, no one will be commanded in this. Or few, anyway.

Speaking of pissing, #9, Support your country when it is right, oppose it when it is wrong, was another pee-pee of mine on the administration of George W. Bush. See my post of December 27, 2006, "Some Dogs I've Known."

And, finally, #10, Question authority; challenge authority that appears illegitimate, is just eighth-grade civics. Still, it's sad that so many downtrodden people (and peoples) of the earth haven't the power to challenge authority, they are so firmly under its boot.
_______________

1. The version currently displayed in my sidebar I formulated on December 29, 2007.

The One Commandment (in just two words)

In response to my report on George Carlin's Two Commandments, the author of Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out goes a step further than Carlin. How about, he proposes, just one commandment—two words:

Be Decent

Some dictionary definitions of "decent" are:

• conforming to standards of propriety, good taste, or morality
• free from immodesty or obscenity
• conforming to current standards of living
• having praiseworthy qualities

Decency of course depends on which standards are considered to apply (and on who's doing the applying). This is the same as with Moses's "Thou shalt not kill," which depended on who or what was considered off-limits to kill (such as a fellow Jew, but not necessarily anyone else and, of course, not the "dumb" animals, who were subject to ritual sacrifice to flatter and placate the Jews' "jealous god").

Be that as it may, I should note that Jim Rix's book convincingly demonstrates that the police and prosecutor who put his innocent cousin away for ten years for murder (Ray Krone was finally released, in April 2002) were not behaving decently with respect to such publicly accepted standards of fairness and justice as discovery of evidence, presumption of innocence [until proven guilty], and reasonable doubt.

By the way, the publisher recently lowered the retail price of Jingle Jangle to $24.95 (from $39). It can currently be had with no charge for shipping or handling from Broken Bench Press. A growing number of discriminating, well-informed readers consider this one of those indispensable books that don't come along often.

Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better

When I took Richard Dawkins up on his suggestion in The God Delusion that the Ten Commandments needed updating to align them with the advances mankind has made in understanding what's what (and what ought to be what), I rather slavishly followed him in retaining the number 10. Of course, he was only following Moses, so why not?
 
 
 
 

But since then George Carlin died (on June 22) and I've been looking into this great man's work. At a UNC library (on June 30) I listened to a CD recording of a live performance he gave not long after 9/11/2001. I was struck by the final segment of his performance, titled on the liner notes, "Why we don't need 10 commandments." Unfortunately, I didn't take notes, or I'd have shared this with you sooner. But fortunately, I discovered yesterday that in the library's copy of Carlin's 2004 book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, there's a section titled "The Two Commandments" [pp. 14-18, emphasis mine] that contains the same material (possibily edited and improved).

Carlin shows his brilliance right off. Unlike Dawkins and me, he's sensitive to having a numerical

problem with the Ten Commandments....Why are there ten? We don't need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It's clearly a padded list.
    Here's how it happened: About five thousand years ago, a bunch of religious and political hustlers....

Of course, Dawkins and I too knew about the hustlers, so why didn't we follow suit, perhaps along Carlin's lines:

...Ten sounds important. Ten is the basis for the decimal system; it's a decade. It's a psychologically satisfying number: the top ten; the ten most wanted; the ten best dressed. So deciding on ten commandments was clearly a marketing decision. And it's obviously a bullshit list....

In all fairness, I have to acknowledge Mel Brooks for having a similar insight. In his 1981 movie, "History of the World, Part I," Moses comes down from Sinai bearing three tablets and begins to explain them as "the "Fift—" but he drops and breaks one..."the Ten Commandments...."

Back to Carlin:

Okay, right off the bat, the first three commandments—pure bullshit. "Sabbath day," "Lord's name," "strange gods." [He's using the Catholic version "because those are the ones I was fed as a little boy."]...Spooky language designed to scare and control primitive people. In no way does superstitious mumbo jumbo like this apply to the lives of intelligent, civilized humans in the twenty-first century.

That leaves seven. Then he's quickly down to six by observing that the next commandment (about honoring thy father and mother) overlooks that

obedience and respect should not be granted automatically. They should be earned. They should be based on the parents' (or the authority figure's) performance. Some parents deserve respect. Most of them don't.

Then, in the interest of logic ("something religion has a really hard time with"), he skips the fifth commandment for a bit and proceeds to the sixth and seventh (against stealing and bearing false witness), which he points out "cover the same sort of behavior: dishonesty." He combines them as "Thou shalt not be dishonest." Down to five.

And then quickly down to four with the combination of the eighth and ninth (about adultery and coveting thy neighbor's wife) as "Thou shalt not be unfaithful."

And when you think about it further, honesty and fidelity are actually part of the same overall value. So, in truth, we could combine the two honesty commandments with the two fidelity commandments, and, using positive language instead of negative, call the whole thing "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful." And now we're down to three.

And the next (the final one on Moses's list),

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods" [note "that coveting takes place in the mind"]
    ...is just plain stupid. Coveting your neighbor's goods is what keeps the economy going: Your neighbor gets a vibrator that plays "Oh Come All Ye Faithful," you want to get one, too. Coveting creates jobs....You throw out coveting and you're down to two...,

one of which is the one we skipped, the fifth:

Thou shalt not kill.
    Murder....But, if you give it a little thought, you realize that religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason.
    To cite a few examples, just think about Irish history, the Middle Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, our own abortion-doctor killings and, yes, the World Trade Center¹ to see how seriously religious people take Thou Shalt Not Kill. Apparently, to religious folks—especially the truly devout—murder is negotiable. It just depends on who's doing the killing and who's getting killed.²

He offers the revision,

Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless, of course, they pray to a different invisible avenger than the one you pray to.

Finally,

Two is all you need, folks. Moses could have carried them down the hill in his pocket.

Carlin can be heard and seen delivering this deconstruction.
_______________

1. The World Trade Center is where Sam Harris starts in his own heraldic 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
2. "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conquerer. Kill them all, and you are a god." – Thoughts of a Biologist, Jean Rostand, 1939.

"The American Dream"

What "American Dream"?

Barack Obama's presidential campaign seems to be going with "The American Dream" mythology. A couple of weeks ago, a glossy flyer from his campaign featured a graphic with the phrase, "Reclaiming the American Dream." And yesterday arrived a letter (signed by Senator Obama and addressed to me "personally") asking for a contribution, implicitly to help him and others "reclaim the American Dream." Just what dream isn't spelled out.

The letter refers to dreams "of some factory workers," "of a woman who works the night shift after a full day of college," "of a young woman who was tricked into buying a home she couldn't afford," and "of a mother who gave Barack a bracelet inscribed with the name of her son." I guess people are expected to fill in the blanks and imagine whatever dream they want.

A book reviewed in today's New York Times Book Review has the subtitle, "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream." What dreams will its readers fill in the blanks with? The dream that by believing hard enough you can get whatever you want ("God willing"), even a born-again Christian in the White House? The dream that America can keep all of the Mexicans out? The dream that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals will just shut up and go back into their closets? The dream that everyone will watch Fox News and agree that the government is right about everything?

Some flip-side dreams: In America, you can be free of religious oppression. In America, if you can get across the border and establish yourself, you can make a new life. In America, you and your partner will receive equal treatment, whatever the gender of your partner. In America, can should be able to have free, objective, informed discussion.

The Wikipedia's American Dream entry mentions getting stuff (material, position, power, leisure, whatever your goals area) by dint of hard work, but it's obvious that hard work is not the first thing that comes to the mind of many an American dreamer. The blue collar worker who votes Republican seems to dream of making it someday and becoming one of George W. Bush's "have mores," forgetting that Bush had connections and was a legacy admit at Yale. Under the right circumstances hard work isn't necessary, as the career of Bush himself illustrates.

Many a reader of People Magazine seems to dream of attaining the lifestyle of Brad and Angelina (if you just follow their careers closely enough and read all of those glossy magazines at the supermarket checkout).

Many still seem to dream that Americans old enough to vote will inform themselves and vote intelligently, even though we know that millions of Americans don't vote, and millions more vote the way their pastor or Fox or someone else with a special interest tells them to. As George Carlin said, "It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

"The American Dream" has become such a hackneyed phrase, I'm surprised that Obama and advertisers and the authors of books are still trying to exploit it. Maybe they know something about the American public that I continue to dream isn't so.

In America, there seems to be a dream for everyone. In America, you can dream on.

In memoriam: George Carlin (1937-2008)

As a friend wrote to me today, I say to you:

Click on this link to go to [a site where you can link to] YouTube and hear Carlin's routine on "Stuff." It is hysterical.

Wikipedia entry.