Soul and Grace

In What It Means to Have a Soul I suggested that Jews and Christians share a belief that we human beings each possess a God-given immaterial and eternal soul. But recently I have run across a New York Times article that disputes this idea as it applies in particular to Jewish religion, as based in the Hebrew Bible. "After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James," by Avi Steinberg, talks about literary critic Robert Alter's newly completed translation of the books that make up the Hebrew Bible, the canon which Christians call the Old Testament.

Hebrew Bible translator
Robert Alter

Christian connotations of the "soul" indicate an incorporeal and immortal being, i.e., the dualism of the soul as existing apart from the body. The word for "soul" actually found in the Hebrew Bible is nefesh. Rather than the King James Bible's rendering of nefesh as "soul," the actual Hebrew word, writes Steinberg, "suggests not the immaterial soul but the material, mortal parts of the body, the things that make us alive on this earth."

I'm not at all sure precisely what this distinction ought to mean to me as a Catholic Christian. One thing that I do believe Christians ought to take away from this distinction between Christianity and other religions is not to see it as yet another reason to despise Jews.

Which brings me to my second topic: grace.

Peter Wehner

Peter Wehner's article "The Uncommon Power of Grace" talks about that theological term as representing "Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions (emphasis mine)." That is, none of the other major religions of this world of ours has at its theological center the notion of "the unmerited favor of God" — the "unconditional love given to the undeserving" — which includes us all, because none of us actually merits the unconditional love of God.

I find that idea truly compelling — much more so than questions about the existence or nonexistence of an immortal soul. I've sometimes heard "grace" talked about in dry theological terms, just as I've heard "soul" talked about. But no discussion of grace has truly grabbed me before.

So now I guess I'll have to read the book Peter Wehner mentions, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?" by Philip Yancey, in order to find out more.

P.S. I need to emphasize yet again that I imagine I'll have a problem with Yancey's ideas if they turn out to suggest that Jewish religion is lacking j\in not likewise having grace as its central idea ...

*****

I've now begun reading Philip Yancey's What’s So Amazing About Grace?. A lot of the first part of the book focuses on how grace as a theological concept is often either skipped hastily over in many Christian churches or completely removed from the Bible readings, teachings, and sermons.

"Good things come not from our own efforts, rather by the grace of God," writes Yancey. That's what Jesus tries to communicate to us in the Gospels, yet that's exactly what many Christians tend to forget. Instead, we think our heavenly reward depends on our own striving to be good. We live in a meritocracy today, and so we think the good things we receive in our lives on Earth are also dependent on our deservingness. Yet they too come from God ... as do all things.

"Grace is Christianity’s best gift to the world," Yancey writes, "a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate." It seems to me we need to seek God's grace in our world more today than at any other time in my lifetime.

Our religions do indeed teach us about moral proscriptions. But those prohibitions, says Yancey, are not nearly as crucial as learning about God's grace: his unmerited gifts to us that we don't deserve or earn. Even though "Catholics, Mennonites, Churches of Christ, Lutherans, and Southern Baptists all have their own custom agenda of legalism," they pale in insignificance beside grace as the most important thing Jesus knew and taught.

In fact, "Somehow throughout history the church has managed to gain a reputation for its ungrace." ("Ungrace" is Yancey's term for the exact opposite of grace.) "Nowadays legalism has changed its focus. In a thoroughly secular culture, the church is more likely to show ungrace through a spirit of moral superiority or a fierce attitude toward opponents in the 'culture wars'.”

"In truth, though, a virulent strain of ungrace shows up in all religions," Yancey adds. Not only that, "In a dark irony, the humanists who rebel against religion often manage to invent worse forms of ungrace. At modern universities, activists for “liberal” causes — feminism, the environment, multiculturalism — may demonstrate a harsh spirit of ungrace."

Crippling shame is Enemy Number One of grace: there are "three common sources of crippling shame: secular culture, graceless religion, and unaccepting parents. Secular culture tells us a person must look good, feel good, and make good. Graceless religion tells us we must follow the letter of the rules, and failure will bring eternal rejection. Unaccepting parents — “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!” — convince us we will never meet their approval.

As for whether grace is a uniquely Christian teaching — despite being so often ignored in churches — Yancey writes:

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.”

After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law — each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.

Aware of our inbuilt resistance to grace, Jesus talked about it often. He described a world suffused with God’s grace: where the sun shines on people good and bad; where birds gather seeds gratis, neither plowing nor harvesting to earn them; where untended wildflowers burst into bloom on the rocky hillsides. Like a visitor from a foreign country who notices what the natives overlook, Jesus saw grace everywhere. Yet he never analyzed or defined grace, and almost never used the word. Instead, he communicated grace through stories we know as parables—which I will take the liberty of transposing into a modern setting.

I need further convincing about the idea that grace is uniquely taught by Christianity — but I know from personal experience that I myself do have an inbuilt resistance to grace. And I will have to read further in the book to learn how it might be, as Yancey tells us, that “righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.” After all, righteousness is another key teaching of religion. How can a receptivity to grace peacefully coexist with the call to righteousness?

What It Means to Have a Soul

We've just finished the annual Jewish celebration of Hanukkah!

I'm not Jewish (I'm Catholic) but I've recently run across a discussion of the meaning of Hanukkah that I think Christians like myself ought to take note of. It's "Hanukkah and the Soul," by Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an author and a columnist for Hamodia.

Jews and Christians share the idea that each human possesses a God-given eternal soul. This soul can never be extinguished. The story of Hanukkah, the "Festival of Lights," speaks to this non-extinguishability by telling of how Jews called Maccabees drove pagan Greek-Syrians from the (Second) Temple in Jerusalem during the second century prior to the Common Era. The Maccabees then re-dedicated the Temple but found, according to Wikipedia,

... that almost all of the ritual olive oil had been profaned. They found only a single container that was still sealed by the High Priest, with enough oil to keep the menorah in the Temple lit for a single day. They used this, yet it burned for eight days (the time it took to have new oil pressed and made ready).

Today's version of the menorah is, of course, the eight-branched candelabrum illustrated above. (That used in the ancient Temple had just six branches.) The central or ninth candle of the modern menorah is kept burning during the Festival and is simply used to light one more of the other eight candles on each of the nights of Hanukkah.

Mr. Shafran indicates in his column that the number eight is "the number associated in Jewish texts with that which is beyond perceptible nature." It accordingly betokens our immaterial, inextinguishable soul.

The ancient Greeks did not believe in an immaterial, inextinguishable soul. And, as Mr. Shafran points out, neither do today's nonbelievers. They are instead "materialists" who contend everything that exists "can be reduced to the physical."

An awful lot rides on the question of whether or not this is so. Mr. Shafran continues:

If we humans are nothing more than our physical cells, and the innate human awareness of our souls and sense of free will are mere illusions, we have no ultimate value beyond that of any insect. And no compulsion, beyond an ultimately meaningless utilitarian social contract, to bind ourselves to any ethical or moral system.

This is something we all ought to ponder with the utmost seriousness, in this time when the American president is daily accused of not being committed to any ethical or moral system!

Bring Out the Best, Part 1

I'm hereby launching a series of blog posts about civility. It seems to me that as a society, our civility has gone downhill in recent times. Of course, one sign of this is the behavior of our president, Donald Trump. But our civility has been in decline since before Mr. Trump ran for president.

Civility is actually a hard word to define. It's sort of like what one Supreme Court justice wrote several years ago about pornography, the subject of a case the Supreme Court was reviewing. Justice Potter Stewart held in an opinion about the case Jacobellis v. Ohio:

... that the Constitution protected all obscenity except "hard-core pornography". He wrote, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it ...

I think we all likewise know civility — and also its opposite, incivility — whenever we see it or do it.

What civility "looks like"

We hear so much about expressions of hate today. When one is filled with hate one tends to be uncivil. And one often feels entirely justified in his or her hatefulness and incivility.

Our incivility is very often a reaction to somebody else's hatefulness and incivility. Incivility thus breeds incivility.

On the other hand, I find in my day-to-day experience that civility breeds civility. I try to smile and say hello to strangers I encounter — say, when I am at the coffee dispensers while I'm eating breakfast at Panera. I may make some non-threatening comment such as, "I see you like the dark roast coffee. So do I!"

That word, "non-threatening," is crucial. I think hatred, incivility, and all their countless synonyms have to do with our feeling threatened by someone in some way. When we feel another person may be a threat, it is very hard for us to smile at them and be nice and civil to them.

If we feel threatened, then — if only at some perhaps unconscious level of our mental apparatus — we will experience fear. Our hatred and incivility are apt to be the result of our fear.

We fear, of course, any apparent threat to our own personal lives and well-being. But we likewise react negatively to anyone or anything that we interpret as menacing our families and loved ones.

By extension from that fact, we tend to include within our personal circle — i.e., the people we don't feel threatened by — certain individuals who aren't our own family members but whose friendship we trust in and believe in. And by further extension, we tend to include within our personal circle of people we trust and believe in other people we don't actually know, as long as they seem to be "just like us."

All that is normal and natural.

The question is: When we encounter people who don't, on the surface, seem to be "just like us," how do we nevertheless find it within ourselves the ability to be civil to them?

In the area in which I live, including the court I live on, I encounter lots of people who don't look like me and in various ways don't act just like me. Often, this is due to racial/ethnic differences, but it can also be due to age differences, gender differences, etc. etc. etc.

I have found that the best way to deal with such social situations is with civility. I smile. I act in a friendly way toward everyone. And I find that my smiling civility, my niceness, and my friendliness are almost always returned in kind to me.

Civility, I think, is that approach to living which brings out the best in us. Incivility, on the other hand, brings out the beast in us.

That's enough for my first installment about civility. Stay tuned for later installments ....

Vote!

It's Election Day today! Please, if you are a registered voter and have not done so already, go vote!

This front-page article in today's Washington Post says there are usually huge numbers of "nonvoters" in America's midterm elections. This year, those who don't show up to vote may be deciding America's future, for better or for worse.

If you are reading this, you may already know I'm in favor of liberal Democrats. You may not feel the same way. That's OK! I still urge you to go vote!

You may feel put off by the way politics is being conducted these days, with both sides treating opponents as if they were in league with the devil. I agree! All the poisonous hatefulness in politics today is truly ugly! And you know what? It's happening because every politician is anxious to draw maximum support from his or her "base." That's because anyone who is outside one of the two parties' political "bases" may not even vote at all. So why even try to appeal to him or her?

Pardon my French, but this kind of polarization sucks!

And if ugly political polarization is one of the reasons you don't feel inclined to vote, your not going to the polls on Election Day today is actually going to accentuate the ugly polarization!

Depending on where you live in the United States, your vote actually could make a big difference as to who wins certain races. This is so even though a great many nonvoters will tell you they believe their vote makes no difference at all!

This year there are 35 seats in the U.S. Senate up for grabs. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight website says there's a one-in-five chance that the Democrats will win control of the Senate:

That is, there's a one-in-five chance that this year's election will wind up putting a total of at least 51 Democrats in the 100-member U.S. Senate next year. Right now, the Democrats (including the two Independent senators who "caucus" with them) have 49 seats, and the Republicans are in the majority at 51 seats.

So expert forecaster Nate Silver is predicting that there is a one-in-five chance that the Democrats will pick up a net gain of at least two Senate seats, and thereby win control of the Senate.

Mr. Silver believes there are two Senate races that are toss-ups — the one in Missouri and the one in Nevada:

In Missouri, incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, is pitted against Republican Josh Hawley in a super-tight race. In Nevada, incumbent Republican Senator Dean Heller is pitted against Democratic challenger Jacky Rosen in another race that is super-tight.

Mr. Silver believes those two states are among the states that are most likely to decide which party controls the Senate next year:

Each of those two states — Nevada and Missouri — has over a 10-percent chance of being the "tipping point" which determines which party controls the U.S. Senate. In Nevada alone, the "voter power index" is the third largest of all the states', meaning there is a high "relative likelihood" that any particular individual voter in Nevada will determine the majority party in the Senate!

(And notice that the "voter power index" in top-ranked North Dakota is an ultra-high 26.3, meaning that North Dakotans' decisions whether or not to go to the polls today may have a huge impact on our country's future.)

If Nevada and Missouri both go for their Democratic Senate hopefuls, and if the Democrats hold onto their current leads in 25 other states, there would wind up being exactly 50 Democrats (including two Independents) in the Senate next year. There would be exactly 50 Republicans. The Senate would be evenly split. Vice President Pence, a Republican, would break any tie votes that occur.

To repeat: there is a pretty fair chance that the Senate could wind up being divided 50-50 next year, which means that any Senate vote that strictly follows party lines would have the tie broken by Vice President Pence.

So I'm saying that everything hangs in the balance today, Election Day 2018. Our political system is so close to being exactly evenly divided that America's so-called "nonvoters" who decide to actually go vote today may decide our country's future. So go vote!

Identity Politics

Identity Politics,
Depicted

I suppose I'm lucky in that I don't have any notable "identity." By that I mean than none of my demographic attributes constitute paplable fodder for so-called "identity politics." I am

• White
• Male
• Heterosexual
• Of an ethnic background that is a mix of English, Scots, and Scots-Irish
• A native English speaker
• A native-born American citizen
• Middle or even upper-middle in socioeconomic class
• A graduate of a good university, Georgetown
• Suburban

It's true that I am also

• Over 70 years of age, and so I might conceivably someday find myself a victim of ageism (though I've never run into any such thing in my own actual life)
• Catholic (as a convert from Protestantism), though I've never been discriminated against because of my faith (or lack thereof)
• Medically disabled, though not obviously so to other people; I've never encountered any sort of discrimination because of health problems

So my voting and political leanings are not informed by any personal resentment against any sort of discrimination against what I seem to represent in the eyes of others. Political pundits have been opining for decades, however, that many American voters are persuaded by identity politics. Generally speaking, this has been the central organizing principle of the voting coalition that in recent decades has put Democrats into office instead of Republicans.

But in 2016, or so the story goes, that stopped working for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Though she outpolled Donald Trump among such groups as African Americans, Latinos, and highly educated white women, President Trump dominated among white working-class voters, especially men. Clinton could not draw enough votes among her target identity groups to overcome Trump's electoral advantages in key states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Now we are about to have an off-year election in which, pundits are saying, there could be a "blue wave" that will help the Democrats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives as sell as in state governorships and other state and local elections. An unusually large number of Democratic office seekers this year are women, and women voters (especially those with college degrees) are one of the key identity groups that Democrats think they need major support from if they are to produce a "blue wave" in 2018.

*****

Carlos Lozada,
Washington Post

But book reviewer Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post has just reviewed a whole slew of books that display various attitudes, often conflicting ones, about identity politics. "Show me your identification.
Identity politics may divide us. But ultimately we can’t unite without it," Lozada's essay, is tremendously worth reading.

I admit, though, that after I read it, I found myself quite dubious about the basic legitimacy of identity politics. And yet ... the main takeaway from the Lozada article is just the opposite: that identity politics can ultimately rescue us from the political polarization we see today — and that identity politics itself has contributed mightily to during the last several decades.

I will leave it to you readers of this blog post to think about the various attitudes toward identity politics which Lozada mentions in his article. What you take away from Lozada's discussion is apt to differ from his own expressed attitudes, as well as from the one I am myself about to express.

*****

The one I would like to express here has to do with enmity. To me, keying on group identity in politics is keying on the enmity that group members can be expected to have toward those "on the other side." If I were black, for instance, I might feel enmity toward (a) all whites, or (b) just those whites who "hate" me because of my color.

If I were gay, I might feel a visceral enmity toward homophobes.

As a male of the species, I admit to sometimes entertaining misogynistic thoughts, as if feminists were an enemy.

If I were poor, I might see the top "one percent" as enemies.

Pundits talk about the rise of "tribalism" today. When we engage in identity politics, I'd say we are engaging in tribalism. Up with the tribes we personally identify as being members of, down with the enemies of those tribes!

*****

But Jesus taught in the Gospel of Matthew 5:43-48:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

It was those verses that dominated my own reaction to Lozada's article and to the attitudes toward identity politics he muses upon. Why did Jesus say "love your enemies," I wondered, instead of just making a blanket adjuration to "love everybody"? I think his choice of words represents the perhaps sad fact that we are all, including myself, prone to identifying our supposed "enemies" and then striving to wipe them out in some literal or metaphorical way. We want to "see them dead" — if not necessarily physically, then in terms of other, more abstract demises that we first envision and then strive to impose on them.

In short, we are all basically tribal creatures. This fact is somewhat offset by the fact that we are notably civilized, and many of us inherit our culture from a religious tradition which includes what Jesus so radically taught at Matthew 5:43-48.

*****

At this point in my own personal musings about identity politics as I read the Lozada article, I simply had to give up trying to mesh the whole approach to identity politics with the "love your enemies" idea that Jesus taught. I realized that my own religious faith is too faint, my own personal wisdom too weak, to really and truly be able to fully live by such words as these, uttered by Martin Luther King:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

And:

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

So I admit it: my own political orientation in favor of Democrats over Republicans and Trump haters over Trump supporters is tinged with, yes, enmity and tribalism. If my faith in my supposed religion — Catholic Christianity — were stronger, I'm sure I would at this point have to ask everyone to pray for my soul, and for their own souls as well.

Give 'Em Ten!

Brett Kavanaugh being sworn
in as a Supreme Court Justice

We Democrats just lost our bid to keep Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's controversial nominee for an open Supreme Court seat, from gaining approval by an ultra-narrow Senate vote of 50-48. Trump might get at least one more chance to choose a member of the Supreme Court, especially if he gets re-elected in 2020. From a Democratic perspective, that would be a huge disaster.

In about a month, on Tuesday, November 6, Americans will go to the polls to elect members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, as well as state governors and legislators. I see the U.S. Senate races as the most crucial. If Democrats can gain a Senate majority, what happened with the Kavanaugh nomination can't recur, since all U.S. Supreme Court nominees must gain the votes of a majority of U.S. Senators or their nominations are defeated.

Right now, there are 51 Republican members of the U.S. Senate. The Democrats (including two Independents who caucus with them) number 49. If the Democrats can pick up just two more seats, they will hold a Senate majority.

*****

Real Clear Politics is a website that tries to project election winners based on current polling. Take a look at this Real Clear Politics (RCP) Senate map. As of today, Monday, October 8, it shows that seven of this year's Senate races are presently considered tossups:

• AZ: Open (R)
• FL: Nelson (D)
• IN: Donnelly (D)
• MO: McCaskill (D)
• MT: Tester (D)
• NV: Heller (R)
• TN: Open (R)

Four of the tossup races have Democratic incumbents: Nelson of Florida; Donnelly of Indiana; McCaskill of Missouri; and Tester of Montana. Two now have GOP incumbents who occupy "open" seats with no incumbent running in 2018: Arizona and Tennessee. And one of the tossups has a Republican incumbent who is running again: Heller of Nevada.

If Democrats Nelson, Donnelly, McCaskill, and Tester all win re-election, and if two of the three tossup states that now are "open" or have a GOP incumbent switch to electing a Democrat, the likelihood is that there would be 49 Republicans in the new Senate and 51 Democrats or Independents who vote Democratic. In other words, we Democrats are now just two seats away from controlling a majority of the seats in the U.S. Senate.

Yesterday I decided to put my money where my mouth is. I donated $10 to each of the Democrats running for the Senate in the seven RCP tossup states.

To be quite precise, I also donated $10 to the Democratic opponent of Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz: a man whose name is Beto O'Rourke. As of yesterday, the Cruz-O'Rourke race was considered a tossup, though today it's listed as leaning toward Cruz. Furthermore, I donated $10 to Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat whose race in North Dakota was until very recently categorized as a tossup.

How did I accomplish my donations? Simple. Each race listed on the Real Clear Politics page has a clickable link. Click on it, and you'll see a page devoted to the Senate race in that particular state. Each candidate has a photo on the page under which there's a link to his or her campaign site. For example, in the Montana Senate race, Democrat Jon Tester's campaign site is here.

Each campaign site contains a prominently displayed link with a title such as "Contribute" or "Donate." That's what you click on. You'll then see a page that allows you to specify a credit card and an amount. As you make your contribution, keep firmly in mind that you do not have to sign up to join any particular political organization, and you do not need make your contribution more than just a one-time gift.

Political contributions of this type are not tax-deductible, by the way. But I'm hoping you'll agree with me that they are an excellent way to help make the country more small-d democratic ... and also a fine way to help make it more Big-D Democratic!

If you hope for a Democratic "blue wave" election in 2018, as do I, I encourage you to do as I just did: pick out whichever Senate candidates whose races you consider the most crucial this year, and in each case "give 'em $10"!

Remembering President Truman

President Truman

It's hard for me to remember the first U.S. president of my lifetime, Harry S. Truman, who occupied the Oval Office from April 12, 1945, to January 20, 1953. In January 1953, I was only six years old.

Truman came to be president because he was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president. FDR died suddenly not long after, in January 1945, being inaugurated for his fourth (!) term in office. After having been elected for a first term in 1932, Roosevelt had shepherded America through the Great Depression and then ushered us into World War II after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which he called "a date that will live in infamy" in his December 8 speech to Congress and the nation.

Our main allies during the long, devastating war against Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, and Imperial Japan, under Emperor Hirohito, were two: Great Britain and Soviet Russia. Britain's leader was its redoubtable prime minister, Winston Churchill. The U.S.S.R. was under the thumb of a communist dictator, Marshal Josef Stalin. Also on the side of the Germans and Japanese, in what was termed the Axis Powers, was Italy under the dictatorship of "Il Duce," Benito Mussolini. Early in the war, Paris had fallen to German guns, after which General George de Gaulle became the leader of the "Free French" in exile. In China, meanwhile, General Chiang Kai-shek had long been his country's dictator when his capital city, Nanking, fell to Japanese massacre in December 1937.

Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, de Gaulle, Hirohito, Chiang Kai-shek: all were names to be conjured with by journalists and historians of the times. Truman: not so much.

Yet President Truman turned out to be as staunch and significant as any of those men during his crucial first four months in office, from April through July 1945. So says A.J. Baime, author of The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World. Until becoming the surprise selection of FDR as his new vice president in 1944, Truman had been the junior senator from Missouri. His name and face were virtually unknown to the American public. In fact, before the 1944 campaign, Truman had met Roosevelt only casually, once or twice in the Oval Office. Roosevelt told his advisers while they were conferring over the choice of a running mate, that he, Roosevelt, scarcely remembered Truman.

Roosevelt was already so deathly ill by January 1945 that he was forced to take his last oath of office in the Rose Garden of the White House, instead of at the U.S. Capitol. Truman, who had taken his vice presidential oath there and then as well, knew he was but a heartbeat away from the presidency, and it scared the dickens out of him. He seriously doubted he was made of the right stuff to be president.

But he could do what needed to be done, as Baime attests. The blurb about the book at Amazon.com says:

The first four months of Truman’s administration saw the founding of the United Nations, the fall of Berlin, victory at Okinawa, firebombings of Tokyo, the first atomic explosion, the Nazi surrender, the liberation of concentration camps, the mass starvation of Europe, the Potsdam Conference, the controversial decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Imperial Japan, and finally, the end of World War II and the rise of the Cold War. No other president had ever faced so much in such a short period of time.

Truman, a Democrat, would narrowly win re-election in 1948 in a race whose early results incorrectly had him losing to Republican Thomas Dewey:

After serving four more years in the White House, Truman chose not to run for another term. He was content to retire with his wife Bess to their old home in Missouri, as the World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower took the reins as the new Republican president. At the time he retired, Truman was considered one of the most unpopular chief executives in history, with a job approval rating of only 22% in the Gallup Poll of February 1952. Yet, according to Wikipedia,

U.S. public feeling towards Truman grew steadily warmer with the passing years; as early as 1962, a poll of 75 historians conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. ranked Truman among the "near great" presidents. The period following his death [in 1972] consolidated a partial rehabilitation of his legacy among both historians and members of the public.

The Accidental President helps us understand both why Truman was so under-appreciated during his lifetime and why he he has become, in retrospect, one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.

R.I.P. Aretha!

Aretha Franklin, who died about a week ago at the age of 76, was laid to rest yesterday. Her funeral was held at the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit, the city in which she had been raised.

Aretha revolutionized popular music back in the late 1960s with the unique sound of her soaring, soulful voice. Here's one of her signature songs, "Respect":

Her funeral service lasted over eight hours. The musical tributes alone took over two hours:

Aretha's first Top Ten record, "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)," came in 1967. She had been trying for a hit single for seven years, since 1960. Before she switched to secular music, she'd been a gospel singer. Her secular music never lost the gospel sound. The same could be said of another great singer of that time, Ray Charles.

Aretha was the Queen of Soul, a.k.a. "Lady Soul." The term "soul music" came to the fore in the mid-1960s, replacing (temporarily) the term "rhythm and blues." It was in Aretha's music that I, as a 20-year-old middle-class white guy, came to understand what "soul" meant.

In the context of today's rancid politics, Aretha's eight-hour funeral was a political statement. I invite you to think of it as such!

Whither Urbanity?

Moderator John Daly
Dorothy Kilgallen,
Fred Allen, Arlene Francis,
Bennett Cerf

I've been binge-watching an old television game show from the 1950s-1970s, "What's My Line." It's the cream of the crop of those old panel-type shows in which well-known celebrities try to guess something — in this case, the unusual line of work of a contestant (decorously called a "challenger.")

The master of ceremonies of the Sunday night program was John Daly, who on weeknights on another network (ABC, not CBS) was the anchorman of the nightly news. The panelists, seated left to right, were usually:

• Dorothy Kilgallen, who wrote the "Voice of Broadway" column for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal-American
• Fred Allen, whose mordant-yet-gentle wit had been the raison d'être of the popular "Allen's Alley" program, the top-rated radio show of 1946-47
• Arlene Francis, a pioneer for women on television, who from 1954-57 was host and editor-in-chief of "Home," NBC's hour-long daytime magazine program
• Bennett Cerf, whose Random House publishing firm published such writers as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, and many others.

Each challenger in turn was called by Mr. Daly to "come in and sign in, please." He or she did so on a small chalkboard, then walked by the panel shaking hands with each panelist in turn. If the challenger was female, Mr. Cerf and Mr. Allen would rise to shake hands, at which point you could easily see the men were wearing tuxedos. (The women panelists would dress as for a fancy cocktail party.) Once seated next to Mr. Daly, the challenger would field yes-or-no questions from the panelists concerning his or her occupation or profession. Each "no" answer would earn the challenger the vast sum of $5. If the total mounted to $50, the challenger would have stumped the panel, and the game was over. But the panel maintained a .750 batting average over the course of time, guessing the line of work correctly 3 out of 4 times.

The centerpiece of each episode was a "mystery guest." He, she, or sometimes they would appear on the stage only after Mr. Daly had instructed the panel to don blindfolds, since the guest or guests would be instantly recognizable to them (and was instantly recognized by the studio and at-home audience.)

Barbra Streisand as a "mystery guest"
on "What's My Line" in 1964

"What's My Line" was fun not just because the guess-the-occupation or -identity premise was interesting, but also because the moderator and panelists were so urbane, witty, and cosmopolitan. They were bastions of civility with a capital "C." They were unflappably polite, supremely polished, ever-decorous. Though there was a lot of good-natured ribbing, there was never any skewering, any snark, any snideness. It was okay back then for the male panelists to comment (in a gracious way) on how pretty certain of the women challengers were, and the female panelists would not hesitate to extol the handsomeness or ruggedness of certain of the male challengers — this, although all the panelists were well known to be happily married to people who were likewise in the upper crust of the New York social and entertainment world. (In fact, Arlene Francis's husband, actor Martin Gabel, was often a guest panelist on the show.)

It was a show from a more relaxed, happier time, I think — well before all the venom, vituperation, coarseness, and in-your-face sexuality we witness today in our social media and in our popular entertainments.

The Bears Ears Controversy

In my last post, "The Coming Green Wave," I mentioned the controversy over Bears Ears National Monument. It's a wilderness area in southeastern Utah that was declared a national monument by President Barack Obama in December 2016. In December 2017, President Donald Trump reduced it drastically in size.

Here's a map. You can click to enlarge it:

Pursuant to President Trump's order, only the Indian Creek Unit and the Shash Jáa Unit will remain protected.

Some Bears Ears photos:

Get the picture? Bears Ears is a national treasure: lovely, vast, unspoiled, once the home of ancient North American Pueblo peoples. Many Native American tribes today still consider sites within Bears Ears sacred:

The Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribal governments are working together to defend the Bears Ears National Monument. They support two bills now in Congress: H.R.4518, the Bears Ears National Monument Expansion Act, and S. 2354, the Antiquities Act of 2018. These bills would restore and expand the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument to the full boundary originally proposed by the five tribes in 2015.

A national monument is "a protected area that is similar to a national park, but can be created from any land owned or controlled by the federal government by proclamation of the President of the United States." The main difference between a national monument and a national park is that the latter must be created by an act of Congress; the U.S. president, acting alone, can declare a national monument. This is what President Obama did with respect to Bears Ears.

My understanding is that if it were to remain a fully protected area, none of the original Bears Ears National Monument could undergo oil or uranium extraction; real estate development; agricultural use other than cattle grazing, which is permitted; destructive forms of recreational use; etc. After being shrunk, some 85 percent of the original site would no longer be protected.

Mr. Trump's Bears Ears order also cut another national monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, to about half its original size.

Grand Staircase-Escalante

Grand Staircase-Escalante was declared a national monument by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

I am about to donate to the Bears Ear Defense Fund, set up by the Grand Canyon Trust. I invite you to donate to this fund or any other worthy organization that works to defend Bears Ears.

The Coming Green Wave

Timothy Egan

"A Green Wave is coming this November," writes New York Times op-ed columnist Timothy Egan, who calls it "the pent-up force of the most overlooked constituency in America. These independents, Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and Democrats on the sideline have been largely silent as the Trump administration has tried to destroy a century of bipartisan love of the land."

Mr. Egan rightly feels Mr. Trump deserves much blame for supporting our country's continuing to burn coal, thereby exacerbating climate change. He says the record firestorms in the American West and in Canada this year may finally convince voters to vote "green," in view of the fact that climate scientists are at last confirming that global warming causes strange weather patterns that can lead to forest fires, hurricanes, and (as is happening here in Maryland) repeated heavy rainstorms that produce scary, killing, financially costly flash floods.

The coming Green Wave of anti-Trump/anti-GOP voting, Mr. Egan says, will arise because:

... if just one unorganized voting segment, the 60 million bird-watchers of America, sent a unified political message this fall, you’d have a political block with more than 10 times the membership of the National Rifle Association.

Bird-watchers in Colorado

And also because:

While President Trump tries to prop up the dying and dirty coal industry with taxpayer subsidies, the outdoor recreation industry has been roaring along. It is a $374-billion-a-year economy, by the government’s own calculation, and more than twice that size by private estimates.

Huge numbers of outdoorsy potential voters are already in revolt:

The revolt started after Trump shrunk several national monuments in the West last year — the largest rollback of public land protection in our history. The outdoor retailer Patagonia responded with a blank screen on its web page with the statement, “The President Stole Your Land.” It was the first shot in a battle that has been raging all summer.

Bears Ears National Monument in Utah
was shrunk by presidential order this year.

The ultimate size of the revolt could be phenomenal. After all, "144 million Americans ... participated in an outdoor activity last year," writes Mr. Egan, and there were "344 million overall visitors to national parks."

If just a tenth of these patrons of national parks and a tenth of all these outdoors-loving people show up at the polls and vote "green" this year, it could dramatically change our politics going into the 2020 presidential election year.

Thomas L. Friedman

And then, writes Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman in "What if Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?," Katy bar the door!

What if all the extreme weather this year — linked to climate change — gets even worse and more costly? What if the big 2020 issue is not left-right — but hot-cold or wet-dry? What if the big 2020 issue is not “Who lost Russia?” or “Who lost North Korea?” but “Who lost planet Earth?” ...

Mother Nature is done letting us pretend that we don’t know and can’t connect the dots — and that could create some very interesting politics. ...

Sure, Trump will sneer that “green” is girlyman, uneconomic, unpatriotic and vaguely French. But Democrats can easily counter that green is globally strategic, locally profitable and working class — green is the new red, white and blue. That message can play today in Rust Belt battleground states like Michigan and Ohio.

If the "green" message — surprisingly to many, perhaps, it's a highly pragmatic one — plays out the way it ought to in Michigan, Ohio, and other key states, it could turn Mr. Trump into a one-term president!

On Localism and Subsidiarity

E.J. Dionne Jr.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. titles today's column "Don’t let politics dumb you down." The column asks us to get back to thinking and debating seriously about our politics, rather than just forever chastising Donald Trump's latest tweet. One key to doing so, says Mr. Dionne, is to get involved with the new "localism" in America:

As Washington politics becomes increasingly rancid, a disheartened nation turns toward the many good things happening at the grass roots. In cities and towns across the country, civic and political leaders are — honest and true! — solving problems and finding new missions for old places. Words like “rebuilding,” “reclaiming” and “renewing” are the stuff of local life.

David Brooks

Mr. Dionne points out that op-ed writer David Brooks of The New York Times has also been championing localism of late, as, for instance, in his recent column "The Localist Revolution." In it, Mr. Brooks writes:

Localism is the belief that power should be wielded as much as possible at the neighborhood, city and state levels. Localism is thriving — as a philosophy and a way of doing things — because the national government is dysfunctional while many towns are reviving. Politicians in Washington are miserable, hurling ideological abstractions at one another, but mayors and governors are fulfilled, producing tangible results.

Solving problems. Tangible results. Aren't these supposed to be exactly what politics and government are all about?

Mr. Dionne cautions us that we need to keep in mind, "as many localists do, that some problems require national action. We’re better off having a federal Social Security and Medicare program, and it will take a comparable effort to get health insurance to everyone."

Mr. Dionne's attitude here reminds me of the principle of social organization called "subsidiarity," to wit, that "social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate (or local) level that is consistent with their resolution." Subsidiarity is familiar to me, as a Catholic, as the general belief that "matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority."

George Weigel

I originally learned about that big word, "subsidiarity," from the writings of Catholic essayist-ethicist George Weigel, who is about as conservative as a thinking Catholic can be — and much more conservative than I am. In an anti-Trump 2016 column, "Resisting the Demagogue," Mr. Weigel wrote:

There is nothing remotely Catholic about the Trump sensibility. There is nothing in Mr. Trump’s record or his current campaign to suggest that he gives a fig for the life issues, for religious freedom in full, or for the constitutionalism that is America’s unique expression of Catholic social doctrine’s principle of subsidiarity. Rather than lifting us above anger to renewed common purpose, Mr. Trump is dragging our politics even deeper into the muck ...

In general terms, Mr. Weigel impresses me as being to the political right of Mr. Brooks, while Mr. Dionne is clearly to Mr. Brooks's left. Yet all three champion some form of localism/subsidiarity. All this tells me that the idea of localism/subsidiarity might well constitute the fundamental solution to all our political woes today.

Democratic Socialists vs. Social Democracy

Sheri Berman

In the Washington Post today, an article by Barnard College professor of political science Sheri Berman is of interest: "Democratic socialists are conquering the left. But do they believe in democracy?"

Much of Berman's article is a quick history of two of the primary branches of European socialist politics, beginning with the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 and ending with the "unraveling" of the post-World War II order in the 1970s. During that extended period, "three camps emerged with different views of capitalism and democracy":

• One camp — that of Vladimir Lenin, the man who engineered the bolshevik communist takeover of what would, in 1917, become the Soviet Union — set about bringing down capitalism lock, stock, and barrel (and with it, democracy as we know it). The necessary agent that would bring about the end of capitalism was thought by this camp to be "a revolutionary vanguard."
• Another camp, disdaining the "violence and elitism" of the revolutionary movement with its self-styled "revolutionary vanguard," settled for "agitating against the reigning [capitalist] order and eagerly awaiting its departure." That departure was sure to happen in the not too distant future, it was felt by this camp. This camp thought it wrong to promote governmental "policies to 'reduce capitalist exploitation'." Why? "Alliances or compromises with nonsocialists" would just prop up the existing order. As for democracy per se, safeguarding it was not a priority — just "a means rather than an end." This camp was that of the first "democratic socialists." It wanted to use democratic means solely to put an end to capitalism's exploitation of the working classes.
• A third camp, the "social democrats," were willing to compromise with the forces of the capitalist bourgeoisie. To leftists of this stripe, capitalism was not necessarily "bound to collapse." But its "downsides" could be ameliorated if its "upsides" were harnessed to the task by means of enacting "concrete reforms" in the here and now.

*****

Bernie Sanders

In 2016, we witnessed a Democratic presidential primary battle between the party's eventual candidate, Hillary Clinton, and Senator Bernie Sanders, who called himself a socialist. Is Senator Sanders a "social democrat," or is he a "democratic socialist"? It's a question I can't easily answer, if the litmus test is simply one's attitude toward capitalism. Neither Sen. Sanders nor Ms. Clinton talked about bringing about an end to capitalism, after all.

Ms. Berman says in her article, "Although traditions are neither monolithic nor unchangeable, democratic socialism and social democracy have worked very differently." And the two camps have accordingly evolved differently. So I think I'm on firm ground when I say Bernie Sanders was and is, at least in today's terms, a "democratic socialist," while Hillary Clinton represented the forces of "social democracy" in our 2016 presidential race. (By the way, I voted for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the Maryland presidential primary in 2016.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Now, in 2018, we Democrats are trying to resolve the question of what our party should do if we want to deliver as much of a death blow to Trumpism as possible in the upcoming November elections. In particular, should we support latter-day "democratic socialists" like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is running for Congress in New York's 14th district?

Conor Lamb

Or should we lean more toward today's "social democrats," such as Conor Lamb, who won a special election in March of this year to be able to represent Pennsylvania's 18th district?

Well, I'd say that as a practical matter, we can do both. Wherever the ultra-left Ocasio-Cortez's can get on the ballot, we can support them if we are so inclined. Where the best Democratic hope lies with a more moderate Conor Lamb type, then that candidate can be our standard bearer.

My attitude is: whatever works to give Trump a big, fat black eye is all right with me ...

Movie: "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"

Just watched "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" on Netflix. What a sweet film!

Based on a 2008 bestseller by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, it's a love story-cum-mystery taking place in 1946, with flashbacks to 1941, that is set on the English Channel Island of Guernsey, which was occupied by the Germans during World War II.

The story is also about a female protagonist who seeks within herself the ability to break with the social conventions of a time when women were supposed to subordinate themselves to men in a male-run world. Even though Juliet Ashton (Lily James) is already an established bestselling author, will she be able to find the inner strength to write not what she and her public and her publisher want her to write, but instead write what her heart tells her to? And will she be able to follow her own heart as she organizes her life-to-come in her postwar Britain?

At the outset of the movie, the audience is shown that German-occupied Guernsey during the war was subjected to the depredations of inhuman, jackbooted Nazis. Now, the war over, Juliet meets the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with whom she has been corresponding by mail. To her surprise, she finds them strangely unwilling to open up to her about their experiences during the occupation. She does learn, however, that the "literary society" was founded on the spur of the moment in 1941 merely as an excuse for getting the Germans to overlook their being out and about after curfew. Yet they are also truly devoted to reading and to discussing literary classics such as Charlies Lamb's Essays of Elia and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Can Juliet break through to the society's tiny handful of longstanding members to find out why they don't want to talk about the occupation? If she does, what might she learn? How might learning it change her life?

I invite Netflix members who might wish to learn the answers, or might ling to view a sweet, cozy, romantic film that packs a message about the values that are truly human, to be sure to watch "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society." Enjoy!

The Blanket Coverage of Trump's Sins

New York Times
columnist
Thomas Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman's latest New York Times op-ed, "Keep Up the Blanket Coverage of Trump. It Hurts Him," prescribes the wrong fix for our ailing democracy. Mr. Friedman's premise: "Just a little wave of disgust among Republican moderates is all that is needed to turn several key states from red to blue."

His prescription (aimed mainly at those in the news media who decide what material gets covered the most): Don't stop the ongoing vituperative coverage of everything the president does wrong and everything he cruelly and falsely utters.

Mr. Friedman's hope: " ... there are decent Republican moderates who, while they may never pull the lever for a Democrat, just might get too disgusted to vote. It’s the best hope."

Too disgusted to vote??? Don't pull any electoral levers at all, if you feel you can't tolerate Trump and refuse to vote Democratic??? The recommendation is itself undemocratic. In itself, if carried out, it would further wound our democracy.

Moreover, Mr. Friedman's logic is self-refuting. He says there has indeed been ongoing blanket coverage of Trump's neverending faux pas. No one would challenge this fact, I agree. Yet in the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump still has a personal approval rating of 43 percent.

Trump's job approval ratings since he took office in January 2017 are shown by the lower black line in this graph:

They're right where they were just after his inauguration! Though they've leveled off in the last couple of months, in the first half of 2018 they have even climbed, after having bottomed out at 37 percent last December!

So the incessant bad press hasn't really hurt Trump.

Mr. Friedman says, in what I consider a tellingly weak argument:

I want all of this heard and spread from sea to shining sea. Because though [Trump's words of "bullying arrogance"] do rally Trump’s base, they also rally Democrats and evidently embarrass Republican moderates and alienate independents.

The veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg told me that he’s seeing signs of this is in his recent focus groups: One was with moderate Republicans, all of whom “were put off’’ by Trump’s behavior, and another was with “secular conservative Republicans,’’ half of whom were put off.

Overall, it seems the ongoing vituperativeness of most of the media coverage toward Trump has had marginal impact on G.O.P. voters, if only half of secular conservative Republicans have been "put off." Mr. Friedman continues:

In addition, Greenberg said, the full Trump — insulting black sports heroes, threatening conservatives who dare cross him, praising Vladimir Putin and attacking the F.B.I. — “reminds evangelical conservatives of the devil’s bargain they made in supporting him. Seeing him in all of his overreach and mania and self-absorption doesn’t make them second-guess their choice, but it makes them uncomfortable about it.’’

Just "uncomfortable"? Just "put off"? The continuing assault of our rational media upon our irrational president hasn't shown itself to be a great strategy, I'd say. So now the best prescription is: if you're not a confirmed Democrat but are uncomfortable with and put off by Trump, just don't vote?

No, I say, that is the worst sort of prescription, if we want to save our democracy. We need to find a way to convince as many as possible of the 40-45 percent of the electorate who continue to form Trump's base to abandon him at their polling places. We need to convince those who cast no vote at all in the 2016 election, and those strong Democrats who might otherwise fail to vote this November, to come out and vote against Trumpism. Let's maximize voter turnout, not minimize it!

A History of Sexual Harassment

You have to be living on Mars not to know that the last several months have given us a great deal to think about concerning sexual abuse and harassment. The Twitter #MeToo hashtag (see also here on Wikipedia) has swelled to epic proportions via the tweets of women who report having been harassed and coerced into sex — or, sometimes, who refused to be coerced — and then (until recently) felt unwilling to publicly accuse the harasser.

I admit I've been torn as to whether to take #MeToo as seriously as aggrieved women might wish me to. For one thing, I've had a blind spot as to whether I ought to believe most of the women's allegations.

The reasons for which I've had a blind spot have to do in part, I think, with the facts of my age (70) and my gender (male). Plus, I seem to personally nurture a psychological predisposition toward innocence. I want to believe that I myself am innocent of all except minor transgressions, and I want to believe that most other people — including most men — are equally innocent.

My predisposition toward innocence has wrongly led me to believe that the spate of harassment and abuse accusations against men — when they are not false accusations — are the fault of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. At that time, old sexual taboos pretty much evaporated. My (incorrect) belief has been that the relaxing of sexual taboos has had as a side effect the engendering of widespread sexual harassing and abuse. Thus if we were to look back to before the Sexual Revolution, we would find little if any sexual harassment.

Wrong!

Yesterday I googled "history of sexual harassment" and found "A Short History of Sexual Harassment" by Reva B. Siegel. Siegel shows that sexual harassment and coercion have been endemic in American life ever since there was American life in the first place. Siegel: "The practice of sexual harassment is centuries old — at least, if we define sexual harassment as unwanted sexual relations imposed by superiors on subordinates at work."

First example: the treatment of black female African slaves by their white male masters. Siegel: " ...  sexual coercion was an entrenched feature of chattel slavery endured by African-American women without protection of law."

After the slaves' emancipation in the mid-1860s, the focus shifted to how women who were not chattel slaves ("property" rather than human beings) but instead "wage-slaves" have been treated. Any woman in the work force might be subjected to harassment and sexual coercion by her male employers or superiors, and have no legal recourse. The law as then practiced thought of every woman, slave or free, as being in effect the possession of some man:

At common law, sexual assault gave rise to an action for damages insofar as it inflicted an injury on a man's property interest in the woman who was assaulted; thus, a master might have a claim in trespass against a man who raped his slave, or a father might bring a seduction action against an employer who impregnated or otherwise defiled his daughter.

As for rape per se, yes, it was clearly against the law. Usually, though, no woman could prove in court that she had been raped unless she could show that she had put up the "utmost resistance" to the act that had been forced upon her. The legal standards that were then in effect cocerning "utmost resistance" were impossible to prove. Any woman who tried would typically just lose her job and/or her good reputation, and the main reason for that catch-22 was that men believed women in general were by nature "promiscuous." If a man had sex with her, the default assumption was that it was at her behest.

What Siegel says in her essay convinces me that sexual harassment and coercion have been rampant not just for decades but for centuries. Wherever and whenever there has been a situation in which a man is in a position of power and a woman is subordinate to him, there has been a substantial likelihood of sexual abuse.

*****

Hands off!

Sexual abuse is thus not just about sex. It's about power. It's about control. And it's very often about class distinctions, inasmuch as the harassing/abusing male is often of a higher socioeconomic class than the woman being abused — the reason being that the higher-ups in an organization are apt to possess more of the attributes of high socioeconomic class than the lower-downs.

And, given the reasons why these class distinctions arise in the first place, it's accordingly often about race and ethnicity, since the abused women are often people of color, whereas the abusing men are often white.

Yet class distinctions and race/ethnicity distinctions are not always present. What is generally present is a difference in the relative levels of power. If the potential abuser can convey to the potentially abused that her (or his, when the abuser is a woman or a gay man) job is at stake unless she complies, and then if she does not keep her mouth shut about the abuse later on, the ground is fertile for abuse.

Humanism Now!

I recently posted "An Open Letter to Steven Pinker," in which I complained about his new book Enlightenment Now that it seems — despite its excellent argument for reason, science, humanism, and progress — to plump for atheism as the basis for his argument.

Steven Pinker

I sent the author an e-mail asking him to respond to my open letter — which he so kindly did! (Thank you, Professor Pinker!)

As a result, I have to take back my accusation about atheism. Mr. Pinker said:

I’m actually not a “public advocate for atheism,” though I am a public advocate for humanism, which is not the same thing. (Atheism is simply a failure to believe in a particular proposition, namely the existence of supernatural entities — but there are lots of things lacking evidence that I don’t believe in.)

I thus became intrigued by "humanism," which Wikipedia says is

a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism and empiricism) over acceptance of dogma or superstition.

Wikipedia says, in its article on secular humanism, that it is

a philosophy or life stance that embraces human reason, ethics, and philosophical naturalism while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, pseudoscience, and superstition as the basis of morality and decision making. Secular humanism posits that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or a god.

But Professor Pinker's life stance is that of a Jewish Humanist. Humanistic Judaism, says Wikipedia, is

a Jewish movement that offers a nontheistic alternative in contemporary Jewish life. It defines Judaism as the cultural and historical experience of the Jewish people and encourages humanistic and secular Jews to celebrate their Jewish identity by participating in Jewish holidays and lifecycle events (such as weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs) with inspirational ceremonies that draw upon but go beyond traditional literature.

The humanorah,
the primary symbol of the
Society for Humanistic Judaism.

In response to my further questions about Jewish Humanism, Professor Pinker told me:

Yes, it’s absolutely OK for Jewish Humanists to carry out traditional religious practices, and their beliefs are their own business – the main commitment is that morality be grounded in considerations other than divine edict. This perhaps grew more naturally out of Judaism than other major religions because Judaism has always been a matter of practice rather than belief. There is no fixed creed, a lot of vagueness and disputation about fundamental theological issues (such as the nature of the afterlife, and whether hell exists), and a don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude to private belief. What matters is whether you circumcise your sons, light the Sabbath candles, observe the holidays, and so on. So the transition to humanism in the Humanistic, Reform, and Reconstructionist branches was not difficult.

If I were Jewish instead of Catholic, I'd probably be a disciple of Jewish Humanism. I, too, have doubts about some of Catholicism's fundamental theological issues, especially the ones pertaining to moral laws. Yet (beliefs being my own business) I do remain a believer that there is a God above and beyond — and also within — the physical world.

It's important to note that this life stance of mine puts me at odds with many — but by no means all — of my fellow Catholics. Regrettably, it also separates me from what I assume has been the vast majority of God-believers, down through history.

Yet I still think that the Bible and other religious texts — Jewish and Christian, and also Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist — can teach us much, if properly interpreted.