Author Archives: admin

Jan 11 2013

Who am I With?

As we enjoy our fine breakfasts of potato curry, my Korean-American friend tells me Korean is better for people because the usage changes depending on their relationship.  It’s not just the greeting, the suffix of many words also changes.  Interactions are not effective if the wrong form of language is used.

What this means is when Korean people meet, they must immediately work out how they are related.  “I must pay close attention to you.  I can’t just start blah, blah, blah as I would to an American.  The language forces me to be more sensitive to other people.”  I knew Japanese was like this and associated it with a stilted, hierarchical culture.  Koreans, my friend says, are very different.  “We are fiery people, always yelling at each other.  But because of our language we do it respectfully.” 

Westerners also assess relative relationships.  Think of a business gathering, think of a social gathering, think of any gathering.  We treat people differently depending on what role we imagine for them, and we can imagine simultaneous different roles for the same person.   Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, the head of a big Tibetan monastery here in Boudha, who travels extensively to give teachings, said with a big smile one day last year: “It’s very strange.  Sometimes people treat me like a great teacher.  They say, “oh, you are such a great lama’ and they bow to me.  Other times they treat me like a baby who cannot do anything for himself.”

How does communication actually work?   Do we need concepts about others to interact effectively?  Does facial expression, for example, tell us more?  Recent research provides a surprising answer.

A researcher with photographs of faces of people who had won or lost a tennis match asked folks to say who had won and who lost.  Then he showed photographs of the whole body of the winners and losers.  Lastly, he showed  losers’ faces photo-shopped onto winners’ bodies  and vice versa.  Shown faces only, people were wrong as often as they were right.  With entire bodies they usually guessed correctly.  We imagine faces reveal what’s in our mind but in fact, it’s body posture.

Surely eye contact is important?  Sherry Turkle has been studying social technology for thirty years at MIT.  When I met her in the mid-90’s she was cautiously optimistic about virtual communities where adolescents (and others) can try out different personalities and learn better ways to interact.  No eye contact there.  She recently published a new book about not only social technology but the impact of always-on smartphones and also caring robots.  She is troubled by how these technologies amplify self-absorption.  Robots that make eye contact are especially seductive.

If a robot follows us with its eyes and responds to our words or gestures, we imagine it cares about us.  It fits our concept of interaction.  We are in fact happy to imagine the emotion that does not exist, maybe happier because that’s safer; we’re in control.  One of Sherry’s research volunteers was playing with her grand-daughter when her robotic “seal” was delivered.  Captivated by its responsiveness, happily imagining its need for food and sleep and responding to that, she soon ignored the real child.

Are concepts of interaction ever helpful?  My sheep didn’t seem to have concepts about each other.  Mothers and their lambs baa’d if they got separated.  Pairs of adult ewes sometimes interacted by standing nose to nose breathing lightly.  In both cases information was exchanged.  Was it correctly understood?

Maybe that’s not the right question.  Sheep and other creatures are programmed not to evaluate but respond instantly to input that might signify a threat.  There’s little or no cost when the threat is not real and great benefit when it is.  They, too, are imagining more than is being sent but in their case, it’s a survival mechanism.  Chickens run from an aircraft shadow because it could have come from a hawk

There is a form of communication that provides perfect information exchange.  Computer-computer communication includes extra data with each message so the receiver can know if the message was corrupted, and extra messages so the sender knows if the message reached its destination correctly.  Getting that to work is harder than it sounds – the network whose development I managed starting in 1971 took a couple of years to debug – but this is a case where message sent and received are identical and there’s no imagining of additional content.

The goal of humans communicating seems less clear.  We are happy to communicate with robots even though we fabricate the emotional content of message received.  We are often unhappy communicating with each other because what’s said is ambiguous and/or what’s heard is misinterpreted.  Why does this happen?  Because our interactions are formed by concepts about others and what kinds we like, don’t like or don’t care about.

Suddenly, I see the big thing.  Korean helps us notice we are speaking with a real person not an imaginary playmate.  Grandma’s robotic seal has the opposite effect, seducing her into an imaginary relationship in which she ignores her real grand-daughter.

We so easily imagine we’re communicating when all we’re really doing is entertaining ourselves.

Jan 7 2013

Trends that Cannot Continue

Pragmatic conservative Herbert Stein gave us the Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop”.  What that implies is, actions will be taken.  It also implies they are unlikely to be immediate.

On Dec. 3, shortly before the “Fiscal Cliff”, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)  released new estimates of the federal government’s long-term budget outlook.   These numbers will not be changed much by the deal Congress so embarrassingly arrived at just after we went off the cliff.  We are still following trends that cannot continue.

Examining them in the order they appear in the table below; first Social Security (S/Sec).  Spending will grow by almost a quarter as a % of GDP as baby boomers retire and average life expectancy continues to increase, then stabilize at that level.  S/Sec revenue is at this time higher than spending but that will not continue if no action is taken.  S/Sec tax used to be levied on 90% of covered earnings.  That has fallen to 84% because most wage gains in recent years went to those making more than the maximum taxable income.  Raising the maximum so the share of covered earnings goes back to 90% would eliminate almost half of S’Sec’s projected long-term deficit.  Other small changes would fix the rest of the potential problem.

Spending & Revenue vs GDP

“Medicare, Medicaid and other health” spending now totals 4.7% of GDP, almost the same as S/Sec.  But at 8.2% it has almost doubled by 2030 then it continues to climb steadily to just under three times today’s level six decades out.   That’s the good news.  The bad news is our total healthcare spending is 17% of GDP.   “Medicare, Medicaid and other health” spending is barely a quarter of the total.  Medicare spending will grow as a higher % of our population reaches 65, and Medicaid will grow unless wages increase at the low end and unemployment drops, but those increases are relatively small in the context of our overall healthcare system.

We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare as the next highest nation, 48 million Americans have no health insurance, and other first world nations get better healthcare results.  If the 8.2% of GDP we’re projected to spend on “Medicare, Medicaid and other” in 2030 was our total healthcare spend, we’d be in great shape but it’s nowhere close.  Although the rate of increase for “Medicare etc” does not need to be cut drastically and it must be done, our healthcare system is far from easy to change.

Bypassing net interest for a moment, we find “All other spending” falls.  It will be worthwhile to examine some line items inside this category in another post.  Is it, for example, a good plan to keep cutting spending on education?  Is it a good plan to continue making war in Afghanistan?  Those questions and more are for another day.

By far the greatest problem revealed by the GAO analysis is how our growing annual deficit drives an insane rate of growth in interest costs.  The deficit grows because while spending increases steadily at rates that are too high but not alarmingly so, revenue stays at its historical average around 18% of GDP.   That drives ever increasing  cumulative debt, the interest on which more than doubles from 1.4% of GDP this year to 3% in 2020 and is almost five times as high only a decade later.  Even those numbers are only if the federal government continues to be able to borrow at 1.3% through 2017 and 3.7% in the long run, which is not possible.

Stein’s Law tells us that because the deficit cannot continue to grow as it does in the GAO’s projection, it will not.  The reason it reaches the impossible height in this projection is because relatively small growth in big spending programs like S/Sec and Medicare compounds into big numbers.  In the same way, relatively small changes in the growth rate of those programs would result in big long term changes in the deficit.

And therein lies the problem.  The Congress that raises taxes and cuts benefits will suffer politically.  Future Congresses will be the ones to get the benefits of lower deficits.  If today’s Congress does not take action, future Congresses will be forced to respond to their society’s pain from high inflation and/or high interest rates.   But we in today’s society are not feeling those pains, so there’s no motivation to act now.  What we are suffering from is low growth but there’s no quick fix for that and many ways we might attack the deficit would likely cut growth more.

Congressional inactivity is something that cannot go on forever but it looks unlikely to stop soon.  They blundered over the fiscal cliff.  I expect them to blunder through at least the next debt ceiling.  Deficit reduction is not likely in the near term.

Note:  The GAO document is at http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/650466.pdf

Jan 5 2013

Where am I? Boudha Stupa

A deep question to which I offer a prosaic answer: I’m circumambulating Boudha stupa.  I wrote about circumambulation at here.  Where is Boudha and what’s a stupa?

Stupa is Sanskrit for “a knot or tuft of hair”.  In ancient Hindu texts it signifies “tree trunk” because mounds of dirt around a tree were tombs for kings and heroes.  Later, it came to mean a pyramidal or dome-like monument containing relics of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni  (563-478 BC) or other revered figures.  Buddha Shakyamuni is often depicted as having a topknot that symbolizes his attainment of enlightenment.

Boudha stupa is one of the world’s largest.  It is on the ancient trade route from Tibet and was probably built in the 14th century when Buddhists fled from Mughal invasions of northern India.  It is said to entomb the remains of Kāśyapa Buddha, the third of the five Buddhas of the present ‘Fortunate Aeon’ and the last of six Buddhas prior to the historical Buddha.  Kāśyapa was born in India to Brahmin parents (i.e., Hindu priestly caste) and is said to have been over 30 feet tall, perhaps accounting for Boudha stupa’s great size.  It is now a pilgrimage destination for both Buddhists and Hindus.

Here’s how it looked when it was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site:

Boudha Stupa 1979

Just over a century earlier, Rana Prime Minister Jung Bahadur invited Taipo Shing, a Buddhist who had come on pilgrimage from Szechuan in China and settled in Boudha, to interpret in peace negotiations after war with China.  He was made head man of Boudha and granted the income from extensive farmland as a reward for his services, married the daughter of one of Jung Bahadur’s concubines and was entitled the First Chini Lama.  His successors grew wealthy and powerful (they were consuls of the Dalai Lamas to the Kingdom of Nepal) until the Ranas fell.  Land reform in 1961 following restitution of the monarchy stripped the stupa of much of its supporting lands.

The influx of refugees from Tibet starting in the 1950s brought new wealth to the area.  The stupa is now surrounded by more than fifty Tibetan monasteries, which are themselves surrounded by housing for the enormously increased Kathmandu population.

Boudha Stupa 1970s and 2010

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution started by Mao Tsetung in 1965 to destroy: “old thinking, old culture, old habits and old customs” led to the destruction of over 6,000 monasteries in Tibet and more than one in six Tibetans starved to death or was killed.  Some Tibetans say their protector deity was reborn as Chairman Mao to force them from a familiar world where they could no longer progress spiritually.  Those who died and what was destroyed were, they believe, necessary casualties of spiritual progress; they were dispersed to grow again and make their wisdom available to all.

Regret for the loss of Boudha’s peaceful surroundings is in any case a mistake.  Better to truly accept that everything is changing in every moment.  The thought may arise in our mind that increased availability and popularity of Tibetan Buddhism’s beneficial teachings is good but ideally we will just notice our thoughts and feel no need to make judgments about them.  As a wise man said: “If you have one foot in the past and one in the future, you’ll only hurt your crotch”.

Jan 4 2013

Mr. Ego and I Went Into a Bar

Actually not.  What happened is I woke up as always in a 5-star hotel with my eyes able to see such beautiful things, my nose sensing such wonderful fragrances and my fingers able to do oh, so many things.  But I’d forgotten where I was, and who I was.  Also, I had a roommate, Mr. Ego, who was anxious about that and in response had so many ideas for things we could do.

Harold, John and Kristin wrote fascinating comments on “We Are Not Alone”, my post about the sense of self.   Harold’s begins: “When I meditate I realize that the thoughts that flow through my head are simply thoughts. Who notices those thoughts? The part of me (I call it my core) that notices those thoughts I feel is the real me.”  That reminded me of Anam Thubten’s metaphor above where Mr. Ego keeps distracting “me” from reality.  Harold goes on to explain how reflecting on the difference between his core and his thoughts enabled him to: “make perhaps the most profound and fundamental change in my life”.  It’s an inspiring example of the benefit of this kind of practice.

What Harold experiences as his core seems to be what Buddhists term cognizant awareness.  Its existence can be pointed out with words but it can’t be adequately described or explained.  We can recognize the experience, however, because it is our fundamental nature.  I’ve met enough extraordinarily happy and kind people who trained themselves to recognize that awareness so I’m sure it’s true.  I need to do as they did because my cognizant awareness is still obscured by the relentless activity of my thought-making heap, Mr. Ego.

What I imagine to be “me” feels like an ever-changing heap of habitual responses that in varying combinations keep being re-enacted in response to new experiences.  I have a sense of continuity, that there is a “me” at the center, because repetition causes the individual habitual thoughts to gain or lose strength slowly and new habits get added at a relatively low rate. What happens from time to time, though, is like what happens to sand piles.  Some habits get aligned, so to say, along fault lines.  When an experience that would usually have little effect hits the fault line and triggers an avalanche, “me” does seem to change.

John describes: “a thought experiment where I gradually eliminate all elements of what forms my awareness of “me” […] sight doesn’t exist. No hearing or concept of hearing. […] no memory […] What is left? […] the me that used all my bodily functions to perceive “the world”, still seems to “be”, but in a timeless awareness.”

Maybe, John says: “there is really only one “us”, but many entities animated by the one “us”” and: “if there were a being who created us […] for a purpose, […] these perceived multiple individualities might be to help us to develop a personal awareness of the effects of Evil since we would be experiencing both the performance of evil actions and the effects we perpetrate on our “selves”.  Perhaps it’s part of a long term education in how to be a truly rational and compassionate being.”

I do not sense the existence of a causal being but I have come to see our situation as a long term training program in compassion.  The existence or not of a Creator feels unimportant for two big reasons.  One is that it doesn’t help with the fundamental mystery.  If the universe was created by a Supreme Being, what created that Being?  Much more importantly, followers of all traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism in which there is no Creator, agree that by training to see things as they really are, we inevitably become more happy and more kind.  If all paths lead toward that goal it isn’t important which one we take, only that we take one.

The more I examine it the more it looks like my heap of habitual responses is not separate but part of the heaps of everyone I’ve ever interacted with and those with whom they interacted.    We are in separate bodies but we operate as a unity.  Like John, I’m concerned that may sound: “strange and mystical and off-putting” because my supreme trust is in logic.  The thing is, it’s logical that our suffering results from our awareness being obscured by our habitual thoughts and emotional responses and how they interact among us.

My academic training was in physics and English literature.  I was at the time also fascinated by philosophy and theater but pretty much abandoned them soon after because it seemed they could have no practical result.  I always retained my interest in how things work physically and how we communicate.  What John terms “the oneness or not of us”  and Harold is aware of as his “core” will likely remain a mystery to me because they seem beyond the reach of intellect.  But not beyond the reach of experience.  I’ll keep working on experiencing cognizant awareness.

I don’t know enough to respond to John’s comments about Hinduism or the Abrahamic or other religions.  I will at some point write about size, structure and longevity of religious, secular and government organizations.  In every case, they have enormous impact on the results organizations achieve.

Kristin recasts my dad’s words, writing:  “What if “Be like THAT, then” were a call to be with (or like) whatever we are experiencing in the moment?  Be like that bowl slipping down and spilling over, be like that bird in the tree chirping, be like that rock sitting on the beach.  A call to “be here now” as opposed to a humorously paranoid “the world’s out to get me.”

That’s a great example of how we can reprogram ourselves.  Noticing our habitual thoughts is the first step but what next?  Bringing them into the light cuts their power but not instantly.  Often-repeated ones build up a lot of power.  Mental judo, rethinking them with a positive message, is a good way to wear them down.  They will in the end fade away now you notice them but in the meantime their power will be less harmful.

I highly recommend reading Harold, John and Kristin’s comments and ask you to add your own.

Jan 1 2013

“Four Colly Birds,

three French hens, two turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree.”  This old Christmas song was written when the blackbird was food along with the hen, turtledove and partridge.  Colly in Old English means ‘black’ hence ‘colliery’ meaning coal mine and colly bird meaning blackbird.  Blackbirds were gourmet food in those days.  In “Sing a Song of Sixpence” 24 of them are baked in a pie.  So here, as thought-provoking fare, are four colly charts.

Fed Tax and Spending vs GDP

The first one shows Federal spending, the red line, and revenue (taxes), the blue one, in relation to GDP, the overall economy.  Spending is now 24% of GDP, higher than its ~22% average for the past few decades while revenue is substantially lower than spending at 17% of GDP and lower than its ~19% average over the past few decades.  This chart illustrates two of our three big problems, too high spending and too low taxes.  Our third problem (which I haven’t illustrated because I want only four charts) is economic growth that’s too slow to grow us out of the revenue and spending problems.   Slamming on the brakes to fix the deficit would make all three problems worse.

Health Care Indices

Where to cut spending?  Medicare?  We keep hearing that’s out of control.  The second chart suggests otherwise while also showing that our overall healthcare spending is unsustainable .  Medicare spending is now growing at an annual rate of 2%, right around the upper end of forecast GDP growth.  It was more than 7% six years ago.  Overall healthcare spending, however, (the composite index), which was also increasing 7% then is still growing 6% to 7%, an unaffordable burden on our economy.  Cutting Medicare, the only part of our healthcare system that is growing at an affordable rate, would increase that burden.

Labor vs Capital Share of Nonfarm Business

Where to raise revenue?  Wage-earners?  The third chart shows that after holding fairly steady at around 65% for the half century following WW2, labor’s share of non-farm business spending has, for more than a decade, been dropping fast.  It’s now around 57%.  What is correspondingly growing is capital spending.  Workers of all kinds are being replaced by computers and robots, not just by lower paid workers in other countries.  They, too, are being replaced by technology.  Capital investment is especially favorable now because interest rates have been driven so low.

Debt v Income Tp and Bottom Quintile

The fourth chart shows that even though low interest rates are attractive to all spenders (especially governments), they are not helping everyone equally.  Debt (also interest payments, therefore) as a percentage of income is growing rapidly for those with incomes in the bottom 5%.  That’s because their living expenses keep growing but their incomes do not.  That will not change for the better in a very slowly growing economy.

Conclusions: (1)  Here, too, there is no silver bullet.  (2) We’ll shoot ourselves in the foot (at best) if we act as if there is one.

Dec 31 2012

“A Flash of Light, a Clink of Steel,

two pounds of potatoes and a small brown loaf.”  Maybe this line from “The Goon Show” was heralding democratization of the aristocratic warrior code.  The glint of sunlight on a knight’s armor and the clink of his trusty sword were now on the grocery list along with bread and potatoes.  Or maybe it’s not because we have such romantic ideas.  Whatever, we do have a lot of guns, and they do a lot of harm.

We 315M Americans who already possess 310M firearms spend on average $20 a year on firearms and ammunition, a total annual spend of $6B.  That’s much less than we spend on bread and potatoes but it adds up.  Much of the ammo is consumed but the firearms bought in previous years remain in service.  In 1994 we owned 192M guns, one for every two people.  Today’s average is almost one to one.  Some of us have several guns, 47% of us have at least one gun in our home.

The total economic impact of the firearms industry including gun shop rent, utilities and wages, sales taxes and etc. is around $32B but that’s still only $100 per person per year.  Maybe we should also consider a different cost.  In 2009, the latest for which we have CDC statistics, we had a total of 31,347 firearm deaths.  Our overall rate of deaths by firearm was 10.2 per 100K.  Homicides were 40% of that total, suicides 60%.

First and foremost, then, firearms are used for suicide.  Looking inside the 6.1 overall rate for firearm suicide rates and 5.9 by other means, we find 12.3 per 100K for firearm suicide by white males, 4.8 for black males and 7.6 for male American Indian or Alaska Natives.   The suicide rate by other means was 9.3 for white males and 3.8 for black males. That says white males are significantly the most likely to commit suicide and their preferred method is a firearm.  The next highest suicide rate is 10.3 for American Indian or Alaska Natives using other means.

Turning to homicides, inside the 3.7 per 100K overall rate for firearm homicides and 1.7 by other means, we find the firearm homicide rate was 3.1 for white males, 0.9 for white females, 28.4 for black males and 5.2 for American Indian or Alaska Natives.  The homicide rate by other means was 1.8 for white males and 5.8 for both black males and American Indian or Alaska Natives.

Black males are almost eight times more likely than average to be killed by firearm homicide.  White males and females are less likely than average to be killed by firearm homicide.  So, if you’re black you are right to fear being killed by a firearm, if you’re white you have much less to fear.  These statistics do not indicate the demographics of who shot the black males or any other group.

Why do people want guns?  In answer to a recent survey, 67% said for self-defense, 58% for hunting and 66% for target shooting.  Nobody said because guns are cool.  Nobody said for suicide.

Do people think society would be safer if fewer guns were around?  In the wake of the Newtown massacre, 58% of those surveyed in the most recent Gallup Poll said they favor stricter gun control laws.  That’s up significantly from 43% in October 2011.  What surprised me, however, is 51% are against any law making it illegal to manufacture, sell, or possess “semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles” vs 44% who favor such a restriction.  I was only a little less surprised that a very large majority, 74%, opposes any greater restrictions on the possession of handguns vs 24% who do favor more restrictions.

I cannot fathom why the majority of those polled want more people to have “semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles”?

What restrictions are favored?  Background checks?  The number of firearms manufactured in the US is 5.5M per year, the number of gun registrations is 3.2M.  That means a very large number of guns are sold every year to people we don’t want to have them.  And remember, the guns used in the Newtown massacre were purchased legally.  The owner whose son killed her with one of them bought those guns at least in part for self-defense, a tragic mistake.

I once bought a gun.  It was when we were raising our forty sheep and a pair of dogs leaped the fence one day and attacked our prize rams.  I heard their barking and, flooded with adrenalin, managed to chase them off before they did any lasting harm.  It was very hard, I was very scared for my sheep, and I was very angry.  “Next time,” I raged, “I’ll shoot the bastards!”  So I bought a .22 rifle and did some target practice.  As it happened, the story ended happily because we sold all the sheep a few years later before any more dogs came.  I’m lucky I was never in a situation where I’d have used the gun.  It could only have led to suffering.

So what should we do?  First, what we should not do.  Killing other beings for pleasure harms us but I don’t want to ban it because some people do it for food and, anyway, I have no right to dictate other folks’ pleasures.  I have no objection to target shooting and have had fun doing it myself.  Although having firearms for self-defense is a mistake because few of us could disable an attacker who was already set to fire, and a firearm in the house is more likely to be used for suicide or cause accidental death, I wouldn’t ban them because gun ownership is part of our culture.  I hope that will change but in that hope I’m in the minority.

What I would do is make civilian possession of semi-automatic and other such weapons illegal and enforce it rigorously with heavy penalties.  I would buy and destroy those weapons.  Mark, in a comment on “The Massacre in My Home Town”, writes more about what weapons are OK and not OK to own.  Defining that has some challenges but so do all laws.  We’re capable of writing good ones.

Background checks are good but gun shows too often evade them and too many weapons I would ban are already in the hands of criminals. That’s why I would rigorously enforce possession.  I would also mount a campaign like the one against smoking to make everyone aware of the real dangers of gun ownership.

It would take many years to remove even 80% of the banned weapons from civilian ownership.  It would take many years before significant numbers voluntarily gave up guns the law allowed them to keep but whose danger they had come to recognize. So?  There is, pardon the expression, no silver bullet in this case.  The fact that there’s no immediate fix is unfortunate.  We need to accept that and get started.

Our culture is different from nations with tighter gun control and correspondingly lower firearm death rates.  We can learn a little from their experience but our path will be different.  As practical people, we need not explore the cultural origins of our very high rate of gun ownership.  We only need to recognize it results in too many preventable deaths.  Then we can take positive action.

Dec 29 2012

We Are Not Alone

And we do not exist.  It’s good news but it takes some getting used to.

I’m in our kitchen in Maine washing wooden spoons in hot soapy water in a mixing bowl.  I pull one out.  The bowl shifts, its narrow bottom slides into the drain hole, it begins to tip, soapy water runs out.  “Be like that, then,” enters my consciousness as I grab for the bowl.  Where did that come from?

It was the voice of my ten-years-dead father saying what he always said when that kind of thing happened.   He always spoke as if it was mischief-making when he had difficulty with an inanimate object.  He wasn’t an animist, he didn’t really believe unseen beings were making life difficult for him, he just expected things to go wrong and used humor to protect himself from disappointment.  My mother believed there was no problem she could not fix.  That’s why my dad married her.  I like to think I inherited her attitude.  I don’t like to think I inherited his although I’m OK with knowing that his genes led to my defective serotonin uptake and I’m perfectly happy to lay claim to his virtues.

It’s a mistake to have things I like to think and don’t like to think.  “Be like that, then” was a powerful reminder that I’m only sometimes in control of what I think.  Most of the time I’m not really paying attention, just cruising along on autopilot.  Too much of what I do is programmed by stories based on a grab-bag of experiences, only partially recognized in the first place and reshaped by replaying them over and over again.

The “be like that, then” moment seems to be an example of what Buddhists mean by karma.  It’s one of my father’s mental habits that still lives even though he’s no longer alive in the way we normally think.  That habit now lives in what I think of as “me”.   It doesn’t have much power left, partly because my overall genetic material isn’t a good host for it and partly because I’ve trained myself to discard its message.  It’s still there, though, along with how my genetic material interpreted everything else I’ve ever experienced, much of which was actually the interpreted experience of others.

The self I seem to have has no fixed nature.  I don’t mean it’s not real.  Its appearance and its sense of others are perfectly real.  The problem is I misinterpret the appearance.  There is no aspect of me that is permanent, nothing without which I would cease altogether to exist.  I began to suspect this when I read “Three Faces of Eve”, a psychologist’s book about his patient with three entirely different personalities.  I was 16 and struggling to figure out who I was.   Maybe what seems to be revealing itself as me isn’t real, I thought.  Maybe I’m just pretending to be like this.  Maybe a whole different personality is quietly getting strong enough to take over?   Theater was what I enjoyed most in those days.  Maybe I was living everything as improvisational theater?

It was a frightening thought so I pushed it away.  It never crossed my mind that if I have no self in the way we imagine, neither does anyone else.  Only now I begin to recognize that I’m both a role player – a parent, husband, ex-businessman, and on and on – and at a more fundamental level, a gathering of parts from other people and things.  I approach an intellectual understanding, also, that some of what were once parts of “me” are now part of the shape of others.  It looks like there are two simultaneous realities, the roles that we play and that there’s nobody playing the roles.

The more I sit with this view the less scary it feels, the more I recognize it’s good news.  If what I experience as a self and others is on another level an inseparably intertwined unity, the first implication is to be equally kind to all.  The next is to be happy because whatever the situation is at this moment, it won’t stay the same no matter what anyone does, and while I have this healthy body I can work to make the next moments better.  It does take getting used to, though, and acting upon.

Dec 23 2012

The Massacre in My Home Town

Twenty young children were shot to death last week in Newtown CT where I lived for 35 years.  Setting aside the emotion, why do these things happen and what can we do?  The NRA says we should place armed guards in every school.  Others say we should ban guns, we need more religion, we should ban violent video games.   What do the statistics suggest?

The following table of UN data shows our results in the context of  some other countries for the past decade.  We average around 5 homicides (intentional killings) per one hundred thousand people per year.   Because there are more than 300 million of us that means we have around 15,000 homicides per year.  Because Canada’s 35 million population is only about a tenth of ours and their homicide rate is one third of ours, they have only 550 homicides per year.  Our other neighbor, Mexico, has a population of 115 million.  Because their homicide rate was twice as high as ours at the start of the decade and is now over four times as high, they have over twice as many homicides as we do, 27,000 last year.

Homicide Statistics

The rate in the UK was one third as high as ours, about the same as Canada’s, at the start of the decade and is now only a quarter.  China’s rate is about the same as the UK’s and has dropped in the same way.  Switzerland has a much lower rate, around one seventh of ours.  Japan has by far the lowest.  It is stable at around one tenth of ours per capita.

How about homicides specifically by firearms?  Are the rates of  those homicides correlated with gun ownership, religious practice or video game spending?  The following table combines statistics from several well respected sources.  The data are not all from the same year (the range is 2007 to 2011) and the number who practice religion is self-reported census data so it should be taken with a grain of salt.  Nonetheless, the data are dependable enough to support some conclusions.  One thing that stands out is our very high rate of homicides by firearm, almost 300 times as high as the rate in Japan.

Firearm Homicides

Our rate of firearm ownership is also by far the highest.  Our 270,000 thousand firearms in civilian possession means we have almost 90% as many firearms as people.  The most interesting statistic in this column is Switzerland’s 46% rate.  Switzerland has no standing army, only a peoples’ militia for its national defense, the vast majority of men between the ages of 20 and 30 undergo military training, including weapons training, and their weapons are kept at home as part of their military obligations.  Their gun ownership rate is half ours, their percentage of homicides by firearm is similar to ours, but their firearm homicide rate is one quarter of ours.  Even so, it is twice as high as Canada’s and enormously higher than the rates in the UK and Japan.

These firearm-related statistics show that a higher rate of gun ownership is correlated with a higher percentage of homicides by firearm and that tighter gun control legislation, e.g., Switzerland’s vs ours, leads to a relatively lower rate.  The first table shows that there is from country to country a much wider range of homicides by all causes.  The rate in Mexico, for example, is 40 to 50 times as high as in Japan while ours is 10 times as high.   Those big differences must result from a combination of situational and cultural factors.  Criminalization of our insatiable appetite for drugs, for example, which makes smuggling so profitable, is one cause of Mexico’s violence.

Is religious instruction a way to reduce violence?  The statistics say otherwise.  Two thirds of Americans report themselves as religious practitioners, significantly more than other countries.  Only 29% of Japanese identify themselves as followers of a religion despite their very low homicide rate.

Violent video games and movies are also blamed but again the statistics say otherwise.  The nations with the lowest firearm homicide rates, Japan and the UK, are among the highest spenders on video games.

So what does the data suggest we should do?  While the data tells us we cannot eliminate homicide, we know we can eliminate the kind of homicide in my home town last week by banning civilian possession of automatic weapons, the only weapons making that kind of massacre possible.  As noted in my previous post, the writers of the 2nd Amendment gave us the right to bear the arms of their time, single shot firearms.  They did not intend for civilians to have grenades or automatic firearms.  We don’t claim a right to bear grenades.  We should not claim a right to bear other such weaponry.

The second table shows a clear correlation between the number of firearms in civilian hands and the rate of homicides by firearms.  While Switzerland’s overall homicide rate is lower than relatively peaceful China, Canada and the UK, a high percentage of them is by firearms.  Only Japan has a significantly lower overall homicide rate than Switzerland.  This says we could significantly cut our overall homicide rate by implementing tougher gun control as Switzerland does, and cut it even more with stricter control as in Japan.  More religion or less video games are not indicated.  Better mental healthcare is indicated although I have not assembled the stats.

Statistics alone can not show us how to cut our homicide rate tenfold or even further.  They give us a first answer to “why do these things happen and what can we do?” but shed no light on the root cause of homicide.  Why, for example, do so many of us feel the need for weapons?  My Swedish classmate Peter asks us about Buddhist practitioners who, when they go alone deep into the jungle to meditate, take a weapon.  “What if I’m attacked by a robber or a bear” they think?  They hope their meditation practice will in the end remove the cause of their fears.  They expect their fear of attack while meditating will make it less effective and hope a weapon in the meantime will help them focus.  More dramatically, my American friend Sean pretends to propose a Federal program to arm every schoolchild with an automatic weapon for self-defense.  We can (I hope)  all agree that would be a crazy response to our fears.  Maybe we can reflect and find some of our own crazy ideas that make us all vulnerable to causing violence.

But we can in any case see what to do to make an immediate big difference.  We must update our approach to gun control.  With well written and well enforced legislation we could eliminate the Newtown type of massacre altogether and cut our overall homicide rate by at least half.  There is no benefit to society in not doing that.

Dec 21 2012

A Tale of Two Constitutions

Nepal’s political morass has not changed in the months I was gone.  Progress is stymied by too many squabbling children in politician bodies crying “mine, mine, mine”.  How did it get this way?  Does history of the US Constitution offer guidance?

A transitory coalition of the other 5 leading parties recently announced they would no longer attend public meetings where Maoist Prime Minister Baburam Bhatterai or anyone else in his unappointed government is present.  The parties are united in wanting his government to fall, at odds on what should happen next.  The government is unappointed in the sense that there was no provision for what would happen if the Constituent Assembly (CA)  failed to draft the new Constitution.

When the CA was dissolved in May four years after its two year term began, Prime Minister Baburam said (a) we need an election to establish a body that will do what the CA failed to do, (b) we need a government in the interim, and (c) the existing government should stay in place to hold elections asap.  The second largest party, the Nepali Congress (NC), said that’s OK but Baburam must resign in favor of an NC leader.  Baburam said that’s no good because the President, who had the authority to disband the CA, is a member of the NC.  There would be too much risk the NC would hang on to power until they thought they could win an election.  If we want to make a change, he said, we should choose a coalition government for the interim.

It’s not clear how a coalition government would differ from what’s already in place nor how the politicians could ever agree who would make up the Cabinet.  The NC can’t even agree which of them would replace Baburam in the impossible event anyone else agreed to that.  Meanwhile the smaller parties make transitory alliances to promote specific agenda items that cannot be implemented in the current situation, anyway.

The leader of a party that recently split off from the Maoists published a 90 point demand.  One third of these demands relate to India, including that Indian vehicles must be banned from Nepal, Hindi movies must not be shown and Hindi music must not be broadcast.  The leader said his party would begin enforcing the demands nationwide and immediately.  Like other such initiatives, even the ones that makes sense, that soon fizzled out.

Having failed to accomplish what they were elected to do, the politicians fear they will not be reelected.  The one thing they can agree on is it’s best to keep delaying a new election.  It’s not clear how those not in the Cabinet are getting paid but it’s never clear how money flows in this society.  Transparency International reports that Nepal is the only South Asian nation whose Corruption Perception Index has worsened in the last seven years.  To get a government-financed contract, contractors must pay 50% of the project budget to politicians and civil servants who could block it.  Only 20% to 30% of the budget is spent on the goods or services provided.  They are inevitably of poor quality.

For some, the argument over the number of States in Nepal is philosophical; broader representation (more States) vs strengthening Nepal as a nation (fewer States).  For others, it’s personal.  Tribal leaders allegedly fighting for their people but wanting access to the money trough, “Nationalists” wanting to preserve the Hindu establishment’s lock on power, the breakaway party motivated by anti-Indian prejudice and seeing high caste Nepali Hindus as “really Indian”.

How did it get this way?  A regional prince who conquered his neighbors and unified the territory paid his generals with rent they could collect from newly conquered land.  After further conquests were halted by British India and imperial China the monarchy was pushed aside by the Rana family and, under new ownership, Nepal continued to be operated as a private family tax farm.  No industry developed because Nepal has no coal, oil or useful minerals and its geography makes transport very hard.  Subsistence farming was supplemented by petty trading.  One third to half the total economic output went to the center as rent.  Many men left to be soldiers in the British Indian army. When the Ranas fell 60 years ago the monarchy was restored.  Foreign aid began to arrive but much was siphoned off by the elite.  Almost the only government Nepal had ever had that was for the people was in villages with a good head man.  No surprise that apart from tourist services there are still few alternatives to getting a position to extort bribes, getting property to rent, or working abroad.

How important is a new Constitution for Nepal?  A nation’s Constitution is much like a business strategy; every business should have one and it should not be a bad one but several good ones could be successful.  A well executed good strategy will always beat a less well executed better strategy.  So Nepal’s politicians just need to choose one of the good ones, apply it diligently, and adjust as conditions change.  To illustrate, let’s take a quick look at the US Constitution that was established with equally high hopes and, as it happens, around the time Nepal first became a nation.

The US Constitution reached its current form in three stages.  First, the structure and purpose of government was articulated: (A) three branches of central government to make, enforce, and interpret the law, (B) the roles and powers of  central and local governments, and (C) what the national government would provide the people, namely justice, civil peace, common defense, things of general welfare they could not provide themselves, and freedom.  It was adopted in 1787 by a Constitutional Convention, ratified by conventions in eleven states and  went into effect in 1789.  Next, ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights were proposed in Congress and came into effect in 1791 after approval by three-fourths of the States.  It had been too hard to agree everything at once.  In the third stage, the Constitution undergoes periodic clarification and/or amendment.  It refers, for example, to “the people” but the rights it asserts for them were understood for very many years to apply only to white men.  Rights for American Indians, African Americans, women and others were adopted much later.

The US Constitution does not specify the nation’s borders, or the borders between States.  US territory greatly expanded after the Constitution was adopted and some State boundaries changed.  The Constitution is not explicit about whether States could secede and form a new nation.  The 1860s Civil War aka War of Northern Aggression established that the southern States would not be allowed to do that.  The great ongoing debate, however, is about the third element of the Constitution, the social contract, what the central government should provide to the people and how it should do so.

How have the first three Amendments, presumably considered to be the most important, stood the test of time?

The first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  This may be the most important principal in the entire Constitution.  The devil, however, is in the details.  How much freedom, for example, should there be about speech on behalf of political candidates?  My freedom is abridged if my campaign contributions are limited but if there’s no limit, I can in effect silence you.  Estimated  contributions for the most recent US election range up to $6B.  Because US politicians now need so much money to get elected they must depend on a wealthy few to whom they must deliver correspondingly big favors.  So a side effect of the Constitutional right to freedom is, at this time, a corrupt central government.

The second amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.  The intent of that tortured phraseology, at a time when only single shot firearms existed, was to prevent the central government from tyrannizing the States and, by implication, its citizens.  There was no need then to define what kinds of Arms the people could bear.  The federal government now has nuclear arms, however, and killer drones.  Does this Amendment mean the States and “the people” also have the right to them?  Nobody I know believes that but many Americans support the right to bear assault weapons (I’ll say more about that in a future post).  Some even imagine they must have assault weapons to defend against central government attack. 

The third amendment says:  “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law”.  Although this Amendment has long been entirely irrelevant it continues to be enshrined as part of the Constitution.

What conclusions should Nepali politicians draw from this and other nations’ Constitutions and from the above examples, (1) a profoundly important right that also has a deeply corrupting effect, (2) an important safeguard when the Constitution was established that is now ineffective against that risk and creates unanticipated new dangers, and (3) a provision that became completely irrelevant ?

First, since several structures of national government have proven to be effective, Nepal’s politicians should just choose one and start governing.  Second, they should not imagine that even the most finely crafted Constitution will guarantee what the people get from their government.  Third, some Constitutional provisions will need significant update when conditions change and not all will remain relevant, anyway.  Above all, what is important is good governance.  The time for that is now.

Dec 13 2012

The Power of Place

I keep meeting people whose life was transformed in Nepal.  What is it about this place?   What triggers change here?

I’m now in the Boudha region of Kathmandu at the stupa, a beautiful mound-like structure containing Buddhist relics.  I’m trying to understand the benefit as I circumambulate this greatly revered stupa with a throng of Tibetans of all ages, many in traditional dress.  We walk clockwise, emulating the movement of the sun across the sky.  It’s a very distracting environment.  Maybe that’s part of the point.  It’s training in being vividly present in the moment, not remembering the past or anticipating the future?  Embracing the moment, not being irritated by folks around?

This morning at breakfast an American at the next table who spends a big part of every day doing prostrations was complaining to an English monk that someone removed the stones from under the plank where he does his prostrations.  There’s a wall round the stupa with many wooden planks between it and the stupa.  People use them for prostrations.  “Why would anyone remove the stones from under my plank?   I’d got it angled perfectly.  And why do all those Tibetans just sit on the planks and chat?  It’s so distracting, so disrespectful.”  I’m pretty sure he’s missing the point.  Maybe it will come to him, though.

Hey, there’s Jampa, one of my classmates last year!  He came here years ago from his home in New Zealand to go mountain biking.  Now he’s a Tibetan Buddhist monk who no longer has a home.   Last year he’d just come from a long stay at a monastery in Colorado.  I wonder where he’s been this year?  I speed up and join him.  “Hi Jampa.  Great to see you.  Are you coming to this year’s class?”  “No, I don’t know yet what I’m going to be doing.”  I almost ask why he’s here but that’s probably a bigger question than he can answer.  I ask instead what is the benefit of circumambulating the stupa?  “It has great power,” he says. “We get benefit just by being here.”  “Even if we’re just chatting while we walk?”  “Yes.  But there’s more benefit depending on our intention.  Also, it helps to chant mantras.”  “Most people doing that are doing it silently.”  “That’s OK.”

We walk on with everyone else circling the stupa.  It’s still quite early so there are not many tourists.  Some of the Tibetans are chatting animatedly, many are walking silently.  In both cases they’re counting their chants on a string of beads in their left hand.  A few are twirling a prayer wheel, an ornate cylinder that turns on a stick.  Inside the cylinder is a scroll filled with the mantra Om Mani Madme Hum, the aspiration for compassion.  It’s said that each revolution has the same effect as saying the words aloud as many times as they’re written on the scroll, so the more mantras are inside a prayer wheel, the greater the benefit.  The effect is enhanced by simultaneously chanting the mantra with the profound aspiration to attain perfect wisdom in order to free every sentient being permanently from suffering.  It’s a means of training the mind.

Rene, my Mexican classmate  this year who dresses entirely in black and has long black hair and a bushy black beard was instructed by his Tibetan guru to memorize a mantra created especially for his benefit and circumambulate the stupa chanting it as loudly as he could.  He was puzzled by the reaction.  At last a young Tibetan asked if he knew what he was saying.  “No, I don’t know Tibetan.  My guru taught it to me.”  “I think I should tell you what you are saying.”  “Thank you.”  “You are shouting, ‘I am a black man with a very big dick’.”  I’ve met Rene’s guru.  I don’t understand his trick on Rene soon after he arrived but his deep insight and caring are unmistakable.  Rene came to Kathmandu for a month before college and stayed two years.  What he met here led him to other places then he came back.  Now it looks like he’s here for good.

I don’t know what to make of the power of place.  It’s very significant to animists.  Dhiren, our Nepali trek crew boss, is always respectful of places where devis live, the spirits that protect villages but are wrathful if disturbed.  He knows the kinds of places they tend to be and always makes sure we also behave respectfully.  Temples are considered by all religions to have powerful effects.  Feng Shui has spread to the West.  The power of place is recognized in all cultures.  I’d never really thought about it though.  I dismissed it as an obvious delusion.  What would be the origin and nature of such power?

I’m still skeptical about the power of place but I do know we can train our mind.  If we expect training to work better in a particular place, presumably it will.    But change happens to many people who come to Nepal with no expectation.  It just seems to happen.  Maybe geography and cumulative past behaviors form a feedback loop here?