Tag Archives: Culture

Jan 15 2013

A Semi-Wrathful Frog

Frogs are not cuddly but each could be a prince.  Today, the transformation is triggered by a princess’s kiss.  In Grimm’s version it’s when the princess disgustedly throws the frog against a wall.  In other cases the frog had only to spend a night on the princess’s pillow.

Setting fable aside, a sad fact about frogs is that one sitting in a pan of water will not notice the gradual change if the water is heated.  It will remain unaware until it dies.

A frog that touches hot water, however, will immediately jump away from the danger.  I say this because although no form of attention from a princess will transform me into a prince, I do try to notice and point out water that’s getting hotter.

A couple of days ago, someone I greatly respect asked: “Your posts seem a bit angry; do you feel that way?”  I was surprised.   “I don’t think so…  I hope not…  Hmmm, I do see what you mean.  Maybe they do sound that way.  It’s true that I very much want some things to change.”

My posts are on disparate topics but most are sparked when I notice something and feel like a frog sensing hot water.  Wanting to alert my neighbors to the danger, I probably would be semi-wrathful.

What does semi-wrathful mean?  Tibetan Buddhists use images of deities with peaceful, wrathful and semi-wrathful appearance.  Meditating on them helps practitioners see the origin of their emotional habits and misguided concepts as they work to slowly gain control of their mind.

These deities do not experience emotion as we do.  They do not feel attracted, repelled or indifferent.  They simply recognize what is good and not good behavior, speech and thoughts.

Peaceful deities help calm the crazy spinning of the mind.  Wrathful deities help destroy its passions, anger, desire and indifference.  Semi-wrathful deities help those of us who sometimes need gentle calming and sometimes more urgency to do better.

Aspiring to be a semi-wrathful frog is better than the goal many of us are given, to be lion king of the jungle.  That has three defects — lions do not live in the jungle, it is not possible to control the jungle, and above all, it’s selfish.

Selfishness makes everyone unhappy.

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.

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 9 2012

Waiting for Godot in Kathmandu

The easy part is sleeping the first day or two after a long journey.  What takes longer is sleeping at the right time once you’ve caught up on sleep.  That teaches patience.  So I enjoy my masala omelet for breakfast, veg momos for lunch, chicken fried rice for dinner, I circumambulate Boudha stupa, do laundry, take showers when the water is warm, email when there’s power, and read Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” while waiting for my own to become functional again.

Nepal’s political situation hasn’t changed.  The politicians are still arguing about anything and everything.  They almost agreed there should be an election for a new Constituent Assembly (CA) to draft a Constitution.  They almost agreed that before.  There was going to be an election in November.  Now they’re saying, if they agree, that is, there could be an election next May.  There has to be an amendment to the existing interim constitution to authorize the election because the first CA was supposed to draft the new constitution and there was no expectation they might fail to do that.  The politicians can’t agree what form the modification to the interim constitution should take.  They also can’t agree who should lead the government during the interim.

The issue cited as the roadblock to agreement about the new constitution, the one the CA was supposed to draft, is the number of districts (pradeshes) in Nepal’s new secular, democratic federal republic.  The UCPN-M (Maoist party) says there must be 10 or 14 pradeshes with no more than 2 in the Tarai (the area in the south adjoining India).  The UDMF (Madhesi confederation of Tarai folks) currently agrees about that.  The NC (Nepali Congress, Nepal’s first political party) says there must be 6 pradeshes, or 11.  The UML (United Marxist-Leninist party) says there must be exactly 7.  There are many fringe parties with only a few members in the disbanded CA but nobody cares what they think.  The four major parties do agree that demarcation and naming of the pradeshes can wait until after the election.

This got me thinking about the French Revolution.  They were against the provincial structure that existed under the monarchy.  They favored the rights of the individual and a strong nation.  They considered the state architecture based on parochial cultural traditions and local privileges to be reactionary.  They were for a uni-lingual state.  The underlying issue in Nepal is indigenous rights vs unification.  The Maoists got much of their support by promising the tribal folks they could self-administer, follow their own cultural traditions, and use their own languages.  But Nepali speaking Hindus don’t want to lose the privileged position they had under the former Hindu monarchy.  Also, there’s philosophical disagreement about the best national architecture for Nepal.

What could be learned from existing models?  France is centralized, unilingual and has a president who behaves in many ways as monarchs did.  India is a multilingual, multiethnic secular federation.  The US is a federation of states whose number and boundaries evolved over time.  Maine split off from Massachusetts, for example.  US States have substantial rights, everything not explicitly granted to the center.  How much scope should be provided for evolution?  The US is secular per the constitution but added “under God” when feeling threatened by communism, was primarily unilingual but is becoming bilingual, briefly split into two nations, and so on.

Nepal’s politicians have no experience forming agreements to take action.  How will that develop?  They are ignorant of how to govern because there have been no Nepali leaders to show the way.

So why am I thinking about Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot?   In that absurdist play, two men wait vainly for someone named Godot to arrive.  They claim he’s an acquaintance but admit they would not recognize him.  To occupy the time they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide.  It’s a sadly apt metaphor for today’s Nepal.

Not for me.  For one thing, there’s nobody here with whom I could swap hats.  For another, I’m not here to wait.  I’m here to practice not waiting for some fantasy about the future.  I’m here to practice not replaying stories about the past.  I’m here to practice being 100% aware right now in this moment.  If I get another moment, I’ll try to be 100% aware then, too.  That way, I’ll know what to do in each moment.  It’s like the better I’d practice playing tennis like Roger Federer, the fewer shots I’d miss.  The better I practice being awake, the fewer moments I’ll waste.

Dec 8 2012

Why Go On Journeys?

Because in new surroundings we must look more closely.  Seeing something familiar in a new context could disrupt how we’ve been imagining it to be.  We might recognize how it really is, how it is now.

What struck me first on this year’s journey to Nepal is air travel may be at the peak of an unsustainable growth path.  The first time I flew on a 747 was 1970 when I came to the USA.  They’re magnificent aircraft.  No surprise they’re still in service more than 40 years later.   In information theory no surprise means no information.  We have not been surprised by changes in air travel in the last four decades because the experience is little different.  Less than 40 years before 1970, however, it took not hours but 6 days to fly from England to India.  That was a dramatically different experience.

The great change in air travel since 1970 is enormously increased volume.  We do notice more crowding, less service and so on, but because the degradation has been stepwise we haven’t been provoked to think about the cumulative effect.  I do notice it on this trip, first because when my flight from Boston arrives at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, the shuttle, with no stops or traffic jams, takes fully 15 minutes to reach Terminal 4 for my flight to Doha.

When we approach Doha, it’s over scattered islands of apartment buildings propagated as if by winds over the featureless desert.  The airport, already a vast expanse of runways and buildings, is soon to be replaced by an even greater complex.  Even now it’s a 20 minute walk from where I disembark to the gate for Kathmandu.  When we take off, it’s over a mass of shiny new skyscrapers.  The entire spectacle is surreal.

All this vibrant life is possible only because there’s oil under the desert.  I remember Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias, whose statue was the only thing left of the empire it once surveyed.  How will these colonies survive when the oil is gone?  How long can we continue to fly?