The Golden Rule Revisited

May 11, 2025

Compare the Golden Rule to what I call “The Titanium Rule”, which is to treat people better than they treat you.

The substance of the Ten Commandments, however radical the form in which it is stated, is conventional in that it refers to what is owed to God, now that he is defined as a single God, and what is by the way owed to other people, in that it is still about settling family disputes: families don’t steal from one another or seek to appropriate one another’s wives, which is the same thing. It says nothing about what has come to be called social justice in that it does not refer to the condition of the poor or the sick and it does not refer to how people should get along with one another, except insofar as they should not get in one another’s way.

This New Year's Eve

January 1, 2025

Here is a story about New Year's Eve and afterwards. My wife Jane and I weren't much taken with New Year's Eve as a holiday. It seemed superficial, unlike Christmas, where Jane had a tree ever since when she was a kid and her mother who immigrated from Odessa said that this was America and if her grandchild had a Christrmas tree, that was alright. I liked Passover, but I gave it up in my teens, and that was a sacrifice, when I became as secular as possible. Jane and I rarely stayed up late to watch the ball fall in Times Square, that holiday liturgy, turning in early. When my kids were little, one or the other got double hours for babysitting in the neighborhood coop and so had hours banked until March.

Last night, my son and daughter in law and myself had champagne and steak and by the time it was over, it was 9:45 pm and so I turned on my tv to see the ball drop from New York, two hours later in its time zone from me. I found it very touching: all those people being so cheerful, young couples kissing, small children on dad shoulders, animated and just being happy to be part of the crowd, amid the lights, with festooned lights and a lot of confetti, despite a ban on porta potties, backpacks, no containers of liquid, and police in abundance. Everyone was wishing one another a good new year, especially by the friendly Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen on CNN.

And then I thought about the sentiment. As I told you, things are going to be bad before they get even worse with the new administration. The debacle may occur as soon as Jan. 3rd, when Johnson may be ousted as Speaker because the deficit hawks don't think he is conservative enough even if Trump backs him. But chaos of weeks before a new Speaker is chosen is preferable to efficient Trump leadership that actually tries to pass money to build detention camps for 13 million people and jail political enemies and perogue the civil service. Drag events as long as possible until the 2026 midterms. Delay confirmations and defeat some of them.

Then, this morning, I heard about the New Orleans truck ramming which turned out to be by a native born American who had served honorably in the military, but had been declared by Trump to be an illegal alien. It is amazing to know that a President in three weeks is so fast and loose about facts rather than the government relied on to be careful to tell the truth except when it is deliberately lying, as happened when Cheney and company said that they were certain there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I thought the American people couldn't possibly re-elect George W. in 2004, but they did despite his betrayal of trust. Now we have elected a President who lies all the time, congenitally, and we of the press are in the awkward position of honoring a Presidential office while reporting his latest lies. Apparently, the uncooperative press people will be eliminated in the new White House Press Room.

Some people are suggesting to take a new tack and compromise with Trump rather than just oppose him. But his declaration of war is his stated attention and his past treasonable offenses to which he never answered in the court of public opinion, much less a trial. So he is a constitutional pariah and that is all that needs to be said.

These will be dark days and there is no reason to celebrate the just past New Year's Eve.

Childhood Experience

October 31, 2024

Even small children have identities and the ability to rationally manipulate social life.

There are deep structures in existence, like consciousness or the reality of the external world, that are thought to be philosophical or metaphysical or even just conceptual that in fact can be reduced to generalizations or inferences that people draw from experience rather than as inevitable or inherent. The evidence comes from consulting the experience of early age children as to establish what they themselves are able to find and what can be found about them even without the advantages supposedly offered about psychoanalysis about how the early child’s mind can be accessed. I am thinking of my commonplace observations of what I remember before I was four about things I now know as having already been discovered in the world. I remember, for one thing, learning to drink from a glass rather than from a bottle. I had been a late learner and my mothers ruse, as I realized it to be many years later, was to say that she could not get down to the village to buy bottles and so I would have to cope by using a glass to drink milk. An accommodating sort, I said I would do that if I drank from a glass in private and she acquiesced and we went into a private space and I drank from a glass and never went back to bottles. Think about that. I already had the ability to feel embarrassed about making what seemed a major transition and I was able to negotiate the terms of my acquiescence.

What Academic Studies are Worth

October 18, 2024

Learning is one way of being human.

The various academic departments in a college or university can be ranked on their relative prestige rather than as a menu whereby students have to try a variety of courses so as to get an ample meal. One way to track the various departments is by how hard they are. Mathematics seems the most demanding and abler students stand out quickly but some still decide that they cannot compete with the real stars and so fall back into other fields, like languages, their intellects superior enough to master those fields, though there seems to be a cleavage between mathematical and language ability, some very good at one but not the other. Classics are said to always attract people even if there are few jobs in it because it is so hard and so it is not surprising that classicists go deeply into related areas like foreign policy or not so related areas such as psychoanalysis to use their acquired skills. Most of the humanities are not regarded as being as hard as the natural sciences or economics, the sole difficult discipline in the social sciences that is regarded as hard, though I note that historians or sociologists can view as naive the speculations on these other matters by people who do hard fields of study because they can form coherent arguments about them while a humanist cannot say anything intelligible about scientific matters. While the natural sciences are ranked hard to relatively easy, humanists are generally ranked from deep to superficial. Low end on the ranking of prestige by difficulty are area studies such as feminist studies because they engage in advocacy more than rigorous methods or include newer fields like mass communication where film production is more important than film criticism.

Recording Events

August 15, 2024

Framing events, like Facebook, can make people vulnerable so that they think themselves as victims.

It used to be that only special people, like St. Augustine or Rousseau, thought they needed to explain themselves by recording themselves, but that seems, over time, to have become a prominent feature of contemporary consciousness, perhaps augmented by Kodak cameras which every person could record their family growing up and so not restricted to rich people who people like John Singer Sargent could portray of their daughters or portraits painted by Gainsborough of beer barons. Computer technology allows everyone to write and publish a memoir. But recordings predated advanced technology. Yes, people had diaries but with rare exceptions those were not meant to be made public. Tombstones had inscriptions of dates, family and epigrams, but those were not from the dead but from the living. Pharaohs followed the traditional idea that only singular people deserved being remembered in gigantic tombs.

The best example of this being an age of self regard is Facebook, a phenomenon only some twenty years old and yet to seem essential to many of its ardent participants. People post their everyday activities, such as pictures of friends and cats and homes and brief videos of jumping into the lake and announcing what of the voluntary community events in which they participate. The purpose is not to create art because no standard of proficiency is required or applied but to make one’s personal activities visible just so as to make these public and therefore a record of one’s activities rather than a list of accomplishments as one might find in a vita offered to a possible employer. That display allows a person to communicate with others in a harmless way and simply to be present in that they are part of the digital world, and so different from personally addressed letters where an attempt is being made to communicate a particular fact or feeling to the addressee. This is a pure example of being neither artistic nor practical even if part of the membership is trying to do just that. Rather, Facebook contributors are just trying to be recorded and vindicated as that by their posts.

Taste

August 7, 2024

Taste is constrained by circumstance and character.

Taste, as in food or music, is regarded as a personal preference that is inconsequential, but that judgment should not be extended to politics or literature, where people are said to be arbitrary or idiosyncratic but where these judgments are not merely consequential but also matters of character.

Begin with the superficial aren of taste. People like the food they grow up with and therefore often seen as comfort foods or throwbacks to their roots. So I like tongue and Reuben sandwiches because my mother was more or less kosher and some people identify the Italian culture with red sauce pasta rather than Michaelangelo or Dante. My children all knew how to use chopsticks because their family and the families around them frequented Chinese restaurants So food tastes are deeply set, people appalled at being exposed to unfamiliar foods, even though, Levi Strauss’s claim otherwise. In my view, taste is a matter of circumstance and history, however deeply set, and does not they do not convey meaning from or for a food taste. It doesn’t explain a person’s character because they prefer rare to well done steak even if someone can speculate that those who prefer the well done are repressed or that those who eat raw shellfish are more open minded.

The Present Begins

May 30, 2024

In other words, when the past is over.

When does the present begin? For me, it was the B-29, which was larger, carried more payload, and had that distinctive bubble nose at its prow and was replacing the not quite antiquated bombers, the B-17 and the B-24. The present began with women in bunned and highly arranged hairdos and art moderne dress, with bold decorations adorning bold colors, rather than the drab colors and shapeless dresses of the Thirties. The present was Fred Allen and Jack Benny engaging in a mock feud across their radio programs. It was the movie poster saying “Clark is back and Greer has got him” which meant Gable was back from the War and how he would match up with Greer Garson, another superstar, was of interest to moviegoers. The present was moving into Queens and summering in the Catskills. It meant knowing that FDR was dead and the United Nations was the future along with atomic energy and space travel. The past, what was antiquated, were cars with running boards and a squared black sedan, and people who had not yet seen the War, as well as silent films, which I never saw before I was in college, which I discovered as hidden treasures though preferring the talky and well constructed dramatic arcs of the movies of the Forties. The latest news thing that marked the present, the new, when I was young, a pre-tyeener, was the advent of television, first through the windows in bars, then in the living rooms of families with early television arrivals, who after dinner lined up chairs in theatrical style so that the neighbors could come visit and see the new marvel, and then my family getting its own tv set,, an RCA, that enriched my life by providing, among other things, travelogs of G.I.’s returning to Japan to see the sights of the recently ended war.

Common Sense

May 6, 2024

“Common sense” means practicality.

What is “common sense"? The term is often associated with its provenance. Common sense is what anyone can have while people schooled with books and lectures can lack common sense and rely instead on these artificial ways of learning to learn the things needed to manage life and things while, paradoxically, common sense may also be a rare commodity in that most people may not have insight about people and processes, about appreciating the motives of people or how to adjust the tv set, while just about everyone can get a rudimentary formal education and remain clueless about how the world works. Common sense emerges as a major concept of epistemology in that assessing it means evaluating a claim that is a way to go on the road to truth. Indeed, John Dewey based his theory of knowledge on common sense. He thought that the practical activity of woodworking or managing farm machinery honed one’s mental abilities so as to appreciate more abstract matters. Practical knowledge led people to be objective and creative in finding solutions. I want to explore the idea of common sense more fully.

Conclusive Argument

April 18, 2024

Adages are more convincing than arguments, but not conclusive.

What is the point of staging an argument? Piers Morgan has tried to moderate a number of debates between Pro-Hamas and Pro-Israeli speakers. No one expects the other to become convinced of the views of the opposing debaters. What is to be gleaned is that one or the other side will have revealed itself as hypocritical or uninformed, at least to the satisfaction of Morgan or the other side and maybe to some in the audience, but strictly speaking each side can defend their own point of view to their own satisfaction even if the other side thinks the opposition is lame or deceptive. So a Pro-Hamas debater cannot admit to criticizing whatever Hamas says because the basis of the cause is very long lasting, as old as the Nakba, while the advocate of Israel disputes the casualty figures even though the amount is beside the point, just too much, though Natasha Housdorff argues that casually figures for civilians to military casualties are far less than what has happened in Iraq or elsewhere and so the Israelis are relatively humane, though I haven’t heard or read such figures in other media sources. So arguments are of limited usefulness. They do not result in a conclusive argument so as to shift sides though some of the points may rankle.

A Solar Eclipse

April 11, 2024

An eclipse is less than meets the eye.

There was a solar eclipse a few days ago that covered a band of geography from Dallas to Burlington. People congregated to watch it, sure to wear their protective lenses so as not to harm their eyes. Such an eclipse would not happen again for a quarter century and so was a major event, but it just meant no eclipse would happen till then over the United States. There would be a band over the North Atlantic including over Iceland next year. Book your cruises for that. Why such a big ado because of a solar eclipse?

Terror is Our Present Time

April 6, 2024

Terror is the temper of our century in public affairs and in literature.

The Twenty first Century is only a quarter over and so it might seem too early to assess the temper of the times for the century. But a quarter into the cavalcade of centuries has already set its defining emotions. The Seventeenth Century started with the tragic mode of Shakespeare and Webster, as that was continued later in the century with Racine and Pascal. The Eighteenth Century abruptly changed to the comedy of Pope who shared a sense of humans as all too human and therefore comic as continued later in the century by Hume and Locke, who thought people to be reasonable and accommodating. “Gulliver’s Travels“ is, after all, a satire in that it exaggerated features to comic extreme, as by making British royalty into Lilliputians, even if the book presents, as a whole, a very tragic view of the human condition. The book was published in 1726, just a year past the quarter century mark. The Nineteenth Century of Romanticism and melodrama was set early with Wordsworth and Coleridge in their “Lyrical Ballads' in 1798 and Jane Austen’s inquiry into all the conflicting and well articulated motives was over by the quarter century mark, however well developed by Dickens later on in the century to high melodrama, including the insufferably bathetic “A Christmas Carol''. Darwin emerged much later in his century but the writers he combined, Malthus and Lyll, of his “Geology”, had been there at the beginning of theNineteenth Century. Modernist greats such as Picasso and Joyce and Kafka and Freud appeared in the early Twentieth Century and so it is possible to see already the strictures and the impulses of that. The epic literature of that century largely preceded the epic warfare of the century: the two world wars and the Cold War.

Communication Appliances

April 2, 2024

I am not a cyborg, but I might as well be one.

There was a very local electrical stoppage in my neighborhood a few days ago. A three block radius was blacked out from early afternoon until power was restored at about seven p.m. Not the end of the world. My family could drive to a nearby supermarket to buy sandwiches because the electric stove was out and we wanted to keep the refrigerator as cold as possible by not opening it. My daughter in law was also able to inspect where the repair crew was working. The power stoppage was therefore hardly noteworthy but it was nonetheless unsettling because no electricity meant no computer, no television and no lights, though my cell phone had enough battery life to outlast the outage. Where would we be without these now essential appliances? I was not plugged into most of my devices, and with the overcast sky, I had no strong light to let me read, and so I went into a cocoon, bundled up in a jacket and blanket, because there was impending snow, even so late in March, and dozed through the afternoon, expecting to deal with the darkness with a pencil flashlight (my family gets prepared) though that turned out unnecessary.

Daydreams

December 18, 2023

Daydreams are structued as stories.

Imagining oneself as having another life, different from the one you have lived, is one version of a daydream, and there are other kinds of daydreams that will be referred to later. What happens in that particular daydream, let us say in Boise, Idaho or Lincoln, Nebraska, is that a person imagines how he or she took one or more forks in the road and so came to live in a different place or time, a satisfying conjecture given the pleasures of time travel romances and disasters, people finding love in another age, or fining the world on the other side of apocalypse, both of them the case in the granddaddy of the literary version of the genre, E. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”. The thing about daydreams is that they are not random thoughts but are stories, filled with incidents and described situations and even dialogue, and so are subject to the restraints of stories and so not to be dismissed as mere reveries.

The Taste of the Eighties

December 9, 2023

What it felt like back then.

The temper of the times for a particular decade can be described by the social upheavals that mark the decade. The Thirties were the Depression; the Forties were theWar and its reconstruction; the Fifties were the affluent society and the civil rights movement, and so on and so on, with each decade having its characteristic sociological events. It is difficult to characterize decades with their cultural emanations in that culture is unevenly produced. The Thirties was sparse on novels though it did produce memorable films and popular music. The Forties had an outpouring of drama, both Miller and Williams doing their best work. The Fifties included novelists and writers such as Bellow and the immigres Nabakov and Arendt, which did give a sense of the deeper meanings of the decade. But it is also possible to speak of what we might call “the taste of the times'' referring to the felt rather than the deeper meanings of a time, what is experienced and readily available, even as that quickly passes and so has to be recovered or exposed from memory as the way it was, never mind the deeper currents. I am reminded of this more restricted focus by having looked at the first season of “LA Law” a network tv series originally aired in the Eighties, which does not seem so long ago but which the usual process of cultural amnesia has abolished until it was made available this fall on Hulu streaming, a service that did not exist when “LA Law'' first aired. Think of those episodes as a way to recover Eighties fads and preoccupations even if current cultural commentators recently offered in the New York Times find the series quaint or distasteful rather than engaging the truths of the times they told.

The Significence of Walking

August 16, 2023

Walking is not much of a sport. There was a time of competitive walk races. Participants had to exaggerate their hip movements so that they could manage to lock their knees with each step, that the definition of a walk rather than a run, and it looked awkward and ridiculous and overly constrained, very different from running, which seems graceful and streamlined and natural, as if people had taken wing. Running races is as old as the Iliad, even if none of the Hebrews in the Bible did sports unless David and his fellow shepherds competed with slingshots, but there is no citation of that.

Disengagement

June 19, 2023

A theory that was current in gerontology when I was a young man teaching that course was the theory of disengagement which was not really a theory but only a single proposition rather than the linking of a number of propositions, but never mind that. The proposition was that people as they got older disengaged from their social affiliations and so became more isolated from one another staying in their own rooms or houses, people dying off around them, and withdrawing from friends still living. People shrunk from their social contacts in preparation for death. That does not seem to me an accurate picture of what old age is like, now that I am there from the inside, while other findings at the time, such as that old people are often thought to be losing their mental acuity when all that is happening is that they are becoming hard of hearing, a point which is something to which I can attest, though that might have been a geriatrics insight rather than a gerontological one.

It does not seem to me that old people disengage, even though, obviously, some of their friends and spouses die and people retire from their vocations. But many oldsters stay at work for as long as possible and retire into alternative occupations without remuneration so as to keep active. Oldsters keep touch with old friends and cultivate people of the younger generation and engage in the same things they did while young, which for me was keeping up with politics and movies. Old buddies are precious because they share a point of view and their bygone experiences and are also because they are associated with those people who have died. Oldsters are not just waiting in the vestibule of death.

But there is something deeper that lurks behind the specter of disengagement that explains better what it is to be an old person. People shed their grieve]nces as they get older perhaps because under the light of eternity it is just not worth holding a grudge or because the oldster is no longer in the battles that made grievances meaningful, such as a battle over academic prestige or who will run the corporation, thinking someone else acted unfairly and got the slot you wanted. Old people can accomplish a little bit of serenity because, after all, the winner in life is not the one who has the most toys, but the one who lasts longest while remaining comfortable, because you will no longer have any trinkets of wealth, power and prestige once you are as dead as a doornail even if the Egyptians and other religionists thought and think otherwise, grievances as well as successes reaching into the afterlife because that is iust what happens, is the substance of living life. So people disengage from their bad feelings and only that though not everyone takes advantage of being so liberated.

Shedding grievances is included in religion because it is part of human experience. Bill Murray in that very wise movie “Groundhog Day” says that God may just be a very old person who has seen everything. Like an old person, He gives past grievances because the grievances no longer matter. That is different from the Christian view that elevates shedding grievances into a doctrine of forgiveness, which is to erase past grievances as if they didn’t happen and, indeed, take it as a virtue to abolish the past so that you are a better person for forgiving your trespassers even though it is obviously impossible to erase away a murder or a hurting insult, just find a way to go past it. Indeed, God in the Christian view, does the sublime event of forgiving mankind for its original sin by having His own Son suffer for mankind’s deeds, becoming, as in the story of Abraham and Isaac, the scapegoat for mankind, as if Jesus whatever they were, which might be a tendency to perverseness, which is hardly the most ultimate flaw, and Jesus suffered just a whit, three days in a tomb, for redeeming all of mankind. A mighty cheap bargain.

Think rather of every old person having a magic wand whereby the person can change the world by changing an attitude and so transform other people and oneself into being fully human by forgoing their grievances. And why not? Old people are also free because if they are run over by a truck they can think the pain wouldn’t last long and they have anyway lived out the vast majority of their lives. Old people are therefore invincible even if they are fragile. Nothing much can happen to them and so shedding grievances is a minor part of the situation of being old. Every day is a joy and a vacation.

That doesn’t mean to be aimless. You can still write a book or be nice to people. But those are added virtues rather than what have been the burdens of your identity, what shaped you and what you know to have characterized you. It is all now gratis, a gift more precious than Jesus could offer because Jesus was compelled by his Father to do that.

Make use of this liberation while being old with regard to people in the midst of their lives, full of struggles and things to lose and matters about which to grieve. As an adult, you can be kinder to others, be only moderately competitive, and just neglect the small stuff. Enjoy the breeze while the kids are in the playground. That is not asking people to be saints, which are singular accomplishments of rectitude, but simply the pleasures available to ordinary life. All people want to be pleasant except for those few who want to be mean and even those who are mean find an excuse for being so or regarding themselves and not really mean, though only a lover can appreciate that. That is what David Hume thought and that is contrary to the Christian view which is, deep down, people are just louses, cockroaches, meanies. What can a belief in original sin otherwise mean?

Not that old age is a long set of epiphanies. You are busy managing your pills and being sure not to eat what will upset your delicate digestion. You need not have gone beyond ambition or anger, but those qualities seem to have been stoked. But you can look at the vast expanse of human creation and sometimes say “This is good ''.

Two Sisters

May 16, 2023

Shedding and acquiring guilt with regard to the Holocaust and other historical and ordinary problems.

My mother, originally known as Manya Demba, later Mary, grew up in Czenstochowa, Poland, a cathedral town close to the German border and famous for the shrine of the Black Madonna. She in later years told me that Easter Sunday was when youths would raid the Jewish ghetto and beat up people. My mother worked at a handbag company, never having gone past the sixth grade, while her sister, later anglicized as “Rae”, was a nanny and so got extra food and clothing from her employer. But war was impending. They had been through the Munich Crisis. Polish troops had been mobilized and my mother remembered the hypnotic power of Hitler on the radio, which she could well enough understand because of her Yiddish. (She later said that English was difficult to learn because its letters did not easily convey the sounds and meanings of the language while Polish was transparent, its letters indicating what was said). My mother planned to immigrate to Palestine and was learning Hebrew and Jewish history in preparation for that when a rich relative who had prospered as a baker in America, much more so than his three brothers who had gone to America also as bakers a generation before, came to visit Czenstochowa, partly to provide money and also, I am inclined to think, to gloat a bit about his prosperity. He offered to sponsor the two young women, my mother and one of her sisters, Rae, to come to the United States by paying the fare and guaranteeing they would not be destitute, giving them food and housing, and so akin to the wards who populate nineteenth century English novels. The two girls decided to do that and departed on the luxury ship “Batory” in May of 1939, reportedly the last Polish ship to leave Poland before the war, my mother insisting in later years that boys took her dancing on the higher class decks while her sister was seasick. That was the most courageous thing the two sisters ever did, however many were the people who immigrated from Europe to America, never again to see the families from which they had departed. Most of her own relatives, including a number of sisters, were killed in the concentration camps after the war began.

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