Rational Philosophy

Following on from yesterday’s post, Craig Newmark (the Craig of Craigslist) graciously agreed to answer a few questions about the phenomenon of a new philanthropy created in part by the boom in the technology economy. Here is the interview:

Q. Is the philanthropy of the likes of Bill Gates, Larry Page, Jimmy Wales and yourself a truly new force in society?

A. I think it’s novel in two senses:

– greater focus on investment in self-sustaining good, where good efforts can sustain themselves or maybe get others to do even more good. example: microfinance

– involve many others in their efforts, creating mass movements. examples: wikipedia, microfinance

Q. Has the rapidity of your success (you’re just 55, I think) made you better able to effect positive change in the world?

A. It’s been thirteen years, not so rapid, probably not a factor.

on the other hand, I’m a nerd, the whole plastic pocket protector cliche. In school, a nerd gets excluded from a lot, and I remember that, and choose to use the Net as a tool for the inclusion of everyone. So it’s not age that’s relevant, but inner reflection followed by action.

Q. You’ve said that you believe in keeping the Internet free. Are there other things you think should be free to everyone (like higher education and healthcare)?

A. I think education and healthcare should be freely available to everyone, but how to make that happen adequately, no one’s quite solved that.

Q. It often seems that governments aren’t able to meet critical social challenges. Is the work of the new philanthropists filling a void or allowing government off the hook?

A. I think that work is about finding ways to make public/private partnerships solve problems.

Q. With Craigslist you have stayed connected to your users by handling customer service. In your philanthropic work, how do you field-test your ideas and convictions?

A. The work’s just started, will be decades long in many cases, and I just don’t know how to measure success now.

Related posts from around the web…

Craigslist Founder Looking For New Causes To Support - Craiglist founder Craig Newmark says he’s discovered he’s not much of a manager. That’s why he leaves the managing to others and concentrates on customer service. This gives him the time and freedom to support different causes. …

Craigslist Founder Buys into Citizen Journalism - Craig Newmark pursues politics and citizen journalism Muckety, May 12, 2008 http://news.muckety.com/2008/05/12/craig-newmark- pursues-politics-and-citizen-journalism/2731 Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, participates in …

Craigslist founder moving forward with own agenda - While Craigslist expands to smaller cities and tries to sort out a current dispute with minority shareholder eBay…

For-profit philanthropy - how new billionaires want to make money … - In addition to putting $4 million into Grameen’s nonprofit arm, the Grameen Foundation, Omidyar Network has supported nonprofit groups like Unitus, which works to develop microfinance institutions and the International Development Law …

Philanthrocapitalism - “We get stakeholders on the ground visiting communities where they have business and philanthropic interests. Combining business opportunities with NGO project/community visits with cultural immersion and empathetic insight is essential …

On the genetic ancestry of the duck-billed platypus, the beating of suspects by police in Philadelphia, and the race tensions in the Democratic primary contest.

The duck-billed platypus has a bill, webbed feet, lays eggs, but has fur and nurses its young. And now that an international team of scientists has decoded the duck-bills genome its uniquely ambivalent classification — part reptile, part mammal — has become a little less mysterious. The team found that the duck-bill’s genetic line split off from the other primary line over 166 million years ago. It has many genes in common with other mammals, but has retained many reptilian genes.

In Philadelphia, police and city officials have hurried to stress that the beating of restrained suspects caught on tape by television news reporters wasn’t racially motivated. The police officers were mostly white, the suspects black. (One presumes that this means they would have beaten white suspects, too.)

And in the contest for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton has again hinted that her success with white voters makes her a better matched against the Republicans.

We live in the confines of our prejudices. Prejudice rests on the fear that our identity of self isn’t supreme.

Philadelphia city officials probably believe they act out of a different fear when claiming that race wasn’t a factor in the beatings. One presumes that they fear the incident will fuel racial tensions. Asserting that race wasn’t a factor allows them to feel that they’re acting to diffuse the tension. But asserting that race is not a factor before that aspect of the beatings has been thoroughly investigated seems to work counter to that aim.

Hillary Clinton fears losing more than she fears anything else, even betraying her bigotry. However latent and denied it is, bigotry does seem to underpin Clinton’s use of the difference of her race from Obama’s as a tool to further her campaign.

The duck-billed platypus, amalgam of reptile and mammal, can stand as an emblem of the possibility of living without prejudice. Rather than spending so much time parsing our differences, how much better would the world be if we could acknowledge that the world is just as diverse and bizarre as we can accept it to be.

On biobigotry, regular bigotry, and the apparent contradiction of free-will.

Natalie Angier writes about our tendency to project human characteristics onto, and make human judgments of, animals. We take a dislike to certain species and favor others. And we justify our preferences on the basis of an animal’s behavior, its choice of habitats, its degree of invasiveness, its plumage… in short, on anything that inspires our appreciation or dislike. Angier calls this biobigotry.

Angier rightly implies that an animal is what it is and does what is in its nature to do; any judgment we put on it has relevance only as an artifact of our mind. By using the word biobigotry Angier connects the concept to the human-human bigotry of judgments based on race, gender, age, weight, etc.

Here we come to the paradox: If we say that animals do what it is their nature to do and shouldn’t be judged for it, then carry this idea forward and apply it to people, who likewise do what it is their nature to do, we end up concluding that people, too, can’t be judged as inherently despicable or adorable.

Is this a supportable premise?

It is wrong for Angier to condemn cowbirds for leaving their eggs in other birds’ nests; that’s what cowbirds do. But is it likewise wrong to condemn a person who steals, for instance? Isn’t the act of theft a result of a certain set of circumstances — genetic, environmental, and circumstantial.

If we follow this approach to its rigorous conclusion we can end up deciding that no one can be blamed for anything. For most of us this doesn’t sit well. So how can we resolve this paradox.

The resolution lies in the concept of free-will. The cowbird does not reflect on a set of choices available to it and decide it would prefer to leave its eggs in another bird’s nest. But the person who steals has a range of options from which to choose. Stealing is a choice.

Immediately, though, we see a problem with this approach. One could argue that for someone who is going to steal the range of possible options is illusory. The options exist in theory, but in practice he or she is preconditioned to reject the other options.

In this new paradox we have reached the limits of the applicability of human judgment. When we judge someone we judge them against a range of possible responses and actions, regardless of whether the person could have actually chosen differently given his or her psychological makeup and the situation at hand. We judge and condemn, in effect, not the person, but the person’s inability to make a better choice.

On the separate worlds of science and religion.

For what reads like a fluff piece, Cornelia Dean’s portrait of evolutionary biologist and author Francisco J. Ayala manages to press some pertinent buttons. Specifically:

1. The title “Roving Defender of Evolution, And Room for God” might mislead. It seems to imply that Ayala speaks not just as a scientist but as a believer. But the piece closes as follows: “Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer. ‘I don’t want to be tagged,’ he said. ‘By one side or the other.’”

2. Ayala makes some curious statements about evolution and evil. As Dean reports “If God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, [Ayala] said, ‘then he is a sadist…’” And quoted Ayala from his book: “Evolution ‘provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world.’”

3. And, in passing, Dean inserts this dramatic and non-trivial opinion: “‘Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,’ [Ayala] writes in the new book. ‘It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.’”

The NY Times exhibits poor editorial judgment in publishing the piece under the chosen title. I don’t know whether the Times is diluting its editorial expertise in the move to become an up-to-date on-line news resource. And I don’t have an assiduous record of the editorial quality of the paper. But it’s my passing impression that the mismatch between titles and content is happening somewhat frequently on-line. I don’t ever recall it happening in the printed paper. The piece itself is less focused and on-point than one would expect from a top notch news source. In an Internet world overflowing with dubious content, these things matter enormously.

I’m fascinated by Ayala’s equating of evolution with an explanation for evil. Given the sketchy coverage of Ayala’s views and opinions, I’m guessing that he has much more to say on the subject. But from the little we have to work with Ayala seems to be saying that evolution lets God off the hook for being the source of evil.

This brings us to the third point. If science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge then on what basis can we cross-reference evolution and evil?

Here are my specific responses:

a. Religion is not a realm of knowledge, it is a realm of belief. In furthering human understanding and combating intolerance, we must resist the confusion of scientific and rational knowledge (which is grounded in a common and reproducible perception of the world we live in) from religious belief (which is not).

b. Evil is a human construct related to belief and doesn’t “exist” other than as a concept. To casually conjoin the concept of evolution with the concept of evil overlaps science and religion in exactly the way that Ayala seems to decry.

c. I agree that denouncing religion in the name of science isn’t particularly helpful. But neither is it helpful for a renowned scientist to use his scientific credentials to explicitly “make room” for religion while being coy about his own beliefs.

As a side note, moral concepts arise out of our experience of the world around us. Morality is our way of making sense of the way that life seems to operate. If we explore the origin of the concept of morality we find that it has its fundamental grounds in the principles of space and time. Working rationally we can define a moral framework that relies only on logic and promotes ideas about goodness that reflect life as it is not life as we’ve been told it should be. — I describe this approach in detail in my book - LIFE!

Related posts from around the web…

Evolution and the Problem of Evil - It does add force to the atheist’s argument from evil, but it’s just one point in a larger picture, and the problem as a whole would remain even if evolution were to fall. A person who accepts evolution and still believes in God can do …

Science Vs Religion: Intellectual Sloth As The Main Problem - Likewise, atheism is not about “over dogmatism” (a cheap characterization in my opinion), but about the rule of rationality and abandonement of superstition (ie leaving the primitive mind behind and embracing the enlightened, …

Good, Evil, Morality, and Ethics - I don’t claim to understand all the forces that govern the evolution of ethics, but it is plain to see that our ethical systems have evolved. Slavery was once accepted and considered ethical by many; now it is not accepted. …

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the rise in America’s prison population, execution, and administrative wrongdoing.

The United States has a prison population far higher than anywhere else in the world. This is a recent phenomenon. About thirty years ago the US prison population started to climb and now other countries regard the US’s penal system as shocking.

The Supreme Court just upheld the use of a lethal cocktail injection for the administration of the death penalty, citing case law supporting the idea that the mere possibility of cruel and painful death isn’t a reason to put a stop to lethal injection. The constitutionality of capital punishment distracts us from whether it is a punishment worthy of an enlightened society.

And slowly but surely details of the Bush administration’s disregard for human rights and US law continue to emerge. Bush and his senior team spent a good deal of time and energy devising mechanisms that would allow them to torture detainees. (Of course, the administration’s blatant disregard for appropriate justification wasn’t limited to the abuse of prisoners. It has been a consistent pattern.)

These three examples seem to indicate a disturbing trend. Most disturbing, the Bush administration’s conviction that it is above the law, simply because it believes it is right. While Europe (much scoffed at by the likes of Bush) has moved inexorably and bumpily toward cooperation and enlightenment, the US has veered off on its own, deluded by the idea of itself as a nation that can remain fixed, or fixate, on the idea of itself as infallible.

As we’ve seen with the Catholic church in recent years, the infallible have a lot to learn. Errors of national ego punctuate the history of civilization like buckshot. The only thing that can save us from even worse transgressions and further isolation is a healthy dose of humility.

On intuition and how it can fool us.

In pointing to the problems with what we think we deduce, Dan Ariely, (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions) points to a study showing that whether someone opts to donate his or her organs depends on whether the question asks them to opt-in or opt-out. People will tend to stick with the default presented to them. Not because they don’t care, but because they care deeply but don’t feel able to decide from fundamental principles.
Similarly, a mathematical analysis of the game show “Let’s Make A Deal” reveals that people aren’t very good at intuiting the correct answers to probability problems. When choosing between three options, knowing that one option is wrong affects the likelihood of one’s secondary choice. On Let’s Make A Deal, Monty allowed the contestant make an initial choice between three doors, behind one of which was a car, while behind the other two were goats. Monty would then reveal a goat behind one of the two doors that the contestant didn’t pick. Should the contestant switch or stick? Does it make a difference to his chances of winning? Counterintuitively, the answer is that he should switch. This seems wrong but is born out by the math. (The “reveal” is constrained, effectively tipping off the chooser; if you switch, you win two out of three times; if you don’t switch you win only one out of three times. When explained in this way — 2/3 plus 1/3 = 1, it makes sense, but that is not how it appears intuitively.)

How does this relate to sexism and misogyny? Nicholas Kristof asks whether the routinely brutal and discriminatory treatment of women in many societies is sexist or misogynistic. He gets a lot of comments on his post. But I think that Kristof and his responders maybe miss the point because it offends intuition. Kristof argues that perhaps ritual abuse and discrimination of women is sexist rather than misogynistic.

It seems to me that intuitively we look at the question from a neutral perspective — that women are routinely discriminated against and abused in a ritual fashion yields evidence of sexism or misogyny. But what if it were evidence of something else? Wouldn’t this change the question?

Throughout the natural world, the male and female of the various species exhibit different behaviors. In some species the females raise the young. in others this is the task of the males. In some species the female is multi-hued and splendid, in others it is the male. In mammals, typically, females protect and nurture the young, men protect and feed the group. These are not sexist behaviors, since sexism is a conscious concept; the animals simply behave as they’ve evolved to behave.

Sexism and misogyny begin from but distort the neutral, natural concepts that differentiate females and males of the human species. But why does this happen at all? Humans exaggerate and conceptualize differences in ways that make them feel less threatened, more in control. Men traditionally exploit and codify the differences between the sexes to reduce their fear and feed their self-esteem. Likewise women do the same, but for the most part with less dramatic and harmful results.

Intuitively, we connect the ill-judged and harmful behaviors of abuse, control and humiliation with the concepts of sexism and misogyny, but they are more closely connected with the concepts of fear and defense. We exaggerate and exploit gender differences to counter our fears and bolster our defenses; this happens more readily in societies that have fewer less harmful mechanisms to bring about the same outcome. These defenses then become codified as socially accepted or tolerated or rejected concepts. Enlightenment, insight, education and social change are the only remedies.

In a 1929 interview, Albert Einstein apparently said: “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge.”

In order to have an opinion on Einstein’s statement, we first need to decide what he means by “more important.” Einstein was speaking of his own process. He had been asked whether intuition or inspiration accounted for his theories. Certainly, when devising a new theory, imagination plays a very significant role, and without it a new theory can’t emerge.

Einstein’s contribution to science was creative. For him, then, imagination was more important that knowledge.

As my wife and I visited our newborn son in the ICU today we talked about the role of the nursing staff. So much of what they do is routine — they learn how to care for the newborns and follow the instructions they’ve been given. But the difference between a competent nurse and a nurse who contributes something important is the degree to which she is engaged with the baby and his parents.

The competent nurse follows the correct procedures, attends to her tasks with care and dedication. The engaged nurse does this too, but also sees things, listens, and reacts.

Artist Mark Rothko said this about art: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

Rothko could have been speaking about nursing. One looks at Rothko’s paintings and one could be forgiven for asking what they are about. But does this mean that they aren’t about something?

Rothko’s children are suing to have his remains unearthed and moved to a Jewish cemetery. I don’t know how Rothko would feel about this. Judged as a creative act, one imagines that he would find it rather obvious. Judged as an action in the world, one imagines he would find it somewhat depressing.

Another child of a famous person — Max Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley the notorious British Nazi — has been in trouble for exploring his imaginative world in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes in London. Apparently, shades of Nazism can be detected in the role-play. Mosley is the chief of the Formula One motor racing federation and has been asked to resign.

The thread that I’m trying to mine is the concept of engagement. A nurse engaged with her role as caregiver. A scientist engaged with his role as a pursuer of new ideas. A painter engaged with the direct communication of otherwise uncommunicable ideas. And a man engaged with his legacy and its demons.

But what does any of this have to do with Bacon? Stanley Fish writes about deconstruction and Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon predicted that rational thought would eventually win out; that we would one day have a consistent , complete understanding of the world we live in, but that we would go through tough times to get there. He predicted that language would get in the way. That the terms we use to talk about and define things would become recursively problematic.

Rothko sought to eliminate words. Bacon recognized their challenges. Einstein sought to subjugate knowledge.

There is a reason, I think, for such struggle. Rothko, Bacon and Einstein all felt painfully the distinction between ideas and reality. We experience reality, and we conceive of ideas.

Ideas can be consistent and whole and concrete. Reality must be felt and experienced and can never be pinned down. Einstein eluded language, Rothko avoided it, Mosley seeks to bend it, and Bacon wanted to wrestle with it, but found it stronger than him. Language, I would argue, can be accurate and complete when it expresses ideas, but not when it seeks to represent the world and our experience of it.

The Hotel New Yorker, Abu Ghraib, and surreptitious sampling.

Nikola Tesla, perhaps one of the most brilliant people of all time, spent the latter years of his life holed up in The Hotel New Yorker, Room 3327, a mental prisoner of sometimes odd thoughts. Tesla, who died in 1943, supported the idea of selective breeding: “A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit,” he said, “than to marry a habitual criminal.” “The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization.” Tesla clearly had a particular view of human rights.

Tesla also hoped to be able to capture and replay people’s thoughts by recording the impact of thoughts on the optic nerve, essentially photographing the mind through one’s eyes.

One thinks that perhaps Errol Morris has pondered on Tesla’s optical ideas. Writing for The New Yorker Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris explore the pathology behind the notorious photographs that exposed and compounded the wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. Gourevitch and Morris stitch together a careful and compelling perspective on the actions of the young MPs who debased, abused and documented their ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The structure of implicit and explicit endorsement by Military Intelligence, and, by association, the military chain of command, peels away the easy conclusion that the MPs were just bad people doing bad things. As one reads the article one begins to have the uneasy impression that one is somehow culpable, too.

And lawyers have begun to challenge the practice of “surreptitious sampling” of DNA by law enforcement agencies. Bypassing legislation that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure, law enforcement officers have been quietly and successfully collecting indirect DNA samples from suspects (from cigarette butts, coke bottles, drinking glasses, etc.). The lawyers claim that this violates the suspect’s right to privacy.

“Unlike garbage that can be withheld or destroyed before it is released into the world,” reads the motion to suppress the DNA evidence in one case, “we cannot do so with our biological tissues.”

“We conclude that under the circumstances, the expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his spittle,” the Mass Appeals court ruled in another case, “or in the DNA evidence derived therefrom.”

Does one have any particular right to the privacy of one’s DNA? How is a DNA sample different from a photograph or a mental picture? Could a suspect challenge a candid photograph or an eye-witness ID as an infringement of privacy?

I expect that most of us feel the emotional pull of the right to privacy. We live with ourselves, with our thoughts. We can withdraw into ourself. We can choose not to disclose. As we grow up we develop what we might call a sacred pact of privacy with ourselves. As Schopenhauer pointed out, we only know the world through our experience of it, and our only immediate experience is the experience of our self.

On the other hand, privacy is one wall of the mind’s prison. Just as Tesla locked himself into the habit of threes (he would only stay in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three) we lock ourselves into a prison of the mind that reveres privacy. As Gourevitch and Morris astutely draw out, the MPs in Abu Ghraib took photographs in part as an attempt to break down that wall of privacy, to reveal themselves, to deprive themselves of some responsibility for their actions.

To exist, we must act in the world; we cannot avoid it. Existence sentences us to participation, however reluctant, however minimal. And, as we act in the world, we create and leave behind traces of ourselves, whether they be ideas, influences, creations, physical remnants. These traces, I would argue, must be embraced as the residue of our existence, for good or ill. We have a right to them only in as much as a prisoner has a right to the bars of his cell.
“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene… His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.”

So said Nikola Tesla of Thomas Edison.

On cell phones for Cubans and bailouts for homeowners.

As I walked through Manhattan this morning I watched as some buffoon on a cell phone began to cross the street just as the “don’t walk” sign blinked from flashing to solid. He didn’t realize that he was blocking traffic until he was half way across the street. With his phone still glued to his ear he first stopped in his tracks, then loped ahead to the far corner without so much as looking back.

Oh, to live in a world without cell phones! Even Cuba, my last hope of refuge from the cursed devices, has relented to the cell phone tide. Raul Castro — Raul The Reformer, we may as well call him — has declared that ordinary Cubans will be permitted to get cell phone contracts going forward (a privilege previously reserved for key state employees or workers for foreign firms). But since the cell phone contracts will be too expensive for most Cubans, who earn an average of a little less than $20 per month, perhaps it will take a while until cell phones cause traffic accidents in Havana.

But this snippet of communist party friction (Raul’s brother Fidel had held fast to the no cell phone policy for years) got me wondering about whether Raul should be classified as a liberal, allowing for progressive ideas, and Fidel a conservative. And if Fidel is a conservative how does that jive with him being one of the foremost and staunchest communist leaders of all time? Could Fidel Castro and his nemesis George Bush perhaps be sitting on the same side of an ideological fence? And if so, how?

As the current presidential hopefuls put forward their proposals (an odd phenomenon, this, since they’re just running for something, not running something) on fixing or mitigating the mortgage crisis, the stark differences in approach provide a lens through which to examine Democratic ideology versus Republican ideology.

This is a subject that fascinates me. For there to be such a clear division along political lines on so many issues, it seems that the roots of these divisions must live in a fundamental philosophical difference of perspective.

With some differences Obama and Clinton endorse proposals that would provide help to homeowners facing forclosure. McCain (and Bush) oppose any plan for homeowner bailout.

To paraphrase the liberal perspective “let’s help people stand on their own two feet.”

To paraphrase the conservative perspective “let people stand on their own two feet.”

As ideologies, both are rational and consistent. Where and why do they differ?

McCain has made it clear that he believes that homeowners deserve some blame if they’ve bought themselves into an unaffordable mortgage. His perspective is founded on personal responsibility, the freedom to succeed comes with the freedom to screw up. You make your choice and live with it. This same perspective underpins the conservative view on all manner of subjects, such as gun ownership and the death penalty (by all means get a gun, but if you shoot someone you shouldn’t you’ll pay for it with your life).

The conservative philosophy rests on the concept that the individual should have more control over his life and that government should not meddle.

The liberal philosophy rests on the concept that for the good of society, and the good of the individual, government should be ready to step in and provide protection or support.

Obama believes that homeowners need protection from banks eager to foreclose to stem their loses, for instance. While some may get help when they don’t deserve it. Many unwitting victims will be spared. And on gun control, a liberal may say that having the right to bear arms is all well and good unless innocent people are getting hurt by that right.

Is this just a difference of perspective without any deeper significance? I think not.

The roots are evolutionary: As social animals, human beings developed an awareness that while acting for themselves could lead to short term gains, acting for the good of all could lead to long term gains. Sharing your food might make you less well fed in the short term, but when you’re short of food, you’ll be happy for someone to share his food with you.

This is all very rational and common sensical, but even thoughtful people in a well ordered society still feel the pull of self preservation and self-satisfaction. We all experience impulses that lead us to want to act for ourselves, and we all experience impulses that lead us to want to help others. Whether we come out liberal or conservative hinges on the degree to which we believe it’s right and feel the rightness of balancing our own needs with those of others.

(For those who are interested, LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive explores a deeper philosophical basis for this line of reasoning by working from the principles of space and time.)

But what about Fidel and Raul?

Fidel Castro exhibited a deep conflict between his personal feelings about individualism — in which he was a conservative (how could a man who led a revolution and took firm control of a country not be convinced of the power and independence of his individual spirit?) — and his intellectual conviction of the benefits of a collaborative, equalized society, communism after all is liberalism on steroids.

This is perhaps why so many of us have a soft spot for the old guy (Fidel) despite his serious flaws and failings, despite his human rights abuses. We empathize with his internal conflict. We see the numbskull stopping traffic while he gabs on his cell phone and we want him to be delivered a comeuppance not a helping hand. But presented with the intellectual idea of helping those who took on too much mortgage debt (numbskulls, most likely, some of them) we easily fall on the side of assistance.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Or, how not to be a misanthrope.

OK, so Richard Branson owns, among other things, not one but two Caribbean islands. I learned this as I read that he recently brought together a bunch of other wealthy and influential people (Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister) to his British Virgin Islands retreat to get them thinking about what can be done to end or control global warming. There’s money in it for them if they can find a commercially viable way to reduce global warming gases or produce an alternate source of greener energy, but the intent also seems to be on some level genuinely philanthropic.

David Brooks writes about the socially conscious entrepreneurs, wealthy, smart venture capital types who have begun to take a hard-nosed business approach to tackling the world’s ills. Brooks proposes that the trend toward disaggregated problem solving and syndicated solutions is not only a sign of the times, but a trend worth fostering. Let them give it a go, he argues. And, by the way, they won’t take no for an answer.

Contrast this with the behavior of the top bankers who have been making money hand over fist profiting from the risky securities that now threaten to bring down the financial markets. They keep the money they’ve made ramping up the risk, even if they share in the losses of the moment. The NY Times proposes that these profiteers should have “more skin in the game,” (Krugman argues that the markets should be better regulated.)

Brooks notes that Microsoft’s Bill Gates “fits neatly” into the category of business-like philanthropists. But Microsoft’s wealth, and therefore Bill Gates’ wealth, it could be argued, has been accumulated through selling overpriced, under-performing software to a captive market. It’s nice that Gates is redistributing this wealth in socially-conscious ways. And he worked hard and demonstrated great skills in getting Microsoft where it is today. All credit to him. But the same single-minded determination to drive profit reveals itself in Gates just as it does in the Wall Street bankers. Microsoft is fiercely competitive, fastidiously greedy and has been sued for it.

All of which is a preamble to the question: Why are we philanthropic? And the counter-question, how do we stop being misanthropic?

Gates and Branson provide interesting studies. Both have turned their talents and accumulated wealth toward helping the world, but neither of them seemed to feel compelled to spread the joy on their way to accumulating that wealth. (Gates developed Windows not Linux, for instance.)

Having vast wealth obviously removes the hurdle of financing one’s philanthropic ideas. But one also needs a charitable mindset, a desire to help people. Surely wealth doesn’t do that for you? Otherwise we’d have far more philanthropists in the world.

A good proportion of us, perhaps most of us, tend toward the non-philanthropic, if not the downright misanthropic. I personally like the concept of helping people, for instance, far more than you would think if you looked at what I actually do for other people.

The answer seems to be insight, vision and belief. Branson, Gates and others of their ilk have taken advantage of the kind of perspective that you get when you’re at the top of the heap. If you’re in that position and choose to take in the view you can see a good deal further than the guy at the bottom of the hill, and you have a sense that since you climbed the hill, if you see something you want to change, you can do that, too.

For us mere mortals, a remedy for misathropy then may be to scramble our way up to the top of a nearby hillock (metaphorically speaking,) and cast about for something we might want to change.

Branson cleverly brought his guests to the Virgin Islands to remove them from the hustle of everyday life. By removing other influences, he allowed them to receive new ideas, to focus on his question about what they could do to save the world.

Seems like a pretty good idea to me, even if we can’t get to the Virgin Islands. And with that thought in mind, since it’s Friday and the second day of Spring, with blue, if cool, skies overhead, I think I’ll head off to my own private island somewhere between the kitchen table and the back door, to contemplate what I can do to solve the problems of humankind.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.