Rational Philosophy

On what we choose to do and how those choices define us.

This is the best picture, make that the only picture I could find of George Bush’s White House reception yesterday for Major League Soccer’s league champions the Houston Dynamos. Although apparently Bush “brought the entire roster into the Oval Office and took individual pictures with each player.” Bush was also present a few weeks ago at the team’s ring ceremony.

But then the Dynamos are a Texas team, no matter that Bush is in the White House, and no matter that while he was receiving the Dynamos Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused and self-claimed architect of the September 11 attacks, five years after his capture appeared before a military court in Guantanamo bay. And no matter that a Senate panel after five years of investigation finally released its findings in which it accused President Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others of deceiving or misleading the American public in various ways about the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and about Iraq’s threat to the region and the world.

So I’ve been sitting here wondering what made Khalid Mohammad choose to plot and execute such acts of terror, even assuming that he’s taking credit for more than he should. And wondering too what would make the Bush administration take matters of such dire significance into their own hands, acting with such careless, callous and criminal imperiousness. The war has destabilized the region, killed thousands of innocents, and perhaps put us at greater risk of future terrorist attacks.

If, as it seems possible, what underlies both motives is a lack of perspective, a lack of humanity (Khalid Mohammad sees America as unholy, unworthy of compassion, Bush’s crowd sees the Islamic world the same way) why do we feel strongly that there is a difference?

(When I start to equate the two too directly I remind myself that Bush feted his home state Dynamos, Saddam’s son tortured Iraq’s soccer team.)

Khalid Shaikh Mohammad wasn’t born a terrorist. So when and how did it happen? After leaving his native Kuwait as a teenager he moved to North Carolina and studied engineering. At some point as a young adult he made a series of choices about what he believed which culminated in a single-minded dedication to acts of violence against the West in the name of his religion. If we summon up a picture of him in a sleepy North Carolina suburb, a newly minted engineer, picking up the newspaper and perusing the job listings, one can imagine him having made a different set of choices, perhaps ending up living a more or less peaceful life.

But he made a choice to believe in something bigger than himself, bigger than any act of terror he could dream up. His choice was so powerful and freeing that he seems never to have looked back, never to have doubted whether it was right.

As a young man George Bush was a screw up. He excelled only at failure as far as we can tell. But Bush too made a series of choices. He chose to sober up. He chose to go into politics. And he chose to commit himself to religious faith as an influence and guide, something bigger than himself.

The similarity then, the reason we deplore the terrorism of Khalid Mohammad and the duplicity and bloody recklessness of the Bush administration is that both have chosen to forgo personal responsibility in favor of ideological responsibility.

If ever we were to go seeking a definition of evil, this might be it — to choose to set aside one’s personal conscience, to deliberately let it go, so that one can experience the freedom of living by a creed.

On the value of skepticism in philosophy and life.

Philosophy requires skepticism. Without the urge to doubt or question our immediate experience we cannot understand it. To Socrates, the ultimate knowing was knowing that he knew nothing. This idea, so central to the process of finding firm conceptual ground, has been taken up again and again by philosophers. A good philosopher has to be scrupulously skeptical, particularly of his own ideas. Bad philosophers tend to be bad because they have lousy ideas or because they’re not skeptical enough –

Schopenhauer, in his World As Will And Representation, spectacularly criticizes his contemporary, Hegel, for instance, because he saw Hegel as a self-aggrandizing mystic rather than a real philosopher. Here’s a sample of Schopenhauer’s delightful vitriol: “What was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make use of this privilege; Schelling at best equaled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel.”

In one of those curious NY Times pieces that hovers between information and advice, like a girl enjoying the attentions of two suitors while delicately avoiding a commitment to either, the NY Times reports on the desirability of skepticism as an asset for business leaders. The article points out that executives tend not to be as skeptical as they should be, causing them to fall on their noses more often than they should. The piece checks off a few reasons why this might be so:

1. If an executive doesn’t know the facts, he or she can’t make good decisions.

2. Hearing about the facts means being accessible and open to bad news.

3. Sometimes it’s not enough to be approachable and you need to go looking for bad news.

In everyday life, so long as we’re careful to understand the basis of our skepticism, skepticism can provide us with a helpful perspective on things. Socrates founded his skepticism on the sound philosophical ground that he knew only that he knew nothing. Such a fundamental skepticism would quickly prove impractical as we’re trying to get through the day. “Do I exist?” may be an eminently reasonable question when we first wake up, but it won’t get us into the bathroom to brush our teeth. Instead, there will be some things that it makes sense to be very skeptical about and others that we can pretty much accept at face value.

It makes sense to be skeptical of the e-mail from a complete stranger promising us a share of a vast fortune. And less sense to be skeptical about whether our schools should be teaching intelligent design.

But back to the reasons an executive may not always be as skeptical as he should be: I would add a fourth imperative to the Times’ ad hoc list — an executive may not want to admit that he is wrong. After all, he’s been making the decisions and setting the strategy, a change in direction often demonstrates that some of those prior decisions or plans were flawed. Letting go of the idea of one’s infallibility can be tough for the person in charge.

Clear thinking absolutely requires an acceptance of one’s fallibility. In my own life I’ve learned from my wife that I’m nearly always wrong. This sense of supreme fallibility has helped me immensely in my marriage. As a manager in the business world, I learned over the course of several years that my own ideas could always be improved upon; another valuable lesson.

As we wade on through this election year, I fear that we’re being too hard on the candidates as they make mistakes. The hypercritical election process, during which every statement is parsed and critiqued, only serves to drive the poor hopefuls toward the alluring but false embrace of purported infallibility. Don’t we want a president who, as the most important executive in the country, can feel comfortable with his or her fallibility?

In Iraq, two bomb attacks today killed 19. President Bush, the current national executive, had this to say yesterday about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: “By helping these young democracies grow in freedom and prosperity, we’ll lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”

On Stanley Fish’s views on the humanties, and congress’s obsession with baseball.

Stanely Fish has this to say about whether studying the humanties can change us for the better: “Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us? The answer in both cases, I think, is no.” Fish argues that the humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, but that this is OK, since “an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”

To which feel moved to give a short rebuttal (”bullshit”) but feel a sense of duty to respond with something longer and more thoughtful. Back to that in a minute.

The other matter that has me scratching my head again today is all the fuss in congress over baseball drug use. Perhaps this is one of those cultural or political gaps that comes from being born and raised elsewhere, but why on earth does the government feel it should spend taxpayers’ money investigating drug use in baseball? Roger Clemens has been desperately defending himself against the allegations in the recent report. And he should be held accountable if he’s sullied the name of baseball, but by the government?

How does this relate to Stanley Fish and his misapprehension of the value of the humanities? Well, you can find echoes of Kafka and Beckett and Heller in the congress’s pursuit of the baseball players abuses, just as you can find echoes of Kafka and Vonnegut and, yes, Heller again in the Bush administration’s press to invade Iraq and chronic abuse of human rights.

Over the weekend I saw “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Granted not a film of any great artistic merit, although effectively done, but it helps illustrate the point. I came out of the theater with a renewed sense of urgency about the value and hidden dangers of the political process, with a new sense of outrage at the current administration’s deliberate mishandling of the current war and manhandling of our rights. Could I have reached the same sense of outrage without the movie? Sure, but that’s not the point.

The humanities, along with news media, word of mouth, personal observation, government and independent reports, etc., give us a picture of the world we live in. In some cases, the humanities give us a picture that we couldn’t get in any other way (because it’s purely imaginitive or impressionistic or surreal). I would pose the reverse question to Fish. If humanities don’t serve a purpose, why do they exist?

We strive to create art because we want to represent something — an emotion, an impression, an urge, a feeling – that seems important to us. Art is the tangible manifestation of our humanity. Without art we have no tangible manifestation of our humanity. Some can live in such a world, perhaps, but most of us cannot.

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The unfolding hostage (just freed) and bomb threat at Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office provides a sobering example of the difference between rhetoric and reality. As an armed man stands off with a bomb strapped to his chest the sparring between campaign candidates doesn’t seem the slightest bit important. Reality trumps rhetoric every time.

Critics of former mayor Rudy Giuliani have stepped up their attacks on his rhetorical device of bandying about mistated, inflated or exaggerated statistics to present his mayoral accomplishments in a brighter light. Here, it seems, rhetoric and reality combine to demonstrate that Giuliani, if elected, would prove to be a deceitful and egotistical leader. Something that by now we’ve surely had enough of.

Then there’s the “outcry” in the Sudan over the thankfully relatively lenient sentence (15 days in jail versus six months and 40 lashes) meted out to Gillian Gibbons for allowing the children in her elementary class to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Sudanese demonstrators have called for Gibbons to be executed. But witnesses indicate that the protesters were supplemented  (or perhaps seeded) by government workers. And the outcry seems to provide convenient rhetoric for the Sudanese government as it tries to block Scandinavian peacekeepers from being sent to Darfur — this in response to last year’s publication in Scandinavia of cartoons that depicted Muhammad and offended muslims.

And for all of the endless rhetoric about Iraq, when one reads some of the details of the violence there (as I’ve been doing in the New Yorker (Inside The Surge)) one realizes just how bloody and brutal and real the war is, and how divorced from those facts is the rhetoric.

The aim of rhetoric, when it has an aim, is to sway the listener or audience. The speaker uses rhetorical devices (such as emphasis, repetition, sarcasm, humor, logic or sophistry, the inducement of fear, omission, bullying, and charisma) to highlight his or her points, and to persuade the listener that his or her perspective has greater merit than any other. Unfortunately, the better the speaker the harder it becomes to differentiate a valid, worthy perspective from an invalid or fatuous perspective. And, given the established methods we employ to select the leaders of our regions, cities, states, and countries, rhetoric must remain for now an indispensible part of the process.

Rhetoric is employed so pervasively around the world that it’s almost impossible to imagine processes of government and leadership without it. But perhaps that’s because we’re not trained to recognize and counter rhetoric. Plato’s Socratic dialogs or their teachings should be required readings in schools. If we could learn to decode rhetoric and diminish its influence the world would be a better place.

Reality on the other hand often gets too little attention. It takes a lot of reality to impinge upon our consciousness. And all too often it’s the sensational stuff that we focus on. In the past few days I’ve been struck by the number of high profile news stories that have focused on tragic disappearances and deaths for no other reason than there was something odd or grizzly or heartbreaking about them (the hoaxed teenager who killed herself, the missing teenager who’d been involved in porn, the couple who allegedly killed their two year old child, the ex-cop who may have killed his wives). I’m not saying that these tragedies aren’t worth our attention, but should they occupy, relatively speaking, so much of our news-space? News serves two purposes — it delivers information of note and it keeps society apprised of things that we should care about and perhaps act upon. Of course, news media don’t make the news, it’s the consumers (us) who dictate our appetite for sensation to the savvy editors and pundits. What would it take to bring about a more enlightened media? A more enlightened public…

One can only hope that the armed hostage taker in New Hampshire is defused. I’d rather have more rhetoric than that kind of reality.

(Beware: This news is already a day old. Sniff before ingesting.)

It took me several Google searches to find the Hilary Clinton “fact hub” entry that rebuts the charge that Hilary Clinton’s entourage didn’t tip its waitress after a meal at an Iowa Maid-Rite. (No-one seems to want to know what Clinton was doing eating at a Maid-Rite in the first place; didn’t she just have a million dollar birthday party?) Hillary’s campaign team has established the “Fact Hub” as a method of rapidly disseminating such critical details as the amount the meal actually cost and the amount of tip that was actually left. After the first couple of failed searches, I would not have continued to look for Hillary’s Fact Hub website unless I’d needed the website’s address to put in this entry, so I remain unconvinced about whether it serves its ostensible purpose. But that’s not why I write.

I write because in an interview with the Times, the Maid-Rite waitress, in lamenting the media’s focus on the matter when other seemingly far more important things are going on in the world, commented “You people really are nuts.”

Maybe not nuts, but certainly priorities are awry. Where have we come to when political process hones in on such inane details?

Ironically, perhaps the first democratic processes appeared in Mesopotamia, a region now known as Iraq.  Admittedly, Iraq has strayed far from the democratic path since then, but exporting American democracy kind of feels like hawking a used car when you know the undercarriage is rusted out. (Something that happened to me recently, but that’s another story.)

Can democracy really withstand the weight of the fluff that’s piled atop it?

One presumes that the system of checks and balances between congress, senate and the judiciary gives the country some protection against a severly broken democratic process. We should worry about such things as the current administration’s flouting of international processes and conventions, and we should worry about its redefinition of what’s legal. These kinds of things deserve a vigorous response, perhaps more vigorous than the response has been. But I’m thinking more about the fundamental process of democracy.

If I have it right, democracy aims to permit society to decide how it should be governed, what the economic policies should be, the law of the land, the policies for education and investment in infrastructure and healthcare, etc., etc. If it’s to work, democracy requires two things:

1. A fair system by which to select qualified leaders.

2. A fair system by which to influence those leaders toward choices that reflect the educated will of the people.

In America today, I would argue that neither of these requirements can be met with any degree of confidence. Here’s why.

We scrutinze the qualifications of those who govern through a lense of such intense focus that we see the pimples on the chin but not the axe in the hand. (Does it really matter whether Hillary left a tip at Maid-Rite? Do we really care? Would she really do such a thing through meanness or pettiness when she knows that the eyes of the world are watching?) We allow political candidates to be run off the podium for changing their mind or expressing doubt or being flawed. Aren’t all humans flawed? Do we really want to be governed only by those who are squeaky clean and offend no-one or are so good at hiding their flaws that we don’t see them for who they are?

And politicians seem to be influenced by many things, but not by the desire to reflect the educated will of the people. Rather than educating us, they want to sway us or dupe us, sometimes because they have ulterior motives, sometimes because they think we need to be swayed or duped. Rather than reflecting the will of the people (which is a long term thing), they seek to reflect the mood of the people (which fluctuates like anything else).

I realize that these arguments are one-sided. But when there is momentum in the wrong direction only by steering against that momentum can we hope to correct our course.

On a more heartening note, another story today tells the tale of a Kansas high school football team undefeated in 51 games. Roger Barta, the Smith Center Redmen’s coach isn’t proud of last month’s record-breaking game against Plainville, in which the Redmen took a 72-0 lead in the first quarter. As the NY Times reports Barta swapped in his freshmen lineup after the third touchdown, but his team kept scoring. He even went so far as to tell his players to run out of bounds or fall if they broke free. “Sure, we like our football around here,” Barta said. “But we truly believe it takes a whole town to raise a child, and that’s worth a whole lot more.”

Now isn’t that the kind of person you’d want running the country? …But wait, I think I see a pimple on his chin. Can I get a fact check on that?

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The concept of motive has many facets. Understanding a person’s motive often proves to be critical in knowing how to respond to what they do or say. I was left perplexed by Lou Dobb’s comment today, because although he makes it clear that he thinks the Bush administration misstates (or lies about) the reasons why the US should sign onto the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, he doesn’t provide a motive for them to do so. I’m left uncertain whether they just don’t understand (in which case, how do they know to twist the truth?) or whether Bush has some nefarious reason he wants the US to sign the treaty.

(I went looking for some sound hypothesis that explains the administration’s true motives, but although everyone agrees that Bush’s support for the treaty seems odd, theories of motive lie thin on the ground. Some claim that as a lame duck Bush is pursuing a global socialist agenda. This, I thought, had to be meant as a joke. And another proposes that Bush seeks to mollify global critics of his detention policies. Again, not a convincing theory. I have to believe that there must be an economic motive, and a very immediate one. Cheney apparently signed on as a supporter of the treaty before Bush did. If that’s not a clue to there being an economic motive, then I’ll eat my hat…!)

Earlier today, I set off to school with my son as my wife ran down the street to move our car before the 8:30 street-cleaning curfew. Alas, despite her shouted pleas, when she arrived the traffic cop insisted on issuing the ticket. The traffic cop (or ticket vendor) explained that she couldn’t stop once she’d started otherwise she’d “get into trouble.” I see the exterior motive for writing tickets on street cleaning days — so that the street cleaning truck can rumble unencumbered down the curb, sweeping up all of the dirt and detritus that has accummulated in the preceding few days. But since I passed a second traffic cop also writing tickets at a shade after 8:30am, I wondered afresh whether the city might not have an ulterior motive — to collect from as many sleepy Brooklynites as possible.

And in another political story, the Bush administration denounces Iran and its Republican Guard, issuing details of automatic economic sanctions unless they shape up. The story concludes by mentioning that since Iran has done very little business with the US in the past twenty years, the effect of the sanctions would be more “political and psychological.” Again, doesn’t this either seem incredibly naive or duplicitous? Does the administration really think that sanctions without spine will deter Iran? Rice perhaps believes this — she seems quite naive — but surely for the leaders of the administration this is another step along the path toward conflict.

We are adept at letting our true motives guide us, and we are adept at concealing our true motives when we think they won’t be viewed favorably. But what is a motive, what is the mental process concealed within that word?

Motive rests on the concepts of desired outcome and action (or inaction). For a motive to exist, we must conceive of a desired outcome. Bush wants the LOST treaty signed to achieve a particular outcome. The actions he takes to achieve that outcome consist of promoting the treaty and, we posit, concealing his true motive. The traffic copy issuing the ticket is motivated by her desire not to be sanctioned, and the city, one presumes, has as its motive for setting her and her colleagues forth at 8:30am precisely the desire to collect as much ticket income as possible.

A particular problem with concealed motives seems to be lack of imagination. When we conceal our motives we don’t expose them to critique and challenge. I can hear you saying that that’s the whole point. But by this I mean that the more openly we share our motives the more likely we’ll end up reaching a better conclusion on the strategy to achieve them. Bush can’t imagine that the LOST treaty will be a bad thing for the US once he’s concealed his motive for why he thinks it’s a good thing. The City of New York can’t be open to the idea that it’s ultimately better for the City (and probably more profitable) not to be so hard-ass about parking tickets when it must conceal its motive to recoup as much ticket revenue as possible. Issue tickets with more discrimination and a little heart, and you’ll create good will, make people happier, more motivated to stay and contribute income to the city’s coffers by their commerce.

And since the concealed motives that led us to attack Iraq still haven’t been disclosed, here we are heading toward a similar disastrous outcome with Iran.

A concealed motive locks us so tightly in to a narrow perspective that it can be almost impossible to adjust.

President Bush warned yesterday of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. He spoke of his pressure tactics, including economic sanctions, by which he intends to encourage the people of Iran to find new leadership. I’m not the only one to experience deja vue and to read into this that if the sanctions and pressure fail, Bush would consider that we should do with Iran what we have done with Iraq, use force.

In a different story, but with a similar underlying theme, the head of the Federal Communications Commission has a plan to relax decades-old restrictions and again allow media companies to own a newspaper as well as a radio or television company in the same city.

Whether it’s apochryphal or not seems unlcear (although likely,) that the determination of a web-spinning spider inspired Robert I of Scotland to come out of hiding and return North to inflict a series of defeats on the English, thus originating the sentiment that if at first one doesn’t succeed, one should try, try again. (Perhaps Bush has heard of that legend.)

My connecting thought today has landed vaguely on the principle of determination, of trying again. Why do we try again? What conceptual basis causes us to respond to failure with another attempt at the same thing?

It occurs to me that there may be several reasons why one would try again: Because one believes that the circumstances have changed in one’s favor. Because one feels that one can try harder. Because one feels that the only choice one has is to keep trying, that it is the right thing to do. Or because one lacks the imagination or insight to do anything else.

In the legend of the spider, Robert I of Scotland took from the spider’s efforts a sense that defeat should not be accepted. That the right thing to do was to go back and try again. The current head of the FCC seems to feel that circumstances have changed that the communcations landscape no longer calls for the same restrictions on media ownership.

But what of Bush and Iran?

Of course, I realize now that I am following a completely erroneous path of reasoning. Bush believes that he has not failed in Iraq. He acknowledges that there have been problems. But he believes still that the approach he took was not just right, but also effective. With Iran, in his mind, he is not reapplying a failed strategy, but a winning strategy.

At which point the question becomes one of why the president doesn’t perceive his Iraq policy and his foreign policy generally as a failed policy. Why, in the face of contrary evidence, does Bush cling to the idea that he is right, that he has made good choices not poor ones?

Self-insight requires courage. We all make mistakes. We all fail. Every day I do things I shouldn’t do, say things I regret, avoid doing things that I know I should be doing. Occasionally I manage to overcome my failures, to make good on something, to follow through when I’ve procrastinated, to apologize when I’ve insulted. It’s in those moments that I feel a glimmer of courage. That I realize how much I lack by way of courage. That glimmer however slight permits me some self insight.

Bush then must lack courage. Thinking back over this administration’s failures, Bush’s lack of courage has perhaps been the single biggest impediment to his success as a leader. His lack of sharpness hasn’t helped. One wants a leader who can understand the complexities of the challenges at hand. His laziness has been a problem from time to time. But without courage he has been doomed to fail and to continue to fail, to never be able to recognize his failure for what it is, and to address his mistakes.

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A “Teen Magazine” quote from Vanessa Hudgens before her nude photo scandal:

“I’m a good kid,” Hudgens said. “I’ve been brought up with very good morals, and I’m not going to go out and do something I don’t want other kids to do.”

“I love being a role model because, in Hollywood, there aren’t a lot of role models to look up to. The fact that there’s a whole bunch of good kids coming out who are now stepping into the limelight, I’m very proud of that.”

On the face of it, reading this, one could criticize Vanessa Hudgens for being deceitful. But one could also argue that her comments were intended “in character” that she was maintaining a public image as a projection of her clean cut character on a clean cut show. The point here is that her intent makes a difference, philosophically, because intent and perspective shape our moral perspective.

To take a more important example, the current administration, it seems clear, deceived the public about the imminent threat posed by Iraq. The aim of this deception was to follow through on a plan to attack Iraq and displace Saddam Hussein. Further discussion of motive becomes a little more murky. Did the administration believe that Saddam, WMD’s aside, posed the kind of threat that demanded invasion? Did the administration have a “gut” desire to invade Iraq and use various justifications to themselves or others in order to support this “gut” desire?

An accurate moral judgment of duplicity requires a sense of the intent. Does this mean that no act or action is inherently immoral?

If we were to accept this perspective we would throw the moral compass of most people into a frenzy of confusion. Most religions, for instance, identify prohibited or immoral acts or practices.

And if morality requires subtle assessment of intent or perspective, how are we to find a new compass? A rational compass?

But, if we are pragmatic and rational, we cannot hold onto the concept of “immoral acts.” Nothing is inherently immoral. Morality flexes and adapts, it bends to the tide.

We can find a pragmatic and rational basis for morality, a basis that adheres to Plato’s strict indictment:

“Unless someone can distinguish in an account the form of the good from everything else, can survive all refutation, as if in a battle, striving to judge all things not in accordance with opinion but in accordance with being, and can come through all this with his account still intact, you’ll say he doesn’t know the good itself or any other good.” – Plato’s Republic VII

And concurs with his incisive statement:

“The bad is what destroys and corrupts, and the good is what preserves and benefits.” – Republic X

(More on this to come in future postings and in my book…)

I just went to CNN.com to check out the leading news stories of the day. CNN’s top story focuses on volunteers who collect the dead in Baghdad. Britney Spears‘ MTV awards performance (specifically, its apparent lousiness) tops the popular story list.

Which story tugged at my deepest human feelings? And which story did I read?

The introductory description of volunteers collecting the dead in Baghdad forced me to dwell on the consequences and aftermath of the violence there in a new and painful way. The thought of the unremitting task of cleaning up dead bodies allowed me to imagine, however palely, how it would feel to live in such terrible circumstances. But I then clicked through to the Britney Spears story…

Upon reflection, the two stories may have more in common than it first seems. The violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, whether we think the US presence there is justified or not, derives from people’s inability to see through their apparent differences, it rests on the ego of believing that we have something up on someone else. And our fascination with Britney Spears’ spiraling decline rests on a similar instinct to separate ourselves from others, to enjoy their calamities because it makes us feel better about ourselves at their expense.

Another reported event at the MTV awards — Kid Rock and Tommy Lee (both Pamela Anderson exes) going at it. And a related story: Popular performers insisting on songwriting credit to boost their perception as artists in the public’s eye, and to boost their bank accounts, even when they have little or no input to the songs they sing.

I am not part of the government administration, nor do I commit acts of sectarian violence. And I haven’t fought fist to face with another person since I was a child. But I realized anew today that I am guilty of separating myself from others, of holding myself out as different or in some way better. Whereas rationally I know that I am not separate. That all of us are part of the collective human swell. Rationally, I know that my ego misleads me because the ego has served us well in surviving as a species. Rationally, I know that I should remain aware of this and prevent myself from acting out of prejudice and pride.