Von Krankensein Heraus

Being sick is a very consuming phenomenon. I am suddenly confronted and overwhelmed with every aspect of my now very present physical presence. Every joint and bulge of flesh suddenly becomes accutely present in my conscious thought. I can feel the pads of my glasses resting precariously on the bridge of my nose. The weight of my shirt presses uncomfortably on my aching shoulders and the fuzzy lining of my argyle socks is digging into my papery skin. My sinuses, which normally are empty both of filling and feeling are suddently overwhelmingly there and my chapped lips, so often taken for granted remind me just how often I move them through the day. I have become not only conscious of my self physically, but self-conscious of my physicality and every flaw that is normally sublimated in my thoughts nows comes to the fore quite abruptly and without warning.

Lost in sickness, I find it difficult to imagine being well. Though I have only been sick for a few days, my perception of time has slowed. Now I feel every tick, tick, tick of the clock. It almost seems like I cannot truly imagine being not sick again. The thought of healthily running down the street and breathing deeply is alien to my senses. I know, however, for a fact, that I do know what it likes to be think, but in my current state, the overwhelming sensory input clouds my imagine. This makes me question whether I can ever truly imagine another state. If I now find it difficult to imagine a state I have directly experienced, how can I then claim to know what it feels like to be any other person. How can I then ever truly feel empathy. A frightening thought. Perhaps the illness is clouding my thoughts.

Betwixt and Between: A Late Night, Flu-Borne Rant

I am finally doing it.  I am suing all of them: Molly Ringwald, Walt Disney, Cameron Crowe, Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (together, of course), John Cusack, the writers of Mad About You, the descendants of Jane Austen, and anyone else I can think of.  I, and many of my ilk, have been victimized too long by the wanton disregard for reality in their films.  Because of them, I have developed unhealthy and unrealistic beliefs about dating, which- dating that is-  I am not any longer convinced was ever a good idea.  I have been taught by too many films to count that true love will win out in out and happy couples will come together.  I realize now, after 29 years of addiction to light romantic fare, that I have been lied to.  

The Jock and the Nerd won't come together and realize that all that's really been separating them are eye glasses and bad clothing choices.  Cute girls don't really fall for the shy, quiet, but passionate guy who likes museums; they run from him and go after the flashy, good looking superficial guy (curse you Woody Allen!) who can buy them nice houses.  Opposites don't attract and birds of feather don't flock together.  Guys are not commitmentphobic and girls are not dragging boys to the alter.  

Frankly I don't know how people ever get together and stay together.  I've dated girls with whom I've had a great deal in common.  They dump me.  I've dated girls who were my exact opposites and quite naturally they were horrified by me.  I've worked hard to control my craziness in courting situations until eventually it all came out at some stressful moment and I was left alone once again.  Never in person, either (okay, once, but we weren't actually dating yet and never did so I'm not sure it counts).  It's always on the phone or via email.  Once the girl just vanished.  Never did hear from her again, but I later saw a wedding invitation.  My one long term relationship ended when a wedding invitation came in the mail.  That finally explained why she had cancelled our long-planned Valentine's date with the horses and the picnic and sunset sleigh ride.  

It's always some variation of the same thing and it has always with but one exception (discounting the most recent events since the fullness of the fallout is yet to be seen), the girl has gone on the marry the very next person she dated and always within one year.   She always tells me what a difficult choice it was and how she really likes me, but only as a friend, and oh this new guy she's been dating for last two weeks is great!  Let me put it in print (or pixels as the case may be) that I have never cheated or been duplicitous in my dating intentions and I'm sure I could find witnesses, but virtually every time I've been dumped, it is because the girl has found someone new.  How hard is it to say, "No, thanks.  I'm seeing someone!"  I've done it before and found it very satisfying.  

I used to be such a romantic.  I really did like candle lit dinners and long walks and went on plenty, but I soon realized that I was becoming a vehicle for free food until Mr. Right came along.  Dating is an investment, I was told; you're spending money on other people's (future) wives while someone else is spending money on your (future) wife.  Not exactly comforting stuff.  Plus, where I live, I can never seem to get on the calendars of many of the girls.  I know convention centers that aren't that booked up.

I never seem to fit in with anyone and no one can give me reason why.  It's always the same story, but with slight iterations.  I've been told that I'm too withdrawn and emotionless.  But!  I've also heard that I'm too passionate and that these intense emotions are too overwhelming. Whatever that is supposed to mean.  I'm too needy, I'm too independent, I'm smothering, I'm too distant.  I have co-workers who think I'm too optimistic, but I've girlfriends tell me I'm too pessimistic.  Friends tell me I lack self-confidence, but I've have professors tell me that I'm too cocky.  It seems that, like Paul, I am all things to all people, but never consistently.  

Around my liberal friends I come off as a conservative, around my conservative friends I sound like a liberal, but I never feel that I am changing my position.  I've been told I'm too out-doorsy, which is something of a laugh, but then out-doorsy folk find me too citified.  I am a liminal person; always betwixt and between; I cannot be pigeonholed or defined; or so it would seem.  

Recognizing that much of this is merely late night venting, does not detract from the truth of it.  As the t-shirts says, the only consistent factor in all my failed relationships is me.  Whenever I hear the girl begin to count off the litany of reasons why she picked Bachelor Number 2 over me, all I can think is that what you are really saying is that you are not attracted to me, because if you were, these petty differences wouldn't merit consideration.  I feel somewhat justified in saying all this because in all my dating career, I have only been the dumpER once (excluding the time I talked a girl out of stalking me when she showed up at my apartment at 2:00 am and tried to climb into bed with me; I don't think that one counts).  

I have come to realize that girls are only attracted to the one thing I cannot fake: self confidence.  

The Language of Roses, A Poem

I
What roses speak I do not know
When in the dark they breathe and grow,
But when I wake, this nighttime work
In imperceptibility
Has brought new growth I cannot see
'Til time has shown it unto me.

II
I'd like to think that flowers too
Know how it feels to fight the dark
That dwells within each living breast;
For ev'ry step toward heav'n we take
The darkness takes away,
And brings
Us down again. Then like the rose
When morning comes, I seem unchanged.
So day by day, the rose and I
We stretch our wings that we might fly,
Then drawing breath, turned heavenward
Like Daedalus with ill-starred son,
I step and beat my wings but can't
Find strength to soar towards lands afar;
Collapsed upon the ground I cry
And in the darkness quietly
With sun and moon and star forgot
Alone I cry, My Father God!
My dreams like tears fall unfulfilled
To barren soil,
Far below
What far-flung fancies hoped for me.

III
Then in the darkness silently
I dream of what tomorrow brings
When rosy dawn with pallor pale
To bring to light my errant flight
Breaks o'er my earthly misery.
I Ic'rus like, the morning's son
So fallen from that glorious sphere
Reflect how that in distant years
When once we walked with Angles I
Did dwell with Gods in Paradise
But now thrust down I have become
A shadow slight of what I longed
To be when light poured over me.
Yet care not, Sol's chariot rose
And scorched me with his eye;
The petals on the flower wilt
Too parched for thirst to thrive,
Like one who dreams and waking finds
The nighttime specters mocked his slake-
So what I would I could not dare
And what I hate, e'en that I do,
'Til in the cool of the eve
A spring bursts forth from near a Rock
And water clear toward flower and me
Begins its tortuous tortured path.

IV
Redeemed by living water I
Rise up upon my knees and cleanse
My tried and tired limbs of filth
Accrued by toil in Stygian night.
Then sweetest sleeps sweeps over me
And resting from all care I dream
And in the dark I seem to hear
The rose once wilted whisper soft:

V
The education of the man
Comes not by will, nor yet by plan;
It comes in shafts of blinding light
That split the gray, unwelcome blight.
For joy and pain, swift death, sweet life
Are not such ends as you suppose.
For love by hate is known to man;
It takes great dark to see the light.
So tarry not when you have fall'n
Let not your stumble be your grave
For man was never e'er so near
That God whose image now he bears
Save when unblinking to the dark
He soars triumphant not with fear
But courage taken, love's fair twin,
Will win the victor's crown.
Within these journeys death awaits,
Fear not, play on, and tempt the fates.

VI
Awake I rise, Aurora's glow
On me has shone; the way to go
I see is not less trying than
What once I feared when once alone.
The rose now drawing clearer strength
Has ris'n again with former grace
And I a hapless passerby
From water clear and fairer sky
Draw breath anew and to the East
Now turn and find that strength renewed
From trials of yesterday has grown.
No effort spent is wasted, but
Soon comes around again, and as the disc
Of Sol should climb, I'll hie me home
Again. And I am brought to say:

VII
O night, O gloom of Tenebras
No blackness yet will conquer me,
For I am king o'er my own life
The Captain of my destiny;
But like that fabled mariner
The winds and sea will choose for me
My daily circumstance,
Yet I have power to fight or fall,
Progress or lay me down.
For every wind and current fair
Or storm or doldrum dire is but
The sea of opportunities
From whence I chart my daily course.
The path does not the journey make,
Nor storms the tempered mood,
But my direction, my own choice
Determines my progression here.
For he who falls and he who lives
Falls not nor lives but for himself.

VIII
So daily I choose my weary course
And daily my breath renew,
The looking back I see my trail
In dawn's pale hue revealed,
Where struggling out my misery
I moved, and yet I never saw
That ev'ry challenge I had faced
Was what had forged in me anew
The hope, the strength, to carry on
When all about in foul despair
Conspire with Hell to murder me.

IX
With every beat of aching wing
I near my greatest unseen goal,
And when the darkness gripping me
In sadness' paltry gloom does loom
I tell myself those healing Words
Remembered always in my breast
For light of dawn dispels at once
The darkest shade of hell
And I will fight till once called home
God speeds me thither on my way,
'Til I do speak what roses know
In the dark as they toil and grow.

Flotsam and Jetsam: An Essay on Perspective

Dropped into this middle state, as Pope calls it, we are, so far as we are aware, the only creatures on this planet with the capacity to wonder about our own existence and to question it. We stare into the infinite void that surrounds us and try to make order of it. It is the horror of a Lovecraft of Maupassant which scares us, if only momentarily, into believing that beyond the veil we cannot see there is nothing, or, if it is there, we are insignificant. Religion tells us otherwise and consoles us that in the vast universe we are not an accident or an aberration, but a key part of a grand plan. It would be, indeed, a terrible irony if the swirling chaos birthed us only to dump us like so much flotsam and jetsam on the shore of life alone and horrified, cut off from anything else.

Some time ago I was riding the train into work. The sky was overcast and the intermittent splatter of rain drops on the car windows left rivulets that formed intricate patterns as the wind drove the forlorn drops backwards. I had settled into my chair, one of the last on a train that was fully loaded, and like always, I began filling out my crossword puzzle. I always get some sense of satisfaction from forming the words. It is not solely pride at figuring the clues, but something much deeper about putting the chaos of the puzzle to rest. Once I start and answer even one clue, I have to finish.

We rocked gently back and forth. No one talked. No one ever talks during the commute, unless it be on their cell phone to a faceless interlocutor who, for his absence, might as well not exist in our little self-contained reality here. My seatmate stared vacantly out the window; the static of noise that escaped her earbuds did not afford me enough of a tune to identify her musical stylings. We were just fifty some odd people who lives had, for a brief moment, intersected and would, we believed, pass on without ever seeing one another again.

We passed underground and the soft sunlight blinked out to be replaced by a the yellowing glare of the rail car's florescent bulbs. The clacking of the wheels now echoed off concrete walls and the sudden drop in elevation caused a static to hiss in my ears until I could again equalize the pressure.

As we passed out of cell phone range, the last of the conversations died down. Save for the occasional "Excuse me," or "Sorry," there was only the sound of the wheels on the track. At every station, we made room for the new arrivals. The doors chimed and once more the track slipped behind us and was swallowed by the darkness; only the mysterious and occasional light shone in the darkness of the tube.

Not far from my stop, the train eased to stopped. Standing passengers muttered automatic "sorry's" as they jostled one another. A few looked up, but such stops were not unknown. A older gentleman, rotund and red faced, looked nervous. "What is it," he asked. No one answered. With a screech and lurch the train moved forward a few feet then stopped. The red-faced man let out a groan; the passenger next to me just sighed.

"Ladies and gentleman, we are being asked to hold our position. There is a train ahead of us on the track. We will be moving momentarily."

"What does that mean?" asked the nervous older man. Again, no one answered him. The everyday needs no explanation, even when it is inexplicable; it has the comfort, at least, of being familiar and no one bothers to question it. One outsider, though, can provoke a situation.

A lady in front of me with a wide face and a hat that reminded me of ones I had seen in old movies with matriarchal women on their way to church answered, though she did not address the questioner specifically. "Never run good, this train. Been riding it for years. Don't think a day has passed that something didn't go wrong." Whether she intended this to comfort our agitator or not, it failed. His face was flushed and only grew redder as time drew on. Now, more heads popped up from their ipods, newspapers, books, and naps. A svelte, high cheek-boned lady sitting across from me began to bounce her leg in irritation and sigh loudly as she shook her thin face.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for this delay. The train ahead of us is experiencing mechanical difficulties. We will be moving momentarily."

More people grew agitated by the further delay and quiet sounds began to pierce the hum of the background noise: the rustling of papers, the beeping of cell phones, the din of overlapping voices. I sat stock still, taking in the new sensations. A new energy quickened the passengers. Whispered conversations ebbed and flowed. Sentences were let loose and then hung; half ignored, half answered, merely passing each other and carrying only the slightest resemblance to real conversations.

"Not again..."

"This never happens on the New York Subway"

"How difficult is it to get a train to run on time"

"I know! Can you believe it? I was once stuck for over an hour"

"Hiking rates, buying new cars, and they still can't keep the trains running for a single day."

"I hope that doesn't happen today"

"I'm gonna be late again today!"

Somewhere in this concatenation of half-hearted conversations, the confabulations began to coalesce. Two theories emerged almost organically from the crowd and grew seemingly independent. They developed legs and wings and dwelt among us quite as though they were face. Somewhere down at the end of the car the word "fire" drifted from one of these half-formed conversations and was taken up with gusto by our corpulent, ruddy friend.

"Fire?!" he said. "Everyone! We need to find the nearest exits. We going to have to evacuate the train. I'm serious. Look around you." He wiped the sweat from his face, his leg nervously bouncing. A few people laughed at his suggestion, but nonetheless many eyes wandered toward the emergency exit signs. Just in case.

The other theory came from wirery gentlemen of indeterminate age with salt and pepper hair and glasses. To a not very attentive partner, he extrapolated his own interpretation of events.

"It's likely just a stuck door or maybe even a sick passenger. They never tell us what's really going on. They afraid people will panic if they knew the truth. Could be a lot worse."

His would-be interlocutor nodded, but did not raise her eyes from her paper. We waited now; the novelty worn off. Humans are amazing adapters and soon fell back to their papers, their novels, their crossword puzzles or their sudoku. The whispered conversations now ebbed away until only the occasional whisper or soft rustle remained.

"Ladies and Gentleman. We apologize for the delay and would like to thank you for choosing MetroRail..."

--"Choosing?! What other choice do we have?" said the wirery, bespectacled man.

"There is a train ahead of us that is experiencing mechanical difficulties."

The ruddy man with the round face gulped obviously. "Does everyone know where their nearest emergency exit is?" He asked loudly.

"We have been asked to push the train up to the next station, allow the passengers to exit and then push the train forward and unload this train."

"Oh my g--!" shouted the round man. He stood up for the first time and moved closer to the exit.

"See," said the bespectacled philosopher, "I knew it was worse. It's probably even worse than they are letting on. I'll bet there was a fire. Can you see any smoke." He looked out of the window into the dim light of the tunnel. Apparently unable to see any smoke, he said down without saying a further word.

The train jerked forward and with a creaking groan it crept forward. With a jolt, we coupled with the train in front of us and began our shaky journey forward. The train vibrated. Every eye looked up and out as if expecting to see something, though logic said there would be nothing to see.

We sat in a sepulchral silence and we moved jarringly forward. Even the most jaded of commuters now looked up. No one spoke. The rustling and beeping was silenced. Only the groaning of fatigued metal and rusted joints remained. It echoed through the car. The round faced man paced nervously, but never strayed far from the emergency exit. The thin man sat stoically but shot occasional furtive glances in search of smoke.

At long last, the shuddering stopped.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we thank you for you patience. We will be holding here until the train ahead of us unloads all its passengers."

With the last click of the mic, a deep and overwhelming silence stole over the rail car. No one spoke; not the thin man, not the ruddy man, not even the church-hat lady or the peaked-nose business woman. Aside from a stray cough or two, it was total silence.

In a few moments, a creaking groan signaled we were moving again. The train shuddered forward, its engines straining to propel twice its normal load along the underground track. Light broke out around the forward edges of the car as the train emerged into the station. The packed crowds all along the platform stood shoulder to shoulder completely filling the whole area. They watched us with weary glances, more annoyed than angry, but still resigned to their fate. We stared back no less drained of expression by the prolonged exasperation. The trained continued to jerk along. The faces of the passing commuters on the platform shook wildly, but passenger in the car looked inward.

At last we stopped and the doors opened. Crowded as we were on the train, it was even more difficult to find room on the platform which was packed tight with two hours worth of angry passengers. The ruddy face man was the first off, scarcely pausing to say the obligatory sorrys. I saw him last as he exited the station carelessly brushing people aside.

I followed the thin man with the salt-and-pepper hair and the business lady with the aquiline nose. We stood on the platform and waited for the train to depart, weighing whether it would be best to stay and fight for room on a crowded train or take a cab. The business woman typed furiously on her blackberry with her thin lips pursed tightly. She made no sound other than an occasional and much too emphasized sigh of annoyance. The thin man continued to espouse his theories.

"Of course, if they had had the foresight to establish a double rail line, they wouldn't have these problems. This place is so poorly managed, that its no wonder I have to leave so early just to make sure I'm not late every day. This is what happens when you have a socialist model that doesn't allow competition. You get substandard service 'cause they know they're the only game in town. I'm sure their is corruption, skimming from the funds. They why the trains keep breaking down."

He continued his philippic to no one in particular. A blond lady with cheap jewelry and sensible flat shoes who had been on the platform already listened politely.

A new train came and whisked away a sizable crowd, including the bespectacled man and the thin businesswoman. I was not yet late, so I remained for the next train. Instead, I watched the people milling about having parallel conversations speaking at the air and only occasionally intersecting in their words. The only real conversations seemed to be over the phone, but that was only inferential deduction on my part.

Bit by bit, we dispersed until I finally took a train and made it to work, being left only to think about what had just happened. It was, in reality, no spectacular event; nothing worth being recorded in the newspaper or a history book. Yet I saw much of humanity in there. Face to face with the seeming randomness and apathy of the universe, we each sought the divine will. The ruddy man saw danger and evil, unwilled, unwilling, and uncontrollable; something that can only be escaped. The thin man saw a malicious design that actively worked against us in the pursuit of its own interests. The businesswoman saw nothing. She scarcely even noticed the world around her, but absorbed in her own solipsism, she went about her way.

I saw a story. It was story about sight. We all saw and heard the same things, but we each experienced something completely different. Whether it be experience or prejudice, or disposition, we each saw a different shadow of reality. The world, for its part, continued to swirl around us on its eternal course as we scampered about its surface rushing about in artificial haste for unimportant reasons. Important reasons exist, but we mostly miss them while we are distracted by the trivial. I suppose what matters, is what we were before we entered the train.

On Pre-Judging

I like to think I am an a non-judgmental, fair-minded person. Whether I truly am is, I suppose, a matter for others and for God to determine more definitely. However, one trait that I can say positively that I possess is that I rarely make assumptions about people and things and when I do, I am open to changing them. My reasons for bringing this up today is that several recent encounters have forcefully shown me the dangers and power of humanity's innate sense of categorizing thoughts.

Humans think in categories. We have, for example, a category called cat into which we stuff the various sensory imput objects we encounter that correspond to our notion of cat; that is, a furry mammal with whiskers, four legs, a long tail, slit-shaped pupils, and a particular propensity for cat nip. Now, this definition is not precise and like my earlier discussion about clouds, these notions can be ambiguous for there are indeed cats with no fur, short tails, even missing limbs. Note, however, that in these cases the specific cat in question is usually referred to as a "shorttailed cat" or a "hairless cat" indicating that we know these particular instances of "cat" are at the fuzzy margins of our categorical thinking.

Our minds tend to follow heuristics, that is, rules of thumb that help us speed up our thinking. In this way, we do not have to continually analyze everything we see; we come to take certain things for granted. We do not often even notice things that are the same; our brain continually looks for movement and changes in our environment. This propensity not to notice those things that are similar leads us to often over emphasize differences we perceive in those we meet. This leads us further to construct this person (or these persons) as the "other." We neglect the ways we are similar because our brains are drawn to the exotic.

As I mentions before in connection with Asperger's Syndrome, I have the frequently annoying ability to notice everything all the time. I see the mundane again and again and am constantly fascinated by it. I have read in the scientific literature on Asperger's that persons with it are frequently far less likely to be prejudiced because they are less likely to think of things in terms of categories. The more severe the Asperger's/PDD/Autism, the less likely the individuals is to think in categories. At severe enough levels, this constant inability to filter sensory input is actually disabling. Some scientists studying spectrum disorders believe that this difficulty in censoring input is one of the primary aspects of autistic behavior and that therefore teaching such individuals to filter by helping them learn proper behavior and what is expected will aid in their integration.

It is clear, then, that this categorical thinking is actually essential for us to function. Filtering out the normal keeps us sane by allowing our minds look for deviations from expected patterns that might be dangerous. This same pattern-searching behavior leads us often to see connections between disparate things. Hence we see faces in rocks or ascribe human emotions to animals (though personally, I believe animals do have emotions that are comparable to human's).

It seems that we are doomed to pre-judge, though I believe we can limit its more deleterious effects if we remain cognizant of our own biases. That is the only key. We can never eliminate categorical thinking and we should not, since it essential for sanity, but we can be aware of it and by checking our emotions and biases (like the good stoic philosopher have enjoined us), we can be sure that we are never motivated by prejudice and bias.

Environmental Repentance

The company I work for, the Mosaic Foundation - a non-profit that seeks to help women and children while promoting greater understanding of the Arab World, is working on a major grant for this coming year that will address water access and sanitation and how it affects society's most vulnerable: women and children. Anyone who knows my family knows that my father is obsessed about water. Growing up, we were always the first to have low-flow toilets (which instilled in a me a fear of overflowing toilets that persists to this day), low flow faucets, drip irrigation (for the roses), and, of course, timers on our showers to keep us wasting too much water, which we generally ignored when my father was not at home. So I was generally more in my comfort zone than my fellow employees as we discussed these issues with the technical people we are partnering with. I knew something of aquifer depletion, watersheds, osmosis desalinization, and so forth.

Despite my rudimentary familiarity, I have been reading extensively on the subject in several books including, "Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource" by Marq de Villiers and "Last Oasis" by Sandra Postel. At the core of both books, and numerous others, is the idea that water scarcity cannot be solved solely through technological innovation. What must occur is that society at large must change fundamentally its attitude toward water and stop regarding water as a free given, but as a finite, fragile resource that must be conserved and protected. This, they argued, would lead to changes in behavior regarding water and ultimately to, as Ms Postel terms it, a new water ethic.

As I read this, I was brought forcefully back to my youthful Sunday school classes. This was repentance! Every piece fit: recognition that our actions were harming the environment, remorse for our past bad actions and a desire to change, restitution through environmental restoration, reformation through changing water use habits and, in a new agey sort of way, absolution by coming to more connected to nature and our place within ecosphere (i.e. atonement with the natural world). Every step as my youthful instructors had sermonized was present.

Repentance is changing behavior to be in harmony with spiritual realities and eternal law; ought not all behavior therefore be subject to repentance including pillaging our natural resources and our water? It made sense. What strikes me, though, and here I will tempt the stagnant cesspool (to expand an appropriately hydrological metaphor) of politics - something I normally avoid - is that people on the so-called "left" reject the idea of repentace as being "right wing" or "conservative."

Let me state that I detest the terms Right, Left, Conservative, and Liberal. I almost never use them in describing myself or anyone else. There is so little agreement as to their meaning that in public discourse they become more than confusing, they become dangerous. All words are subject to being understood by different groups differently (ask a Mormon and an Evangelical what grace means and watch the fireworks!), but these four terms have been more abused than any other similar set of terms. Ambrose Bierce, an American humorist from the early 20th century, once defined Liberal and Conservative as follows:

Conservative: A old liberal

Liberal: A young conservative (Source: The Devil's Dictionary)

A British comedian, whose name I forget, one said of Britain when trying to describe its political parties to an American audience that there were, in fact, two parties in England: the Labor Party, or as Americans would call it, the Liberals, and the Conservative Party, or as Americans would call, the Liberals. These terms are so fluid, so relative, that in cross-ideological terms they are useless. A Liberal in the 1880s would be a Conservative in the 1980s while the conservatives of 2000s would could actually be termed Neoliberal in their approach to government, but conservative in policy. A Liberal in 1990s would be a progressive in the 1890s and on and on. It can give you a headache. I propose the following definitions: a conservative is anyone who calls themselves a conservative and a liberal is anyone who calls themselves a liberal. Not quite a tautology, but it plays dangerously close to the edge.

My reasoning for going into this aside, is to set up what comes next. Among many described as Leftist or Liberal in America, meaning that they advocate a policy of using government power to recreate society through redistribution of wealth and who are the inheritors of the social progressives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth, there is tendency to eschew any and all religious colorings in policy to the extent that now they often bend over backward to avoid letting the majority cultural norms have any say on policy (and even go to the extreme of letting minority views rule). This movement generally has environmental protectionist leanings and believes that government should be the locus of societal change, including of environmental protection. The Progressives, at least 100 years ago, believed that social mores and practices followed scientifically describable patterns and could be controlled and developed. This led to social engineering programs and ultimately to the excesses of forced sterilization and eugenics programs, which were supported, regrettably, by so-called liberals and conservatives alike. How would you describe a person like Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor who advocated both socialism, nativism (i.e. restricting immigration, esp. to non-whites), and eugenics? It seems like a strange amalgation of right and left as frequently defined today. You can see why I hate those labels.

Returning to the "Left." As typically understood, this movement is for environmental protection through government action, minority rights, affirmative action, gay rights, abortion, and so on. In essays and speeches I have heard over the years, proponents of this viewpoint argue that we must accept others as they are. This seems to me to be espousing total moral relativism, but though their words seem to indicate this, leftists cannot mean it, for that idea, taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that we could not require intolerant people to tolerate others, which would contradict a whole slew of leftist legislation which require us to tolerate others regardless of race, religions, ethnicity, etc. I recall a conversation I had as a Mormon missionary with someone who argued that I had no business telling other people to change their behavior (i.e. calling them to repentance). He apparently did not see the irony in telling me to stop telling other people to stop doing something. He felt that tolerance was the highest good, though he could not, apparently, tolerate my intolerance!

I have come to realize that the basic principles of the gospel, most especially faith and repentance, are near universal, even amongst the non-religious. To act one must have faith. We would not work if we did not believe we would get paid. Now, we have experiences that teach us this faith is warranted, but ultimately, I do not know that I will get paid. Confidence in the company and in the ability of the judicial system to defend should my rights be trampled ensure that I am confident enough to keep working. A farmer does not know his harvest will come when he plants, but he has experience that tells him it will if he does certain things like water and weed his crops. Repentance is changing one's behavior either to accord with one's prior beliefs (a behavioral realignment, perhaps), or to accord with new-found beliefs as in conversion. How we know what we know is another matter. I am not speaking of faith in terms of how we come to believe, but rather faith as an operational, motivating principle. Under this definition, then, it is faith when scientists shoot a rocket to Mars to be guided by the mathematics of Newton and Einstein even though the knowledge and/or assumptions underlying it were gathered empirically. That is because we are discussing how this knowledge/belief drives us to behave not how it originated.

It is a mistake, therefore, for "Leftists" to claim they do not believe in repentance. They do. They are calling for people to change their behavior to stave off global warming. This is not say I think that we ought not work to conserve and recycle. In fact, I am a big advocate of it and likewise I believe that in all probability anthropogenic global warming is real. I am merely saying that the Left and the Right (understanding all my prior caveats) both believe in repentance, it is merely that they have different values and standards toward which they seek to conform behavior. It would seem, then, that left and right are really more alike than I suspect truly partisan practitioners would likely admit. They just cannot see it and so spin their tires arguing about all the wrong things. However, the right thing to argue about is even more intractable for it concerns the origins of our beliefs, the beliefs which, by faith, compel us to repent.

On the Defining of Clouds: Life on the Spectrum, Part II

As I reread what I wrote last time, I noticed, in addition to a few typos, that it still seemed a shallow treatment of this issue. I thought that today I would address two issues that are of utmost importance to myself: Asperger's and religious belief and socially constructed Asperger's. I shall begin with the second first, apropos given that the first shall be last, et cetera.

What do I mean when I say that Asperger's might just be a socially constructed artifact? Well, from this aporia let me continue by saying that there is no one normality in human behavior. There is rather a range or spectrum of behaviors. Some of these are functionally adaptive, meaning that they lead to success. Others are maladaptive; that is, they lead to failure. These can be maladaptive or functionally adaptive in various spheres. For example, the ability to concentrate on one issue or thing may be useful in studies or science, but it might be maladaptive for social situations where stimuli are many and transient. This means that the degree of adaptivity or maladaptivity is relative to the frame of reference from which it is viewed.

Human behavior ranges widely and the variety of behaviors and traits is difficult to comprehend. However, for any individual, his behavior is defined as normative by the society in which he lives. Thus, for example, when I board a bus or train in America and there is only one other person on board, it is typical in America for me to seat myself a fair distance from that person. Alternatively, if there are lots of people who enter at once, they will most likely each try to space themselves equidistantly (if possible) throughout the train. However, on my brief experiences abroad in the Arab World, I have noticed that people tend to group together. when they board a train or a bus. Now, let me state in all fairness that public transit in Egypt as I experienced was much more widely used and the city had a much larger population, but I couldn't help notice that people, when there were empty spaces, tended to prefer being around other people.

It is difficult to define what is normal in human behavior, even within a single society or group. I have recently been reading Umberto Eco's "Kant and the Platypus," which treats semiotics and linguistics. He discusses how language shapes our understanding as well the interplay of cognition and language. Frankly, I find much of it arcane, since I am not an expert in semiotics, but I can understand his greater arguments. For example, in the first chapter he discusses Being, the mere fact of existence. No one can adequately define what it is to exist without generating a tautology. If you say, To be is to exist; you have merely restated in your predicate what you said in your subject. You can try a negative approach (and this is popular both in metaphysics and its less rigorous cousin mysticism) by saying, Being is not being nothing.

Eco argues that while we cannot define Being, we cannot let it mean everything (and hence mean nothing at all), but nor can we define strict limits. Instead, we have "resistances" as he terms them. We can't define exactly why a cat and a dog are different, but they are. Something resists them being lumped together in the same genera. This means that as we trying to assay experience, we run into "resistances" that force us to categorize what is around us. Like the blind men and the elephant, we grope and feel. We are aware that there is a boundary, but the harder we try to pin it down, the farther it slips away. Imagine, for example, a cloud. From far away a cloud (and let us take a nice fluffy cumulonimbus since they are my favorite) has a very distinct border that separates it from blue sky. True, there may be wispy fringes, but in general, if you were asked to describe the boundary of the cloud, it appears very evident. However, the closer you draw to the cloud, the less clear this liminality becomes. Blue becomes gray becomes white without every showing a clear boundary. Still, we know when we are in a cloud and when we are out of a cloud. These two facts exists, but they overlap like a Venn diagram creating a space that is both cloud and sky while also being neither cloud nor sky!

Human behavior is much more complicated but analogous. It seems clear that many people fall along a continuum in various fields of behavior such as sociality, deliberateness, introversion, et cetera. Human beings exhibit many different behaviors and in each of these they fall within a wide range along the spectrum and so the individual can be quite complex behaviorally. It seems likely, however, that some behaviors are interrelated and that the relationship among them complex. The degree of one behavior influences the degree of another (as I noted before). I will not, however, go into that here. Another time, perhaps.

All human societies have normative behaviors that are both obvious and impossible to pin down. These are often termed (negatively) "stereotypes", or (positively) "traditional values." Like our cloud, we cannot always pin down the boundaries of these behaviors, but the center seems clear and is orbited by a periphery of interrelated and dependent behaviors that arise from and influence one another in a fashion that I will not attempt to delineate here (both because it is beyond the scope of my interests for this essay and because I am not qualified to discuss it).

It American society, where in recent years there has been an explosion of Autism spectrum diagnoses, we live in a society that sociologists term "low context" culture. That means that unlike a more homogeneous society like Finland or Japan, Americans have much less shared cultural and interpersonal shared meaning. Norms of behavior are much less rigid here. That means that each individual much be constantly interpreting the signs around him anew. Non-verbal communications are not a given in our society as they might be in Japan. Individuality matters much more. We Americans praise our individuals and make heroes of the mavericks (a word, naturally, coined in the American West and originally referred to a stray calf). However, the down side of the low context culture means that each of us must put much more effort into understanding others.

This low context, highly individualized society makes it difficult for persons who might have a predisposition towards having difficulty distinguishing the subtle non-verbal clues. In fact, studies (and my own experience have shown) that people on the the Autistic Spectrum fare well in structured environments where the societal relationships are well defined. Thus, it would seem, persons diagnosed with "Asperger's" in America, might, in Japan, be fairly well integrated by virtue of the fact that they need not be constantly trying to figure out verbal clues. These structured rules of interaction allow him or her to concentrate their efforts on other issues and thus they are able to be more successful at navigating society. However, those same persons in America would find society almost unmanageable because without rules, the subtle clues are too numerous and contradictory to make out. Thus what is a strength in one culture, leads to failure in another for the individual with Asperger's would feel liberated in the high context culture while someone with a more maverick personality would feel constrained. This means there might be disorders in Japan that would have no social meaning here.

Early psychologists used to speak of women suffering from "Hysteria" (a typically female's only disease according these all-male scientists who thus named it from the Greek word for uterus). In a repressive, Victorian middle class society, suffering from nerves was a natural for women who could find no outlet for their frustrations. This "disorder" has all but ceased to exist. In southern Egypt and the Sudan, there exists the Zar cult among traditional societies. This cult (in the ethnographic sense, not the pejorative sense) is confined mostly to women. In the Zar cult, women become possessed by spirits, frequently male spirits, and under the influence of this spirit, they act and speak like men. Men in the community will even treat women under the influence of the Zar spirit (which comes from the Arabic word for visitor) as a man. In a society where women have no voice, those who struggle against the social norms have no outlet and so they become men in order to give vent to this possible subconscious desire.

These examples show that some "disorders" might very well be socially construed. They represent the inability of certain segments of society to adapt to the prevailing societal norms. For people like me, who thrive on order and structure, our inability to adapt to the chaotic social norms of American culture manifests itself as "Asperger's Syndrome." This is not to argue that all the behaviors and traits of Asperger's are socially constructed. If any reader things I have argued that, then either I have done a poor job of explaining myself, or the read has done a poor job of reading. My argument may be summed up thus: Whether it be due to nature, nurture, or both, there are those whose personality traits are ill suited to the prevailing societal norms. These traits, neither good nor bad per se, lead to classes of behaviors. Under a society where these traits are maladaptive, these behaviors become a disorder; whereas under different conditions, these traits might be an asset. Let it be said, however, that even under contrary society where said traits are maladaptive, they may still bear fruit if only fruit choked by weeds.

As the hour is late and the words verbose, I will save my second theme; Asperger's and Mormonism, until a later entry.

On Asperger's Syndrome: Life on the Spectrum

As some of you may know, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome some time ago. I have pondered this a great deal and even now do not know what to think of it. Some days I reject the diagnosis entirely as an artifact of poor human understanding into the differences of the human mind. Yet there are still days when that diagnosis hangs its pallor over my consciousness and disturbs my thoughts. Humans know so little, but we presume so much. Being aware of the vast, infinite void, unlike most of our fellow creatures, we feel compelled to fill it with something. We cannot allow ourselves to be surrounded by the unknown, unknowable chaos. It is that fear that gives Lovecraftian horror its staying power.

For those that don't know, Asperger's Syndrome is a milder variant of Autism. According to the diagnostic manuals, the following are the basic criteria for diagnosis:

1. qualitative impairment in social interaction
2. restricted, repetitive and stereotyped behaviors and interests
3. significant impairment in important areas of functioning
4. no significant delay in language development
5. no significant delay in cognitive development, self-help skills or adaptive behavior (other than social interaction)
6. criteria are not met for another specific pervasive developmental disorder or schizophrenia.

Often added to these, particularly by neurologists specializing in the Syndrome, are poor motor coordination (i.e. clumsiness), unusual speech patterns (called disprosody), and, building on point two above, obsessive interest in one area or shifting obsessive interest (formerly called monomania) in different areas. There is a litany of other behaviors and characteristics which are often associated with Asperger's Syndromoe including: difficulty empathizing, lack of interest in sharing experiences with others, difficulty communicating emotions, making lists, arm flapping, literalness, underresponsiveness to emotional stimuli, extreme sensitivity in some senses (such at touch, sounds, light), poor mirror neurons, social anxiety and isolation leading to depression, etc.

What continues to bedevil me, though, is whether this real. True, I have many of these symptoms, though a patient mothers and years of counseling have helped me temper some of them. I am not nearly the socially isolated, monomaniacal kid who used to stack Legos obsessively in coordinated color schemes and scream if anyone touched me or moved my stuff from its appointed place. I no longer go catatonic when forced to change my schedule at the last minute and even, Mirabile Dictu!, find joy in spontaneity. Still, though, when I am stressed, I find myself organizing things by color. But a lot of people do things like that to control stress. I know people who clean when stressed; people who run, people who eat, et cetera ad infinitum. What makes my idiosyncrasies symptomatic?

Experts and Aspis (someone with Aspergers) alike talk about the Spectrum. Asperger's Syndrome is a spectrum disorder, meaning that it falls along a line of varying degrees. There are the severe, which includes persons with Autism so severe that they cannot even feed themselves, and the mild who scrape by in society but are usually deemed as a little odd. If anywhere, I'm more towards the "little odd" category.

I was diagnosed in 2002 while attending Utah State University. This diagnosis was confirmed by Dr. Nancy Isenberg of Princeton University. While there, I participated on a study on Mirror Neurons, which aimed to show that persons with Asperger's Syndrome do not have the same mirroring ability as others. In short, mirror neurons allow humans (and other primates) to learn by observing because the motor cortex, the strip of your brain that controls your motor functions like your hands, fires up regardless of whether you are the one doing or watching. However, in some people, like those with autism and Asperger's, this mimicry system does not function very well meaning that these persons cannot easily learn motor skills and are, hence, clumsy and slow to learn new motor skills.

This has certainly been true of myself. Without trying to be too down on my athletic skills, I can honestly say that I was never good at anything that required quick hand-eye coordination. Even my piano playing skills are good only in slow to moderate speeds. No fast music. I have also always had unsteady hands. I had never thought much about this until Dr. Isenberg pointed it out to me. When stressed, I find that my arms, usually the right one, tremors. At times, even the slightest touch is painful and I need to take a shower or soak in the tub to overcome the pain of even my own clothes.

As a child, I could not be rushed, nor did I speak to others. Many of our neighbors, no doubt, believed me mute. I did not speak to my father until I was five or thereabouts. I collected shells obsessively and if anyone tried to move my stuff or even touch me I would scream. Needless to say, I was a difficult child. Whatever I am, if indeed I have achieved anything beyond these limitations, I owe to my mother who patiently entered my world and learned my rules. She adapted to them so that I could learn to adapt to hers and in time I felt more able to interact. I developed friendships, though I never was a social butterfly and even now, many of my memories are solitary ones. I hate admitting this, lest I offend any that I esteem highly, but while I have a good memory of many things I have done in my life, I can only with difficulty recall who was with me. I remember trips and outings, but I cannot say who, besides myself, was there. It is a like a type of solipsism.

But let me not overstate my case, lest any accuse me of playing the "Autism" card on myself and trying to skew the evidence. I no doubt have friends and do recall a great deal about many of them. No one remembers every detail of their life. Memories are not camcorders. They filter and remember best that which relates to other items in their cognizance. Perhaps I am just more selfish than others, though of a more solipsist bent. Pride, I believe I have mentioned before, seems to have a passive variety and an active variety. The active believes that the self is genuinely better than others, while the passive pride simply does not bother to consider others. There may be little difference between the two (and certainly little difference in effect), but there is a difference, I feel, in intention.

We come to what constantly troubles me. What is this thing? Some say, and I lean in this direction, that it is merely a different way of being wired, not some deviance from proper normality. This groups talks of different traits and strengths as well as weaknesses. If, for example, red hair is frequently linked as a gene to pale skin, then is it not possible, that the intense focusing abilities and recall of those with Asperger's Syndrome is linked with social awkwardness?

This seems possible and I can even perceive a possible causal chain. One of the common traits of those with spectrum disorders is difficulty filtering their sensory input. I experience this sometimes when I feel overwhelmed by sounds or physical sensations. Because of this, my preferred seat was in the front of the classroom in school where the noise and visual stimuli were less noticeable. Being distracted is not, of course, limited to those with a spectrum disorder, but for me it was often overwhelming sometimes causing physical pain.

I feel the same thing, often, in other places. When I walk into a room, I see everything and notice everything. My family has often noticed my ability to notice changes in my environment or when things have moved. I perceive the whole and this applies also to social situations. In large crowds I feel overwhelmed by all the different subtle stimuli. Communication is frequently non-verbal. The tilt of a head, the sideways glance of the eye. I perceive these things consciously and the sheer volume, in a crowded environment, is overwhelming to the point of being almost suffocating. More the point, I cannot help but see the myriad of meanings behind these subtleties. It does not help that we live in a highly atomized society comprising the detritus of some many cultures that there is scarcely a societal touch point for social clues. In a more homogeneous culture, such clues might be widely dispersed, but here there seems to be little transmittal of social norms. It would seem, then, that my very ability to be observant and analytical of things, might contribute to my ability to interact. It is, if true, one of the inherent ironies and vicissitudes of life under the sun.

On Religious Persecution and Historical Perspective

History, the old adage tells us, is written by the victors. But that is not the entire truth; nor is it one hundred percent accurate. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century B.C., but most of our accounts of that conflict come from Athenian sources. What matters is good Press skills and the Athenians had that. Over the course of centuries, it doesn't matter that Athens was beaten, what matters is that they kept records and others did not. What this means is that the historical records is always skewed; even when the record keeper is honest. He invariably interprets events as his world view shapes them.

Let us look at an example. In the 1830s Mormon converts began migrating to Jackson County, Missouri, which had been designated in a revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith as the site where Zion would be built. However, within only a few years, the Mormons were expelled en masse from the County and took refuge in northern Missouri where, after only a few years, they were again expelled, this time on pain of death if they stayed, under Governor Lilburn Boggs' justly infamous Extermination Order.

As Mormons tell the story, they were the victims of religious persecution driven because of their beliefs again and again until they were forced to make a dangerous winter flight to Illinois. The government, however, said that the Mormons were a threat to public order, and enemies of the state. What is the truth? Well, both.

When the Mormons began moving to Missouri they did upset the public order. Their more communal lifestyle was at odds with the more independent-minded Missourians. Most Mormons were also anti-slavery (despite what you may have heard about blacks and the Mormon church; they did, at least, oppose slavery). In the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Missouri a slave owning territory even though most of the Louisiana Purchase was Free. Still, the issue was revisited again and again. In the Compromise of 1850 and again in the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, legislators tried again and again to resolve the issue of slavery in the expanding United States. Missouri, though a slave state since the Compromise of 1820, still had agitators demanding Missouri become a Free state.

In the midst of all this, in 1836, the Mormon owned newspaper in Independence Missouri published an editorial advocating abolition. The day after this issue appeared, Mormon leaders were rounded up, tarred and feathered, and the press was destroyed. This incident is famous in Mormon history, but Mormons often forget the role that this editorial played in fomenting this violent act.

Mormons often portray this as the culmination of religious persecution, whereas it could equally be seen as a political riot. The truth is that both viewpoints have some aspect of the truth. Swelling numbers of Mormon immigrants instilled the Missourians with a fear that would lose political influence to these strange, religiously different, anti-slavery (mostly) northerners. Not only that, but Mormons were quickly outnumbering the previous immigrants and threatening to take over all political life. This threat of Mormon domination led to the election day riots in cities like Gallatin.

The Missouri Mormon War figures prominently in LDS history, but scarcely a blip on US history and barely a mention even in Missouri history. Both Mormons and Non-Mormons publicized their side of the story broadly in their day, but the Mormon version has become the more widely told tale today because Mormons have kept up the story long after many others stopped caring. The story is taken up by Anti-Mormons who wish to make it sound as if the Mormons were not the victims of persecution, but rather the justly expelled enemies of the state that Lilburn Boggs declared them to be. They have the Missouri State archives on their side in that battle.

Often, I noticed, Anti-Mormon or other writers will compare this story to examples from their own Faith traditions history to show that these upstart Mormons were trying to make themselves victims instead of criminals to tie into the long tradition of persecution that Christians have faced. What intrigues me here, though, is that is an uneven comparison. They take in insider's viewpoint of the Biblical persecutions and an outsider's perspective on the Mormon persecutions to prove their point.

In fact, Jewish and Roman sources depicted the Christians as enemies of the state who threatened the public order and deserved the violent actions taken against them. They broke up families, disobeyed laws, lived communally in their own areas (early on), and advocated radical social changes that disrupted the traditional values of Roman society. Consider the riots in Ephesus that Luke relates in Acts 19. As Luke tells the story, the craftsmen whose livelihood depended upon making votive statues and decorations for the Greco-Roman gods were worried that Paul's success would diminish business and so they rioted against Paul and the Christians.

This story is a nice parallel. The difficult is, however, that we have only Christian story. Doubtless, the pagan workers would have told a different tale of meddling outsiders upsetting the place, living strange customs so who knows what else they really do. In fact, Roman writers often wrote that Christians were cannibals (think of the Sacrament/Eucharist), drank blood, were atheists (they didn't believe in any of the gods!), who swore secret oaths against the government and practiced incest and all sorts of perverted marital arrangements. They often lived separately and shared all things in common and called one another brother and sister. Romans found this all very disturbing and riots ensued. The only solution was to persecute the Christians who were viewed to be the cause of the disturbances since no such problems had existed before.

What is religious persecution? Those who are prejudice and discriminate and persecute others would almost never say they did so because of prejudice. It is always the victims' fault. Victims are not altogether blameless in these situations. I do not mean that the victims' deserve it, but rather that their being different does, indeed, lead to the persecutions. It is contrafactual and hence weak to argue, but had Mormonism not arisen, likely no mass migration of anti-slavery, communal northerners would have settled a southern state like Missouri thus raising tensions and prompting violence (from both sides). So, in a sense, the Mormons did cause their own persecution.

Jesus was executed, not because He was the sinless Son of God and victim of a massive conspiracy to suppress the Truth, but because Jewish and Roman leaders viewed Him as a threat to public peace and the established order. As far as the Romans were concerned, Jesus was a political rebel who had declared Himself King of the Jews. Neither the Romans nor the Jewish leaders lay awake thinking that needed to prevent the "Truth" from coming out. They likely genuinely believed that they were right, which to my mind is more frightening.

Humanity is often prone to an arrogance of assumption. We assume too quickly. Truth is much larger than any one man's (or woman's) paltry ability to grasp. Its depths recede beyond the farthest horizon we can imagine. Pride is the most human of sins. It may even be the defining characteristic of our species. This extends even to our understanding of events. We forget that real people live on every side of every issue. In the end, the truth lies not in the middle, for that would somehow give every bigot some measure of undeserved dignity, but rather beyond, encompassing all the small-minded assumptions of our kind. James Lowell, an American Poet, wrote, perhaps envisioning this struggle:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

That Peculiar Logic of Darkness

Darkness has a logic all of its own that is shaped to the contours of the boundary between the seen and the unseen. Here, at the liminal extreme of our knowledge, reasons breaks down as if in a moral singularity. Maybe there is some truth after all in my mother's adage that the Holy Ghost goes to bed after midnight. It seems that as one goes away from the Light, the Logic of Darkness takes over bit by bit. It begins with rationalization. As the Poet said:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As to be hated needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

~Alexander Pope, from "Essay on Man"

This is because logic is a tool and not an end of knowledge. It constructs our thoughts as a blue print guides a mason. It is however, no more the edifice than that lined paper is. With logic we can see the ends of thoughts and their relationships with one another, but we cannot know through logic.

Knowledge is a priori and can only be organized. Truth exists in and through itself independent in the universe, though each of us can only grasp a small portion of it. Ultimately, logic is limited in its ability to convince, because the assumptions that our beliefs, independent of any intellectual framework, are deeply held and difficult to change. Argument is so often doomed to failure because people cannot agree on the very epistemology that would permit them to discuss an issue within a shared logical framework. A theist and a secularist fundamentally disagree on what constitutes truth and the source for deriving truth and so can not easily discuss any topic unless one or the other yields to the epistemology of the other. In our society, it is often the theist that must yield to the secularist.

Hence, the logic of Darkness is not really different from the Logic of Light. Rather, the same framework houses very different buildings. The same logic can lead to very different conclusions when different ideas are plugged in. Consider a simple arithmetic formula. 2x=y. The value of y is dependent on the value of x. If x were 2 than y would equal 4, but if x were 450, the y would be 900. So it is with logic. Two conclusions can both be equally valid logically, but completely contradictory. Consider the simple syllogism: All tall men play basketball well; Jon is tall; therefore, Jon plays basketball well. This is logically valid, but utterly false since I play basketball abysmally. The error lies not in the logic, which is correct, but in the assumption that all tall men play basketball well.

Such errors can compound themselves. Joseph Smith once remarked that if a person starts right, it is easy to continue right, but if that first step is wrong, it is all the more difficult to get on the correct path. He was speaking of arguments. It is the fundamentals that matter most. Our conclusions are only as good as the assumptions that go into them.

We read in the Book of Mormon, in chapter 4 of Alma, that the Prophet Alma gave up the Chief judgeship to become a missionary among his people because he was afraid they were going astray. This well educated, erudite man of business and government, however, did not try to argue the people to his side.

And this he did that he himself might go forth among his people, or among the people of Nephi, that he might preach the word of God unto them, to stir them up in remembrance of their duty, and that he might pull down, by the word of God, all the pride and craftiness and all the contentions which were among his people, seeing no way that he might reclaim them save it were in bearing down in pure testimony against them. (Alma 4:19)

Alma saw that only bearing testimony could turn people around. The only people with whom you can discuss things logically are those with whom you share enough common assumptions to make your logic accessible to your interlocutor. Only the meek and humble will listen to someone whose basic assumptions about the truth are at odds with their own. Thus Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing the word of God (Romans 10:14-17) preached by those who are sent. The Doctrine and Covenants tells us, "of tenets thou shalt not talk, but thou shalt declare repentance and faith on the Savior, and remission of sins by baptism, and by fire, yea, even the Holy Ghost. (D&C 19:31). This is not that we should hide our beliefs, but rather it is an acknowledgment that debating doctrine and tenets is a futile spinning of one's wheels.

So, as always, let me end by saying that we should listen more than we speak, and ask more than we answer.

Of Darkness and Light

As far as I am aware, man is the only animal with a conscience. This is not that animals do not feel bad from time to time. Anyone who has every been around a dog knows that they can evince something that resembles shame when you get mad at them. However, like Robert Burns said of that ill-fated mouse whose cozy winter home the Poet's plow so rudely overturned:

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Man is doomed by his intellect to suffer for the pains of the past and fear for the future. That is why, perhaps, so many of the world's mystical traditions encourage their initiates to put the future in God's hand, the past in His mercy and become immersed in the present. So taught the Taoists, the Stoics, the Sufis, the Christian Mystics, and even Jesus Christ Himself. Consider these words:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself ~Matthew 6:34

A few years ago, a heard what was a paradigm shifting sermon for me by Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. It was October of 2000 in the Saturday Afternoon session of General Conference. Elder Oaks spoke on Becoming. He said:

[T]he Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts--what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect of our acts and thoughts--what we have become.

Not long before this I had encountered as a missionary for the Mormon Church an angry minister of another faith who accused me of believing that each good deed somehow got me a certain number of "points" with God and that I need only achieve a particular threshold in order to enter heaven. Having only said, "Hello," to him, I was startled by this brazen declaration and no manner of refutation on my part could dissuade him of his error. However, I though a lot about his words and about the perceptions our words and actions can give to others. I have addressed this topic many times before in this site.

Elder Oaks' talk, however, gave me great clarity. Many more scriptural passages became clearer like Jesus' parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), which Elder Oaks cites. It is not the things we do that matter, but the effect of the things we do on our soul. This is at once comforting and frightening.

On the one hand, it means that where we labor, whether it be as Prophet, Relief Society President, or the guy who vacuums the Church on Saturdays, does not matter at all because the ultimate goal is the effect of our work on our soul. Elder Oaks notes as an example that, "the pure love of Christ" (Moro. 7:47), is not an act but a condition or state of being. Charity is attained through a succession of acts that result in a conversion. Charity is something one becomes. Thus, as Moroni declared, "except men shall have charity they cannot inherit" the place prepared for them in the mansions of the Father (Ether 12:34; emphasis added)." Doing charitable things does not matter nor does the size of the charitable deed; it is that we become charitable beings. Thus repentance makes more sense. We can never truly ameliorate or mitigate the bad effects of our poor choices and sins. Indeed, we may be forced, as Paul with his thorn in the flesh, to suffer for our bad choices all the days of our probationary mortality. However, we can become better in our souls and through the mercy, grace, and charity of God and Our Savior, we can return and be sanctified though this ultimate end may not come for many years even after our mortal deaths.

On the other hand, we learn here that only true repentance that wrenches the very roots of our souls will ever suffice to obtain God's grace and mercy. The Prophet Joseph Smith said that we would all be tried as Abraham and our very heartstrings would be wrenched. The purpose in all this is not to torture us, but to purify our desires. Hence there are scriptures that say we will be judged by the very desires of our hearts.

The one raised to happiness according to his desires of happiness, or good according to his desires of good; and the other to evil according to his desires of evil; for as he has desired to do evil all the day long even so shall he have his reward of evil when the night cometh. (Alma 5:41)

And yet, throughout all the days of our erring mortality, we are all full of darkness and light warring within us. Each of us has different strength and we fall to different temptations according to our desires.

It is overwhelming sometimes. I often feel beset with my failures and weaknesses. In quiet moments when I should feel peace, I hear only the voice of self recrimination. I am convinced that cynics and idealists are really the same class of being, but we cynics, though we hope for perfection and beauty, see too often the failure. We over emphasize the bad perhaps to justify our own failings.

Light and Dark are continually at war within us. The more I ponder this, the less I am inclined to judge any man for his sins. I cannot do it. He is tied to me in the same ultimate endeavor. At stake is the very integrity of an immortal soul. How can I dare to cast one of those aside? C. S. Lewis remarked that when he looked upon suffering souls, he saw gods. The Bible tells us that we are gods (see Psalms 82:1-6). But fallen so far we little resemble what once we were when we walked with Angels for a time. We are as much now like God as a pebble resembles a mountain.

Lately I feel that I have been trying to compensate for what Hemingway called, "the burden of a happy childhood." Through this, I have come to understand the wisdom of what Jesus told the Pharisees who endlessly debated the measuring of tithes and the "deep doctrines" of God's presence in the Burning Bush as if such could possibly affect their souls while they omitted the true "deep things of God" as Paul termed them. Jesus said:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. (Matthew 23:23)

Mercy, faith, judgment, hope, charity, peace. These are the doctrines upon which it is our duty to meditate. Oh be sure to pay your tithes, as Jesus said. He never advocated neglecting these temporal duties, but rather He cautioned us to look at what underlies the Law. In doing so, the very powers of heaven distill themselves upon our souls.

The Historical Book of Mormon

Six years of studying the profession of History must have some benefit. In an end-of-the-year party held by my undergraduate history department for departing seniors, the Head of the Department, Dr. Norman Jones, remarked that the study of history is primarily learning how to interpret and weigh evidence. It is not, strictly speaking, scientific, though it can and should be supported where possible with science; but nor is it a freewheeling art form where anything goes. History is the challenge to ponder the evidence of the past and weigh its reliability, biases, and utility for telling the story of a people. So, it would seem, I have learned something in all these years about reading texts.

Though we like to call the Book of Mormon scripture, and I believe it is that, it is also a historical text as the Bible is. With that assumption, what does the Book of Mormon tell us. I have often found myself reading the text of the Book of Mormon like I would a primary source for historical research. This has actually increased my faith in the Book of Mormon; for a work of fiction would not carry those subtle, stray artifacts that make a document ring true.

Being the skeptical sort by nature, I have often struggled to understand and accept some aspects of our past and our story as Mormons. However, I believe so strongly in the Book of Mormon that I am drawn to accept even when I don't understand. I feel like Peter after Jesus gave his masterful discourse on the Bread of Heaven (see John 6). When Jesus expounded doctrines and made claims that many of His disciples found difficult to believe, they turned away from Him, but Peter, though he could not understand replied:

Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.

And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.
(John 6:68-69)

So it is with me. I don't understand the former ban on Africans from the Priesthood, nor do I really comprehend polygamy or all the ordinances of the Temple, but the Book of Mormon and the Prophets of this Church have the words of eternal life and that keeps me here. So, in between my travel adventures, I hope to start posting some essays and explorations of the Book of Mormon as a historical text and what I have learned from reading it this way.

My first observation is not some grand truth, except about human nature, but it is a testament to the veracity of the Book of Mormon and a defense against charges that it cannot be historical because the history it presents is too simple.

The Book of Mormon has three main authors and a few minor authors (excluding the lengthy quotations from such persons as Isaiah, Alma, Captain Moroni, and so on): Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni son of Mormon. Jacob could be added to the list as well. In fact, my first evidence comes from Jacob.

In a class I took in college on the History of the Celts, we looked at the identity of these persons and groups and realized that tribal nomenclature is a tricky business. We use the name Celts, from the Greek Keltoi, to describe the peoples of Europe who inhabited vast swaths of land from the Danube to the coast of Ireland until the invasion of the Romans and later the Germanic tribes pushed their culture to near extinction leaving on pockets of Celtic language and traditions in Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The Romans called these same people Gauls. What they called themselves is actually somewhat of a mystery; assuming they had a sense of "Pan-Celtic" consciousness rather than just tribal identities. The same holds for the Germans, who to this day don't call themselves Germans, a name the Romans adopted from a tribe that lived along the Rhine River. Germans call themselves Deutschen, which is related to the words Teutonic, Dutch, and so forth and roughly translates as "people." Greeks, of course, are not Greeks, but Hellenes in their own language and Greece is not Greece, it is Hellas.

How does this touch the Book of Mormon? Many critics of the Book of Mormon have said that since we have no records aside from the Book of Mormon, mentioning peopled called the Nephites and the Lamanites, then the book must be a modern fabrication. However, this critique is built on the false assumption that the names Lamanites and Nephites were in widespread use. The Nephites were soundly destroyed and most of their records destroyed, according to Mormon and Moroni (see Mormon 6:6). It is highly unlikely that the Lamanites called themselves Lamanites as a people. In fact, Jacob drops this highly interesting hint in his book:

Now the people which were not Lamanites were Nephites; nevertheless, they were called Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, Zoramites, Lamanites, Lemuelites, and Ishmaelites. But I, Jacob, shall not hereafter distinguish them by these names, but I shall call them Lamanites that seek to destroy the people of Nephi, and those who are friendly to Nephi I shall call Nephites or the people of Nephi, according to the reigns of the kings.

Jacob 1:13-14

Mormon echoes this statement hundred of years later in 4 Nephi 1:36-37:

And it came to pass that in this year there arose a people who were called the Nephites, and they were true believers in Christ; and among them there were those who were called by the Lamanites—Jacobites, and Josephites, and Zoramites; Therefore the true believers in Christ, and the true worshipers of Christ, (among whom were the three disciples of Jesus who should tarry) were called Nephites, and Jacobites, and Josephites, and Zoramites.

The key passage, highlighted above, shows that Jacob knew there were more complexities than Nephites and Lamanites, but frankly did not care to distinguish at that level of complexity because his purpose was a spiritual one and he did not care to get bogged down with politics.

These sorts of incidental references provide a strong sense of authenticity to the Book of Mormon account. The authors refer almost parenthetically to the world around them with which they are intimately familiar and hence feel no need to elaborate on such obvious givens. Furthermore, we know from these accounts that the Nephite/Lamanite duality is, in some sense, an artificial simplification of a far more complex world full of various tribes. Keep in mind, furthermore, that none of these names should be assumed to have been used by the groups to which they refer, just as one would not find an ancient Greek source referring to "Greeks." An Greek author would talk about Hellenes and a person reading Roman sources alone would not be able to find records of "Greeks" in the land that the Romans called Greece.

This parallel is not, of course, precise, because both Greeks and Romans were highly literate and thus the records speak repeatedly of each other, whereas the Nephites were literate, but most of the Lamanites were not. No records, aside from the Book of Mormon, exist to document the history of Central and South America prior to the Maya and the Aztecs, both of whom came hundreds of years after the demise of the Nephites. The Incas, interestingly, were not literate and left no records; neither did the Olmec, Toltec, Moqui, and many other groups whose names, it should be rememberd, are mostly exonyms, i.e. names applied by outsides. What these groups called themselves, as with the Lamanites, is unknown. The same is true for ancient ruins in Central and South America. For the most part, their names are unknown and the names applied by archaeologists are modern.

There are two things to be gleaned here. First, the writers of the Book of Mormon recognized they were using exonyms and we should not, therefore, be surprised that no other record uses them since these names were not used by anyone else. Secondly, the fact that the Book of Mormon mentions this detail and does so in a very cursory manner, contributes to the veracity of the Book of Mormon as a historical record.

So now what?

Just a note to let you know that I have not ceased being the Roving Royal Researcher I said was going to be, there has just been some bureaucratic delays. I am essentially waiting for the paper work and the contracts to be processed and as any one who has worked in the Middle East can testify, this may take some time. The difficulty, I believe, lies in different attitudes towards time. Westerners like to think of time as a commodity that can be purchased, saved, spent, wasted, squandered, and compensated. In Arab culture, time is something outside of us that flows like a river around us sweeping us along. In English, we say we will meet at 3:00 o'clock. In Arabic, one says, we will meet in 3:00 o'clock. Time is often viewed less precisely. I recently ran across a list of "You Might Be Arab If ..." statements. One read: "You might be an Arab if you show up two hours late and still think its early." I shared that with a few Arab friends, both of whom confirmed the truth of this.

So, now what. I continue working for the Mosaic Foundation until my contract comes through and then its off to the wide world of researching archives throughout the wide, wide world. I will keep you posted.

In the Year 20878 AD/AH

I can still do basic Algebra! Hurray!

I discovered this recently as I attempted to solve a problem that had plagued me for literally minutes. That was this: The Islamic Calendar and the Gregorian (i.e. Christian Calendar) have different lengths. The Islamic Calendar is Lunar and has twelve months. It begins in what is 622 AD in the Western Calendar (on Thursday July 15, to be precise, according to some calculations). In 622, the nascent Muslim community in Mecca fled persecutions and took refuge in the city of Yathrib, thereafter renamed Medina. This flight is known in Arabic as the Hijra, an Arabic word meaning migration or flight.

Ten Lunar years later, in 10 AH (Anno Hegirae, Latin for In the Year of the Hijra), the Prophet Muhammad revealed that God told him that each year should have twelve months and that they should stop adding extra days every year (know as intercalation). The intercalation had been done to keep the months in the same seasons; however, Muhammad stopped this and Muslims today view this as a great blessing since Muslim feast days, such as the fasting of Ramadan and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, are calculated according to the Hijri calendar, the seasons of the festivals change over time.

Since that time, the Islamic world has followed this Hijri calendar. Days, as in the Jewish tradition, begin at sunset, and new months begin with the first viewing of the crescent moon. Today, rather than rely on plain eyesight, mathematical algorithms are done to determine the phases of the moon. This concern for the phases of the moon and the necessity to determine the direction to Mecca for prayer drove Islamic scholars to become masters at astronomy and it was through their work that the world got the astrolabe and the compass; those inestimable tools of navigation.

The problem becomes, however, in this global world, that going between these two systems can be difficult and complex. The following formulas help one convert dates:

AH = 1.030684(CE-621.5643)

CE = 0.970229AH + 621.5643

Where CE equals the Common Era (or the Christian Calendar) date and AH equals the Hijri or Islamic date.

There are difficulties in this calculation though and dates are frequently disputed. An Islamic date recorded in a manuscript in the middle ages, for example, can be extremely tricky to determine precisely in the Western calendar for a variety of reasons. Firstly, in those times, determinations of new months required visually seeing the new crescent moon; though mathematical formulae existed even then. Furthermore, there have been, over the centuries, different Islamic calendars in use in different parts of the Islamic world. This, of course, is not surprising. Europe has only had a unified calendar for a few centuries. In the middle ages, some regions had their own calculations and there were constant debates about which one was best even though there was general agreement on the months (holdovers from Roman times). I can also through another wrench in the gears: namely, that the moon recedes from the earth every year by a couple of centimeters and hence the length of its rotations subtly change. Of course, this has virtually no impact in the short run even including centuries, but over millenia this might affect things. And let's not even discuss the horrors of leap years which exist in both systems!

So, the other day, my coworker and I were discussing these facts. He asked me what year it was in the Islamic system and I replied: 1429 AH. That means that 1429 lunar years have passed since the Hijra; however 1386 solar years have passed (2008-622=1386). Furthermore, in the first year of the Islamic Calendar, the difference between the two systems was 621 (a thoroughly meaningless number by itself since it is a combinations of two systems). Today, the difference is 579. The Islamic calendar is catching up to the Christian calender at a very slow rate. Indeed, it has gained by only 42 in 1386 solar years. Eventually, the years would be the same, I realized. But when? So, I did the following math:

Let x=CE
Let y=AH
x=0.970229y=621.5643
y=1.030684(x-621.5643)

Since I wanted to find the point at which x=y I substituted x for y and set the two equations as equal, hence:

0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.030684(x - 621.5643)

I proceeded to calculated as follows:

0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.030684(x - 621.5643)
0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.038684x - 640.6363789812
0.970229x + 1262.2006789812 = 1.038684x
1262.2006789812 = .060455x
0.060455x = 1262.2006789812
x= 20878.350492

That means that in the year 20,878 AD it will also be the year 20,878 AH. Christianity and Islam will finally come together and peace will reign upon the earth. Now we need only wait 18,870 years (19,449 lunar!) for peace. At the current rate of the peace process in the Middle East, this might be early.

Stranger things...

Just a short entry today. I have been trying to find some traditional Saudi children's clothes for my sister's kids, but to no avail. I have asked several people and I always end up being directed to stores that sell blue jeans and "the Gap" t-shirts. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that the tradition clothing of Saudi Arabia consists of blue jeans and baby Gap. That, however, is only the frame of the story. During my meanderings in the market I saw a store that sold movies and music and decided to check it out. I really have only two interests when shopping: books, the older the better; and music. Everything else, like food, clothing, and deodorant, are optional and waste money that could more profitably be spent on books. As I wondered the much editted selection of the store, which consisted mostly of Bollywood movies and American pop albums with black marker covering up the women (Shakira's album was, in fact, completely blacked out), I saw the recently released movies. There was "Enchanted" in Arabic, lots of Hollywood and Bollywood fare and, most surprising of all -- so surprising, in fact, that I am tempted to return to the store, camera in hand, just to take a picture if I thought they would not chase me out for doing so -- was the complete "Work and the Glory" series. Who marketed that here?! The box did not say whether the movie was translated or even subtitled in Arabic, but there it was right on the "Hot New Releases" shelf. Weird. It is a small world afterall.

A Night Out on the Town

One of my new bosses, and there appear to be several, all of whom are princesses -- a sign, perhaps, of future problems, assigned her assistant, Ra'id to show me around a little. The national pasttime of Saudi Arabia appears to be shopping. I visited both the old Thumairy Market by Al-Masmak fortress, which I keep mistakenly referring to as a palace, and some modern malls and shopping districts. There are no clubs and restaurants are often segregated into single (i.e. men), and family sections -- even the McDonalds I passed had two seperated sides separated by a wall. The malls have levels with signs reading: "Entry forbidden to single men, families only." It was interesting to see that many people shop as families, though this may also have something to do with the fact that women cannot go out without an adult male relative accompanying them. Indeed, in most of its outward appearences, Riyadh scarcely differs from many American cities with strip malls, freeways, ubiquitious cars, fast food chains, and so on save in one aspect: the lack of women out and about.

The picture above is, I should mention, my hotel by night. This picture is the Faisaliyah tower all aglow. Returning to women. It is interesting to me to see men doing most of the errands. One of my bosses, a princess, has a male assistant who does all her errands. We visited a modern mall, which, minus the Arabic signs, looked as though it had been transported from suburban Washington, D.C. (the rich part, of course). The women in their long black abayas, not all of whom wore hijabs and veils by the way, suddenly brought to my mind the Harry Potter films with everyone swishing around in long black cloaks.

The other difficulty is that during every prayer time, every shop must close. The locals are accustomed to it and plan accordingly, the few foreigners like myself, and there were very few especially in the Thumairy Market where I saw none whatsoever, do find it somewhat difficult to interrupt one's shopping and site seeing continuiously throughout the day. I don't complain of course; it would be beyond rude to do so. The best time to go shopping is after the evening prayer around 8:00 pm because there are no more prayers until morning and the stores stay open until 1 or 2 in the morning. I past a KFC that was open until 3:00 am.

Here is Kingdom Tower by night from Olaya street where we visited Jarir bookstore, the Barnes and Noble of Saudi Arabia. It really is. You can buy everything from the complete sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (which I did for an unbelievably low price by American standards), to the latest Stephen King novel both in English and Arabic. It also had a Starbucks cafe in the corner. It was a good place to visit. I was able to purchase some novels to help improve my Arabic. Again, I was the only non-Arab I saw and was a source of curiousity to many children.

Photography is discouraged in many parts of Saudi Arabia and I have been warned not to take pictures of women nor of anybody without their permission. This made it all but impossible for me to photograph the old market or the mall. I even did a google search to see if any braver souls had done it and found none at all. My verbal pictures will have to suffice, I suppose.

My favorite place in the old market was an antique store that puts any antique store in America to shame. When I visited with Princess Maha, she lamented to me that too few of the Saudis appreciate the remants of their heritage and so books, documents, artefacts, buildings, and so forther, unless they are Qurans, (her words) are razed or tossed. In this store I saw cardboard boxes full of hand illuminated manuscripts some of them dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth century. There were rust canckered swords and daggers. I bought the dagger at the left, a book (see my previous entry), and some jewellry. There were lots of ivory and coral items for sale. Can't buy any of them, of course. It's illegal to bring them back into the States. There were old globes, a rusted astrolabe, hundreds of daggers just sitting in a box, old shields, jewellry, and so on. Some were no doubt fakes or reproductions and I am not expert enough to tell the genuine antiques from the real things (except, of course, for the books). Since, however, this was no tourist trap dump like those that surround the Pyramids of Giza (no offense, but it's true), I was less suspicious than I would normally be.

So, basically a night on the town in Riyadh is shopping and eating. Not really all that different than back home the social dynamics are a little different. I quickly learned, however, that creative locals find ways around it mostly involving cell phones. Tomorrow I meet once more with the princesses and the gentlemen they are hiring to organize the materials already here in

Riyadh. I will also finally visit the exhibit on King Faisal which was part of the main reason for my trip. However, we delayed visiting at first because Princess Haifa wanted to meet me at the exhibit and then the exhibit was close for much of the weekend open only for a few hours at night for families only. We unattached men can only visit in the early morning. Until then.