This Thought Experiment Offers Instant Gratitude – Courtesy of Sam Harris

What? Your life is not perfect? Your friendships and romantic interests sometimes become strained and they occasionally fall apart completely? Does your aging house need many types of maintenance and repair work? Are you concerned about your finances? Is your body failing in minor and major ways as you age? Do your digital devices often need new trouble-shooting, upgrades and passwords? Are the people you care about the most so worried about these same things that these worries and struggles are the topics that dominate your conversations?

No one ever promised us that our lives would be lived happily ever after. We have no right to believe that we would never be required to work hard to maintain our physical and social environments. These daily unrelenting challenges should actually be seen as opportunities because these "burdens" are not distractions from our lives. These "burdens" are the essence of Life. As Sam Harris notes in his thought experiment below, if you take away all the things that make our lives irritating, exhausting and scary, nothing of value remains.

Continue ReadingThis Thought Experiment Offers Instant Gratitude – Courtesy of Sam Harris

A Thanksgiving Message

We are not in "normal" times, but there is so much for many of us to be thankful. If you are looking for these good things, you will find them everywhere. Those who are looking only for problems and imperfections will miss most of the good things. On this Thanksgiving I find myself thinking of those countless people who strive daily to reach out to each other in reassuring and civil ways. Doing this takes many forms, including simply offering friendly greetings and encouragement (at a distance) to oftentimes randomly encountered fellow humans. But it also includes visiting your loved ones who are shut-in, living alone, hanging on, waiting to get to the other side, who suffer from the loud dull pain of social isolation.

I repeatedly think of the millions of people who have worked so hard to developed digital tools that have allowed so many of us to connect to each other. Thanks to incredibly smart people, my elderly mother and sisters have had a weekly Zoom visit each Sunday that has turned out to be a highlight of each week. I also feel deep appreciation for those many thousands of health care workers (including a recent graduate nurse named JuJu Vieth--my daughter) and STEM experts who have worked around the clock to nurture the onslaught of COVID patients and to give all of us extraordinarily sudden hope that a vaccine might be around the corner. We will get through this as a people. That's a given. It's time to raise the bar a bit, though, and aim to get through this in non-divisive ways that make each of us proud to be fellow Americans.

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Social Media is the New Version of Brain-Destroying Lead

In this Interview with Joe Rogan, Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology drew a haunting analogy.  The discussion begins at 1:24.

Throughout the 1900's, lead was increasingly used in paint, gasoline and other products.  It was hailed as a miracle substance.

What are the Health Effects of Lead? Lead can affect almost every organ and system in your body. In children six years old and younger even low levels of lead in the blood of children is poisonous. It can result in behavior and learning problems, lower IQ and hyperactivity, slowed growth and many other problems. Beginning in 1965, it took the heroic efforts by geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson (and see here) to convince the U.S. Government (over systematic misinformation from companies who profited from the sale of products using lead) that lead in the environment was dangerous to humans.

Tristan Harris argues that social media is the new lead.  Instead of brain damage, however, social media causes people to distrust each other, making it impossible for people from the opposing tribes to work with each other or compromise with each other. Social Media is thus causing a massive breakdown of our political system. The following exchange begins at 85:21):

TH: Let's replace lead with problem solving capacity . . .  Imagine that we have a societal IQ or a societal problem-solving capacity the US has a societal IQ, Russia has a societal IQ, Germany has a societal IQ:  How good is a country at solving its problems? Now imagine, what does social media do to our societal IQ?

JR: It distorts our ideas. It gives us a bunch of false narratives. It fills us with misinformation.

TH: It makes it impossible to agree with each other, and in a democracy if you don't agree with each other and you can't even do compromise . . .  People recognize that politics was invented to avoid warfare. So we have compromise and understanding so that we don't physically become violent with each other.  We have compromise and conversation.  If social media makes compromise, conversation and shared understanding and shared truth impossible, it doesn't drop our societal IQ by four points. It drops it to zero, because you can't solve any problem, whether it's human trafficking or poverty or climate issues or racial injustice. Whatever it is that you care about, it depends on us having some shared view about what we agree on.

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Hate the Vote, not the Voter?

I already voted for Biden.I have several friends who have voted for Trump. I know for a fact that they are not mean people, stupid or racist. I'm am sure that they held their nose to vote for Trump; I held my nose to vote for Biden. I will remain friends with my Republican friends. I refuse to hate anyone based on how they vote. This is the context for this little experiment run by Diane Fleishman, as reported by her husband Geoffrey Miller (they are both evolutionary psychologists).

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About Calls to Prayer

For several years I have taught week-long courses at law schools in Istanbul, Turkey. Those visits have been put on pause due to COVID. I was a couple weeks from traveling to Istanbul once again in early March, 2020, but I reluctantly cancelled that.

I often think of the many people I repeatedly visit when I'm in Turkey. Like most of my friends in the U.S., digital technologies have made it possible to keep in touch, but I look forward to the day when I can once again take it all in through all five senses.

Back here in St. Louis, Missouri, I tend to my ordinary life. Every week or so, however, I fondly think of something that I couldn't have predicted before I first visited the Middle East. I often think of the call to prayer.

In the Middle East, the muezzin calls out from the top of nearby minarets five times each day (sometimes more than one at the same time if you are between minarets). It's a call, for sure, and almost seems like a song, but I've been told that it is not singing. The calls seemed like intrusions on my ears until I heard many of them. Gradually, over my repeated visits, the call to prayer became an exceptionally beautiful moment for me. I write this as an atheist who doesn't understand any of the words of the call to prayer. For me, its beauty is about the sounds and the moment, coupled with images of the venerable mosques I visited (I took these photos in Turkey and Egypt). Also coupled with the second-to-none hospitality of the people I met in the Middle East. It's different than church bells, because it's only five times each day and because you are not hearing a mechanical bell--you are hearing a human being earnestly calling out to you.

As I repeatedly visited Turkey, I started looking forward to the calls as opportunities to stop and think about life and my place in the world. I also took it as a reminder to always be tending to things that really matter because the day is always slipping away. It is also a reminder that you are part of a much bigger community because that call is to everyone in hearing distance, not just you.

There are many reasons for craving an effective vaccine for COVID. For me, this is a reason that I didn't anticipate. This is a good example of a reason that you should travel to new places: If you travel with the right state of mind, you will be changed by what you encounter.

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