From my Amazon review of " These Truths " Everyone will agree that America is in a state of crisis, although opinions differ as to why and who is to blame. There is a strange comfort in knowing that this has always been the case - in fact, the constitution arose in a period of chaos after the revolution was won. Americans pretend, with varying plausibility, that the answer to their problems is to be found in the constitution or the god-like secret intentions of the framers. It is perhaps better to look for an answer in the history of America, starting before the arrival of Europeans. ) "These Truths"  forms a kind of spine around all the other history books about America can be understood. At over 900 pages, it barely scratches the surface but manages to make a kind of sense by being purely historical. The reader is left with a big stack of facts upon which he or she may draw conclusions and see patterns. America is its current crisis for reasons that stretc...

I have had second thoughts after posting this essay. For those who know, I don't want to become a Chicken Little like Chris Hedges . I'll bring the post up again once I have taken the time to take another close look at the issue.  Whipping up Climate Change panic is as bad as Climate Change denial. Both distract us from our best vision of what we face and how we can deal with it. A few specific notes on this issue: It does seem like habitat destruction in Madagascar qualifies as a local extinction event. This example can be multiplied. The question is: do all these instances add up to a global extinction event? Are we forced to the conclusion that the disaster will rise to Permian levels? The IPCC report doesn't quite back up the judgment that an extinction event is upon us, or even that it would be a worst-case consequence of doing nothing. The job of the IPCC is to help us understand. If the IPCC models fail to tell us what will happen past 6 degrees, this is not ...

Way back in the 70's I coined the term "creedal group" for a group that is held together by nothing but a mostly meaningless "creed." The creed is seldom if ever, discussed but there is a tacit understanding that everyone in the group kinda gets it, and people outside the group kinda don't. This creed appears on the home page of the United Church of Canada: “God is Holy Mystery, beyond complete knowledge, above perfect description…. Nothing exists that does not find its source in God.” Obviously, our friends at the United Church have more or less given up on drafting something that means anything. How could you disagree with that statement, especially since Liberal Christians are more or less free to define what they mean by "God?" One thing you learn in a United Church seminary is that a perfectly acceptable definition of God is " The ground of all being ," which makes the above creed circular. What I'm saying here is that it d...

This essay builds on the concept of "Boxes" introduced in my April Summary.  In a nutshell, we are all trapped in "Box 1", which is the world "inside our heads". For millennia, there has been little dispute over the fact that our access to "reality" is far from trustworthy. In the extreme, there are those who claim that "reality" doesn't exist at all, or at least the existence cannot be proven. I am reminded of a professional geologist I once met. He managed to make a living dating million-year-old rocks, while simultaneously believing that the world was 4,000 years old. As the Red Queen said, we are capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast. "Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why,...

BOXES One fanciful vision of the (flat) Earth was that it was supported on the back of a turtle, which was, in turn, standing on another turtle and so on:  Turtles all the way down . Similarly, I find it useful to think of "boxes within boxes all the way down." Box 1 is the world we experience "in our head," which includes all experience and everything we know. In particular, it includes what we have been taught and what we have been taught to assume, which is, to a certain extent, " programmed ". Box 1 is the " matrix " of individually shared reality. But, unlike the Matrix of Science Fiction fame, our matrix depends deeply on the "real world" outside and our senses within, as eloquently explained by Antonio Damasio . Our evolutionary survival strategy involves survival as a member of a group, or " super person ". Not only do we not "think for ourselves," we can't . We experience ourselves as o...