Do we want smarter people or better people? This is in some ways a trick question, because an instant answer is that we want both. But if we can’t have both, at least not at the same time, which do we want first?
Here, smarter people means those who can think things through reasonably. They are knowledgeable and are curious and can find ways to learn what they don’t know and need to know. They are discerning.
Here, better people means those who maintain a balanced view of what is good for themselves and good for others, and are guided by a commitment that however they reach what is good for themselves, out of necessity or desire, the effect on others is at least as important or more important.
When we see people who are not so smart, in positions of power and authority or among our neighbors, we are sure we want smarter people.
When we see people who are not so good, in positions of power and authority or among our neighbors, we are sure we want better people.
Nevertheless, at least until I reach the end of this writing, I am going for better people. We have problems that smart people solve. We have problems that smart people create. But smart, whether from other people or within ourselves, cannot wholly solve the problems of soul, theirs and ours. Good people, better people, can.
Quietly, where no one can hear, some leaders and citizens are probably worried that if this was a real Ebola outbreak in the U.S., and not the thankfully tiny and so far isolated problem it is, we would fall apart. Utterly fail the test. (2014)
The post below was published on October 27, 2014. It comes to mind today for a couple of reasons. There is a current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And various recent public health developments, including a sea change in how the federal government looks at disease and vaccines, has prompted scientists to shout that we are not ready for the next pandemic, just as we weren’t ready for the last one. Remember that?
Stress tests. We see them in medicine, in banking, in construction.
How well will the patient’s heart perform when he is on a treadmill? How sound are a bank’s finances in the worst case scenario? How will building materials stand up under maximum pressure?
Public crises are stress tests. So far, Ebola is the latest demonstration of the tendency for our civic infrastructure to crack—or show signs of it—under pressure.
Quietly, where no one can hear, some leaders and citizens are probably worried that if this was a real Ebola outbreak in the U.S., and not the thankfully tiny and so far isolated problem it is, we would fall apart. Utterly fail the test.
The latest episode concerns this weekend’s rapid response by multiple states to Craig Spencer, a doctor returning from West Africa and becoming sick with Ebola in New York City last week. In addition to New York and New Jersey, other states are now or may be requiring returning health care workers to be quarantined.
There is a problem: none of these states appear to have thought through any of it—most especially the practical aspects of whisking someone coming home from a heroic medical mission into isolation that is supposed to be comfortable, suitable, sensible, and sensitive under the circumstances. It now seems the scenario is act first, plan later.
Nurse Kaci Hickox is the first one caught in this trap. She is not sick and is showing no symptoms. Arriving at Newark Airport Friday night, she was taken to a tent behind a hospital, with a portable toilet, no shower, no television, and little cellphone reception. She castigated all involved, particularly Governor Chris Christie, who said she had symptoms and was sick, when she hadn’t and wasn’t. She plans a federal lawsuit challenging the quarantine.
“I also want to be treated with compassion and humanity, and I don’t feel I’ve been treated that way in the past three days. I think this is an extreme that is really unacceptable. I feel like my basic human rights have been violated.”
(Update: Governor Christie has relented, allowing her to return home to Maine, where, if you read between the lines, the message is that it will then be Maine’s problem to monitor her and where, if something goes wrong, it will be on their head.)
We seem to have forgotten how to solve problems, enthralled by our own voice either positing solutions, making points, or complaining. Or maybe it is that this is America, with a history of being bigger, stronger, smarter, and most of all, righter, in all circumstances. Even if that was ever true, politics—in the big sense of privileging positions over effective and thoughtful answers—has poisoned that well. Worthy questions and deliberate solutions are rejected out of hand because of the source, because they don’t fit some preconceived notion or program, or simply because they won’t help win or not lose elections.
Whether or not quarantine of heroic Ebola care givers returning from West Africa is a good idea, it is certainly a good idea to evaluate and plan exactly how you are going to practically handle it. Maybe, though, we shouldn’t be at all surprised. In recent years we did, after all, send hundreds of thousands of troops abroad, and when the promised rewards for their heroic service came due, we seemed unable to fulfill and, worse, were suddenly unenthusiastic about keeping the promise anyway.
If this is a war on Ebola, we better make sure we are committed to those who are sacrificing, part of which is actual planning and resourcing, not ignorant and reflexive pontificating and politicking. So far, this is looking too much like some of our other recent wars. Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to get better and be better at it.
Mindfulness is a growing movement and a good one. It continues to help many to improve themselves and their lives, reducing stress, enabling calm, increasing focus, and developing an overall sense of well-being. Much better than mindlessness.
Finding your mind is an essential step. But once you are there, what are you going to do? Different religious, spiritual, philosophical and psychological traditions offer different recommendations, some of which are expressly related to mind and mindfulness. Buddhism is one of the traditions that puts your mind at the absolute center. Once you have found your mind, the next step is to transform it for the better.
The Dalai Lama has frequently taught about Eight Verses for Training the Mind, a Tibetan Buddhist text by Geshe Langri Tangpa (1054-1123). The following is from The Dalai Lama’s Book of Transformation:
GENERATING THE MIND FOR ENLIGHTENMENT
For those who admire the spiritual ideals of the Eight Verses on Transforming the Mind it is helpful to recite the following verses for generating the mind for enlightenment. Practicing Buddhists should recite the verses and reflect upon the meaning of the words, while trying to enhance their altruism and compassion. Those of you who are practitioners of other religious traditions can draw from your own spiritual teachings, and try to commit yourselves to cultivating altruistic thoughts in pursuit of the altruistic ideal.
With a wish to free all beings I shall always go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha until I reach full enlightenment. Enthused by wisdom and compassion, today in the Buddha’s presence I generate the Mind for Full Awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings.
As long as space endures, as long as sentient beings remain, until then, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world.
In conclusion, those who, like myself, consider themselves to be followers of Buddha, should practice as much as we can. To followers of other religious traditions, I would like to say, ‘Please practice your own religion seriously and sincerely.’ And to non-believers, I request you to try to be warm-hearted. I ask this of you because these mental attitudes actually bring us happiness. As I have mentioned before, taking care of others actually benefits you.
Continuing on this path, you will also begin to appreciate the value of human life, how precious it is, and the fact that as human beings we are capable of reflecting on these questions and following a spiritual practice. Then you will really appreciate a point emphasized again and again by many great Tibetan masters: that we should not waste the opportunity offered to us in this life, because human life is so precious and so difficult to achieve. As life is valuable it is important to do something meaningful with it right now, since, by its very nature, it is also transient. This shows how you can bring all the elements of the various spiritual practices together so that they have a cumulative effect on your daily practice.
Ten years ago, Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president. At the time, the media could not stop showing him and talking about him, his Republican opponents could not stop criticizing him, and I wrote about him far too frequently. Which is why, in March 2016, I promised to make this blog a Trump-Free Zone. Eventually.
In the time since, Trump has been elected president twice, those Republican opponents are now in his cabinet or are his most sycophantic supporters, and I am still writing about Trump, once in awhile and hopefully even less in the future. Just like when we were in the middle of the pandemic, I wrote frequently about Covid, because there are some disasters you should not turn your back on.
So it goes.
I intend and promise to make this blog a TFZ (Trump-Free Zone). Very soon. Maybe. For a while. I run away from my favorite news channels, sometimes for hours, while he is showcased. So I understand not to contribute to the overexposure.
But to torture the famous words of St. Augustine:
Lord make this blog a Trump-Free Zone. But not yet.
239th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution in 1787
The U.S president is making a BIG DEAL of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This is bizarre. The Declaration set off a revolution against a TYRANT and tyranny, so it is ironic that this comes from a tyrant or at least a tyranny wannabe.
The real anniversary we should be celebrating every year is the signing (1787) or ratification (1788) of the U.S. CONSTITUTION and its added BILL OF RIGHTS. This is a president who has done everything but publicly burn a copy of the Constitution, along with copies of any inconvenient laws. Soon we may see American history that identifies some of the founders and signers as “too woke” who should be eliminated from our schools. Thankfully, there are still judges, including those appointed by this president (see below), who are sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws. The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, and the First Amendment live.
Texas philosophy professor Idris Robinson said he was breathing a bit easier this week nearly halfway through what he called “the most stressful month of fatherhood so far”.
That’s because Robinson was faced with losing his paycheck from Texas State University beginning 31 May, along with his academic affiliation, after he was fired for a talk he gave in another state on what he called “the liberation of Palestine”. The incident would have made it nearly impossible for him to find another job teaching – all with a 16-month-old son at home.
But then Trump-appointed district court Judge Alan Albright ruled in his favor this week and ordered Texas State to continue paying him for another year or until his lawsuit against the school reaches an outcome, whichever comes first. The state “put Dr. Robinson’s career in grave danger by violating his First Amendment rights”, Albright wrote in his decision.
“It’s the right decision,” Robinson said in an interview. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I do my job and I do it well.”
The complaint, reported by the Guardian in March, alleges that the school violated Robinson’s constitutional rights by ending his contract after a 2024 talk he gave in North Carolina on Palestine and Israel. A fight broke out before he could finish the talk. Neither Robinson nor anyone else at the event mentioned his job at the university.
Toward the end of the hour-long hearing on Tuesday, Albright highlighted that “the state really hasn’t made an effort to argue that the speech that the plaintiff gave [wasn’t] in some role or another a motivating factor” in the university’s decision to terminate his contract, according to Yarden Azoulay Katz, a member of Robinson’s legal team who attended.
The decision in favor of continuing to pay Robinson is a “shot across the bow for many universities who have violated free speech rights”, said Zach Greenberg, director of Faculty Legal Defense at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), an organization with local counsel involved in the case. “It bodes well for academic freedom.”
The university’s termination of Robinson’s contract was “an adverse action, carried out for an unlawful reason”, said Samantha Harris, his attorney. The judge’s decision not only made Robinson’s near future a lot brighter – “it also showed there’s a substantial likelihood of success with regard to Dr Robinson’s claim of first amendment retaliation,” said Harris, who has worked on such claims for two decades.
Prior to this incident, Robinson had four years of stellar performance reviews, according to the complaint.
Robinson pointed out that others in academia have been disciplined for speech on Palestine, as well as other subjects, such as Charlie Kirk’s killing.
“I hope [the judge’s decision] sets a precedent – so people see they can stand up and fight, see things out to the end,” he said.
The philosopher, who has recently published a book, The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer while fighting the university’s actions, has centered much of his research on societies in conflict and revolution.
He believes the US is in its third “Red Scare”, after those prior to the first world war and after the second world war, which focused on perceived threats from communism. “Repression around speech is part of the new Red Scare,” he said. “Being a Black, leftist philosopher, I’m a target.”
“But it’s not just ‘F this communist’, or ‘F this terrorist’. It’s also good old-fashioned racism,” he added – noting that online harassment after his case went public has included such comments as: “I hope this [N-word]’s whole family commits suicide.”
A few weeks ago, someone texted his wife: “Idris f’d up.” He has no idea how they got her number.
Nonetheless, he said, “I’m still taking up space in their minds – so I’m winning.”
Robinson also allowed that the experience has had a chilling effect on his scholarship. He wrote two chapters about Israel and Palestine in his new book after Texas State began its disciplinary proceedings – and “deliberately avoided using the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine’ and instead referred vaguely to ‘the holy land’ … to avoid further scrutiny”, he noted in an affidavit accompanying the lawsuit.
Robinson emphasized that the talk that apparently led Texas State to discipline him “wasn’t about me giving my opinion … it was about my analysis of what’s right in front of me, about trying to clarify this world historical event” of 7 October and its aftermath. Then, he said, “everyone made this big mess about a talk I didn’t even finish”.
And though the days leading up to this week’s hearing were stressful, he said, “it’s nowhere near as stressful as being a father in Gaza who can’t feed or protect his children”.
While the lawsuit takes its course, Robinson said he’d like to “concentrate on philosophy”– including a book on Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the mid-20th-century thinker on logic, language and political thought.
As for Albright’s decision: “I hope it helps other academics who have been facing disciplinary actions to fight on. Even in a state like Texas, you can win.”
The column below is from the Economist in 2023. Joe Biden was president. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was emerging on the national scene, planning to oppose Biden for the Democratic nomination. We are now living in the future, where Kennedy Jr., who appears to have serious problems, is the chief health policy maker of America. He works for the chief executive of America, who also appears to have serious problems.
This column is about the late Robert F. Kennedy. I have included Bobby Kennedy in at least a dozen posts over the years. He deserves as much attention as ever in 2026. Maybe we can and should use every appearance of his namesake son as a reminder to consider the worth of the father.
The point of the Economist column is as valid today as it was three years ago. If Democrats are lost—they are—and willing to admit they need models—they do—the simple suggestion is that they have one. Whether 2026 is a worse time than 1968 doesn’t matter. What matters is that when you are in such times, leaders may come along who are what we need. We will never know whether Bobby Kennedy was fully the one to elevate us above 1968, since he was assassinated in June of that year. Is there a Democrat out there who can elevate us above 2026? One who truly, not just superficially, is like Bobby Kennedy?
What Democrats can learn from Bobby Kennedy The father—not the son—was the party’s last great populist
The Economist Sep 7th 2023
Of all the what-ifs of post-war American politics, none is more haunting than the vision in which an assassin did not shoot down Robert Kennedy while he was running for president in 1968. Had Kennedy lived, runs this counterfactual history, he would have become president, and America would have left Vietnam years earlier. There would have been no Nixon administration, no Watergate scandal to sharpen cynicism and no successful Republican “southern strategy” to deepen racial division. The Democrats would have become the party of the multiracial working class, rather than of the multiracial professional elite.
Now, as his father challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination, Robert Kennedy junior is challenging President Joe Biden. You might hear echoes of the father’s politics, as when the son inveighs against “the warfare machine that is bankrupting our country” or against the Democratic Party for “inviting Wall Street to strip-mine the American public”.
But unlike his father, this Kennedy has little chance of the nomination. Rather than falling in love with him, leftish journalists are tearing him apart for his opposition to vaccination and his yen for conspiracy theories, including about the murders of his father and his uncle, John Kennedy. Having supplied the tragedy in 1968, history is offering up the farce.
And yet an unflattering comparison could also be made with most other modern Democratic campaigns, even allowing for mythmaking: they all seem a bit pallid beside Kennedy’s blazing, tragic 82-day race. A mix of idealism and pragmatism led him to try to reassemble the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, fractured by the Vietnam war and the civil-rights movement. He got in late, after the New Hampshire primary. Another Democratic challenger, Eugene McCarthy, a cerebral senator from Minnesota, had claimed the hearts of affluent, educated opponents of the war.
Kennedy set out to build on his support among black voters by showing working-class white Americans they had common interests. His policies were heterodox, aimed at holding families and communities together, to nurture civic pride and a spirit of mutual obligation. For decades liberals had linked the growth of the federal government to the expansion of rights and freedom, but Kennedy sensed Americans felt they were losing control to a distant government with giant, one-size-fits-all programmes. He argued that people wanted the dignity of work rather than welfare, and he favoured local, public-private jobs schemes. “He sensed and managed to articulate that feeling of disempowerment experienced by ordinary Americans, including the white working class, black and Hispanic voters and other groups excluded from the mainstream of American prosperity and respect,” says Michael Sandel, a political philosopher and author of “Democracy’s Discontent”.
As riots tore inner cities apart, Kennedy called for “law and order”, courting the disdain of some liberals who, then as now, heard that as racist code. But he always twinned his call for law enforcement with demands for racial justice, saying white Americans bore responsibility for black violence.
To housewives in Terre Haute, Indiana, he cited Camus, urging empathy with the hopelessness of destitute families. In Indianapolis, on the night Martin Luther King was killed, Kennedy defused the anger in a crowd primed to riot. He quoted Aeschylus on the wisdom that comes with despair and added, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
He often said what voters did not want to hear. “You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam,” he scolded students at Indiana University, saying he wanted to take their draft deferments away. “He sort of respects our intelligence,” a farmer told a reporter in Nebraska, where Kennedy freely admitted he had no idea how to milk a cow.
The honesty and intensity of Kennedy’s campaign—along with his decision to visit Native American reservations, where presidential candidates seldom bother to go, to draw attention to their wretchedness—may have resulted in part from the sense of doom suffusing it. Like the reporters covering him, the candidate feared he would eventually be shot.
From George Wallace to Donald Trump
Yet Kennedy insisted on so exposing himself that supporters would make off with his jacket and even his shoes. He ended his campaign in Indiana with a nine-hour ride in an open car inching through black and white communities. The reporter Jules Witcover described an “unbroken display of adulation and support” as he rode through neighbourhoods “that ran smack against one another, and you read their racial or ethnic composition in the faces that looked up at him, in the colour of the hands that stretched out to him, in the accents that shouted out at him”. Kennedy did not succeed with well-off white voters. Instead, he won the Indiana primary by carrying 86% of black voters along with working-class white Democrats, including many who had defected to the segregationist George Wallace four years earlier.
Kennedy would go on to lose the primary in Oregon, an affluent white state, but he won Nebraska, South Dakota and California. There, after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel, he broke one of his own rules. Instead of wading through the crowd he left through the kitchen, where his assassin waited.
It is impossible to know what Kennedy might have achieved. Yet it is also hard to believe Donald Trump would have achieved so much had the Democrats modelled themselves less on McCarthy and more on Kennedy. He was, in short, the last great Democratic populist. Kennedy loved to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’” These days both questions seem worth asking.
Whatever we say about Pete Hegseth—and we say a lot—he did serve honorably in the military. So why does he keep picking fights with Mark Kelly, a decorated Navy flyer and astronaut?
Pete is envious. Even the most ardent Trumpists may believe that Kelly deserves some credit for flying 39 combat missions in Desert Storm and for his 54 days in space during four NASA missions.
Pete can level the playing field.
First, he has to take part in combat flights, 39 of them. He doesn’t have to pilot the attack aircraft, just ride along.
Second, he can go to space. Let’s not be facetious and say he should stay there. He only needs to stay up there for 54 days.
We might add that to truly level the playing field, he should also be elected a United States Senator, but that may be asking too much.
Pete would then be (sort of) Mark Kelly’s equal, qualified to criticize and indict Kelly as much as he chooses. But until then, he should pick fights, as bullies do, with those he is sure he can beat.
What are your constant practices? Ones performed from the earliest time, maybe before memory, maybe every day, maybe every moment. Each time the same, each time different.
Breathing, for example. You may not think of it as a practice, though you know and hope it is constant. You don’t remember the first breath, though somebody else will. You will not remember your final breath, though somebody else may. That previous breath, this breath and that next breath, you know them.
In the beginning….Well, you probably know how it goes. But don’t be jaded by familiarity. And don’t avoid it or be put off by belief that this and all the Genesis stories that follow are neither history nor science. So what? These are big stories and we need big stories. Not to be used as clubs to beat us up (though there is that), but as invitations and portals to bigger things.
Instead of learned discourse, here is something much more fun. R. Crumb, one of the great comic artists (beginning with his classic underground comics in the 1960s—Mr. Natural, etc.), published his Book of Genesis Illustrated in 2010.
(If you don’t like pictures or Crumb’s illustrations, you might just try the excellent translation of Genesis that Crumb used, by Robert Alter)
Take a moment, whatever your inclinations, and allow yourself to be awed. Whatever you think is awesome, the sudden appearance of everything is more awesome than that, however you explain it. And for those who are waiting to see the Big Guy with the long beard–you know you’ve just gotta have it–here it is.
Bob Schwartz 