At the time of World War II, superhero comic books were growing in popularity. Even more so in the following decades.
A big question emerged: Why didn’t Superman just end the war quickly? He certainly could have.
The answer is obvious, even to those who admire him. He is a comic book character. Like all great characters of myth and fiction, he may exist as an all-powerful ideal in the psyche, spirit and imagination, but not in the real hard world.
We are thankful we do have human heroes in dire situations, and that is exactly how the force of evil was vanquished in World War II. In the overall social and political sphere, once in a while we do find individuals who can help “bend the course of history with their bare hands.” But we shouldn’t count on it.
Instead, as deep into undemocratic evil as we are sinking, what we have are very human politicians, which means that some will try their best, or what they think is best, which may not be enough. If we are waiting for Superman, or superheroes, or just heroes, know this: they are us.
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. –Stewart Brand
When Stewart Brand birthed the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, a version of this motto appeared in the introduction to that first issue: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
WEC was an exercise in what we might call Human General Intelligence. It covered literally everything and everyone on earth and in the universe. It was aimed at getting readers—all of us—aware of everything and everyone, so that we could get on an enriched and enlightening learning and acting path of knowledge and ability about anything and anyone.
In a nutshell, that is what AI offers. AI is not “as a god”, though from a certain perspective it may look to some that way. We are “as gods” with it at our command, and not since putting world-destroying weapons in human control has that been clearer.
Think about the last time, or all the times, you used AI. Would you consider that a godlike experience, or was it a matter—not illegitimate, no judgment—of taking an easier and more convenient way to pass a school assignment or complete a work task? Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that, maybe. But if with AI at your side you might be “as a god”, is that all you plan to do with it?
Note: That first issue begins and ends with two of my greatest inspirations, Buckminster Fuller and the I Ching. It may not be enough to know their Biggest Picture view of life and the universe and our place in it, but it is a start. What would they/do they think of AI?
Hey now, baby Get into my big black car I want to just show you What my politics are
Cream’s Politician, from Wheels of Fire (1968), is not the most sophisticated song ever about politics. Still, the message has never gone out of style. For those who don’t know Eric Clapton and Cream, the rest of the album and the earlier Disraeli Gears (1967) are worth hearing.
Hey now, baby Get into my big black car I want to just show you What my politics are
I’m a political man And I practice what I preach So don’t deny me, baby Not while you’re in my reach
I support the left Though I’m leaning to the right But I’m just not there When it’s coming to a fight
Hey now, baby Get into my big black car I want to just show you What my politics are
It is worth analyzing this post from five years ago.
Some of it seems right. Republicans back then saw Trump as a way to get the things they wanted but that seemed, in a slowly enlightening America, out of reach.
What I got wrong was this: “They [Republicans] are holding their fire as they wait for the emergence of a smarter, smoother, more attractive demagogue.” What they and we got is an increasingly less attractive and less stable demagogue.
“All they [Republicans] want is a captain to steer the ship of state in the right direction—one who isn’t quite so problematic and crazy. Next stop 2024.” Right direction? Not quite so problematic and crazy? Be careful what you wish for and enable. 2024 happened and the next stop is now.
Note: The following was drafted in early January, days after the invasion of the Capitol, days before Trump officially left office. Having just reread the draft, I believe it still has merit.
The conventional analysis of elected Republican politics goes something like this:
Most of the elected Republicans stuck with Trump even during his most heinous days—through active support or silence—because they feared the electoral wrath of him and his base. Their prime directive was to stay in office. Not a profile in courage or integrity, but a simple path anyone might understand if not condone: keep your job.
The actual story is more like this:
Many elected Republicans believe that the only future for America is one in which the forces of progressivism—even moderate moves toward equity and fairness—are turned around. They initially opposed and criticized Trump. But once they had to accept him in power, they saw that he could be useful for that plan. Yes, his behavior in office was extreme and distasteful. But it was a small price to pay for restoring America to its former glory.
So while Trump and his conduct are more reprehensible and toxic than ever, we read this headline from the Washington Post, days after the storming of the Capitol:
“Republicans largely silent about consequences of deadly attack and Trump’s role in inciting it.”
Of course they are largely silent. They are holding their fire as they wait for the emergence of a smarter, smoother, more attractive demagogue. Where, for example, is George Wallace when you need him?
So Republicans remain patient and, with some exception, silent or equivocal. They never wanted an invasion of the citadel of American democracy, nor did they want anyone to be killed. All they want is a captain to steer the ship of state in the right direction—one who isn’t quite so problematic and crazy. Next stop 2024.
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.
Emily Dickinson, Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
The storm in America is sore.
Those of us who know American history well, who understand how American government works, who have seen it in some of its worst days, want to maintain a sense that all things must pass.
But some of us who want to see a way past the current circumstances are having trouble assembling a vision of that path.
People have confidence in the checks and balances cleverly built into American democracy, and they are right to be impressed. You cannot say enough about the brilliance of the Constitution, the platform for history’s most durable and successful democracy.
But the founders and the Constitution presuppose sufficient people, particularly leaders, of the highest qualities. The list of those qualities is long and obvious. Honest, knowledgeable, capable, intelligent, brave, selfless, compassionate, just, on and on. There was never any expectation that America would be led by saints, just that when people and matters of government got out balance, other people and matters would step up to make it right.
There has never before been a time when it seemed there were not enough of those people with those qualities at the highest levels. We had no idea what happens to the elegance of constitutional America in those circumstances. Until now.
America—the America that knows and believes in the Constitution, American history, the rule of law, the system of checks and balances—must continue to plan and strategize a way past. But mere confidence that this is just one more difficulty that will be dissolved by electoral democracy, time, and the American spirit, may be misplaced. Which leaves us with hope. That thing with feathers, singing its tune.
A river flowed right through the middle of Chelm. It occurred to several merchants that a bridge over it would be good for business on both sides of the river. But some of the younger people objected. They said: “Of course it would be nice to build a bridge, but let’s not do it because it would be good for business; we should build it solely for aesthetic reasons. We’ll be glad to contribute to the building expenses for beauty’s sake, but we won’t give a penny for the sake of trade.” Still others, even younger people, said, “A bridge! That’s a good idea, but not for the sake of trade or beauty but to have someplace to stroll back and forth. We’ll be glad to contribute money to build a bridge for strolling.” And so the three groups began to quarrel, and they are quarreling still. And to the present day Chelm does not have a bridge.
There are many Yiddish folktales from Eastern Europe about a town called Chelm. In these stories all the people of Chelm are fools, though they all think they are smart.
Not a day goes by when I don’t think about Chelm and learn something, particularly about the news of the day.
“The Shakers were celibate, they did not marry or bear children, yet theirs is the most enduring religious experiment in American history. Seventy-five years before the emancipation of the slaves and one hundred fifty years before women began voting in America, the Shakers were practicing social, sexual, economic, and spiritual equality for all members.”
The Shakers (they called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) have few followers remaining. They are well-known in the twenty-first century for two things: their arts and crafts—most famously Shaker furniture—and a song.
The song is Simple Gifts. You may have heard the familiar melody (used by composer Aaron Copland in his Appalachian Springs Suite) and you may have heard the words:
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d, To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d, To turn, turn will be our delight, Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.
Below you will find a selection from Appalachian Springs Suite, with Copland’s variations on Simple Gifts, and a description of the Shakers from Ken Burns’ documentary series The Shakers: Hands to Work. Heart to God.
Even with all the complications we’ve had before, it is possible this is as complex a time as we’ve had. It is the gift to be simple, at least for a while.
From Ken Burns’ The Shakers: Hands to Work. Heart to God.
They called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, but because of their ecstatic dancing the world called them the Shakers.
The Shakers were celibate, they did not marry or bear children, yet theirs is the most enduring religious experiment in American history. Seventy-five years before the emancipation of the slaves and one hundred fifty years before women began voting in America, the Shakers were practicing social, sexual, economic, and spiritual equality for all members.
The Shakers were ordinary people who chose to give up their families, property, and worldly ties in order “to know, by daily experience, the peaceable nature of Christ’s kingdom.” In return, they were welcomed into “holy families” where men and women lived as brother and sister, where all property was held in common, and where each participated in the rigorous daily task of transforming the earth into heaven.
Shakerism was founded by an illiterate English factory worker named Ann Lee. Guided by divine visions and signs, she and eight pilgrims came to America in 1774 to spread her gospel in the New World.
At their height in 1840 more than six thousand believers lived in nineteen communal villages from New England to Ohio and Kentucky. Tales of their peaceful and prosperous lives impressed the world’s utopians. But Shaker aspirations were divine, not social or material. As millennialists, they were unified in the belief that Christ had come again, first in the person of Mother Ann and subsequently “in all in whom the Christ consciousness awakens.” It was therefore the duty of each believer to live purely in “the kingdom come” and to strive for perfection in everything he or she did.
Work was the currency of their service. If the world was to be redeemed and restored to God, the Shakers would accomplish it by the dedicated labor of their hands. They believed that God dwelt in the details of their work and in the quality of their craftsmanship. All their devotion, which no longer went to family or home, was put into what they made. Their villages were meticulously constructed and maintained, their workshops were world renowned for reliable goods, and their gardens provided amply for their own needs, with plenty to spare for the poor.
Shakerism is a system which has a distinct genius, a strong organization, a perfect life of its own, through which it would appear to be helping to shape and guide, in no small measure, the spiritual career of the United States. — Hepworth Dixon, 1867
For more than two hundred years Shakerism ran alongside American history, sometimes heralding things to come, usually reflecting trends, events, and ideals from a slightly different angle. The Shakers arrived in America on the eve of the Revolution, having left England in pursuit of freedom. They were gathered into order as a practicing religion in 1787, just as the new United States found its form with the drafting of the Constitution. That same year Shaker women were officially given equal rights, and in 1817 the Shakers’ southern societies freed the slaves belonging to members and began buying black believers out of slavery. The Shakers were suddenly appreciated as successful communitarians when Americans became interested in communities, as successful utopians when America hosted a hundred utopian experiments, as spiritualists when American parlors filled with mediums and with voices from other worlds. They invented hundreds of laborsaving devices from the clothespin to the circular saw, which they shared without patents (some of these machines launched brilliant industrial careers for the men who borrowed them), nor were they frightened of useful inventions. The New Hampshire Shakers owned one of the first cars in the state and rigged up electricity in the own village while the state capital building was still burning gas. They were admired and derided, imitated for their successes and ridiculed for their eccentricities. And they are enduringly appreciated for their contribution to American crafts and architecture.
Today, just a few Shakers still live in a single village in Maine. To all appearances these are the last Shakers. But the living Shakers faithfully assert that their religion will never die. Mother Ann predicted that Shakerism would dwindle to as few members as a child could count on one hand, and then overcome all nations. “This is God’s work,” says Sister Mildred Barker, “and what could bring that to an end? Nothing that we humans, that mortals do.”
The post below is from six years ago. We were in the middle of the pandemic. This was about the opportunity we had, unwelcome but unavoidable. Along with practical changes in how we lived our lives, as individuals, culture, society and nation, we could also transform as individuals, culture, society and nation. If we wanted, if we chose, if we knew how.
How are we doing, six years later?
We have transformed the ways we live and work during the pandemic, like it or not. That forced transformation will be continuing for a while. In fact, it is now predicted that some of those changes, like work at home, will last long after they are needed for public health reasons.
There has also been talk about how this has transformed us personally, individually and in our relationships. There’s not much doubt that some of those changes involve psychological and emotional effects that are negative and unwelcome.
There is one more layer beneath all this. Pandemic or not, working at home or in the office, in touch in person or online, last March when it began or next March when it might be over, we are who we are, but more importantly, we can be who we can be. In the times, with all the outside transformations, we can be transformed inside. We can transform ourselves.
How? Why? In what ways? There are thousands of guides, from massive religious traditions to smaller philosophical and psychological practices to individual books and teachers.
This extreme moment, extreme in many ways, has given us an opportunity rarely seen. We can’t go back and we can’t stand still. So, paying the price of cataclysm, we might as well do a complete assessment of how things are and who we are. And make of it and ourselves what we can. It doesn’t look like it right now, but this might be paradise, if we are brave enough to be the ones who live there.
Follow this through, because there is a (surprise?) twist at the end.
Trump wants Ukraine to lose its war with Russia. Whether that’s because Putin wants it, or because it would allow Trump to claim he ended the war, or because he is demonstrating that 5-dimensional statesmanship he is known for, it doesn’t matter. That’s what he wants.
Most Americans, including many Republicans, are on Ukraine’s side. Trump openly helping Russia win might affect Republican votes, even just a little, in the midterm election.
Trump doesn’t care. Here’s why:
Trump plans on neutralizing any voting and election results that go against Republicans. There are many ways this could be done. We don’t know which ones are going to be put into play until the election, but it will happen.
And now, the promised twist. Even if Democrats are in charge of one or both houses of the next Congress in January, that won’t matter to him. If interference with the election fails, he will continue to rule mostly by executive action and order, as he has for two years. With the exception of some big and damaging bills, most of the damage has been from unitary executive governance, that is, from Trump. No change in Congress is going to affect that. Maybe there will be some adverse Supreme Court rulings, but those take a long time, have often gone his way, and most importantly, he plans on ignoring many of the adverse court rulings, even from the highest court.
That’s why he doesn’t care if whatever he says or does, such as helping Russia win, hurts Republicans. Those Republicans matter almost as little as Democrats—even Democrats who might control Congress—in Trump America.
The 20th century gave us two world wars and an atomic bomb, but the most interesting of the Big Events of the century may be the Russian Revolution. An inequitable and unbalanced way of life gave bloody way to abstract enlightened visions of a better world. The particular inequities ended, Russia moved into modern times, but competition for the “right” vision and ineradicable baser human natures seeking power and control led to decades of national and global troubles. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” the Who said.
The Russian Revolution was grounded in a Marxist vision, which was in turn a Christian vision: a community on earth as it is in heaven, a brotherhood of people in which suffering and want would be softened, if not alleviated, by those who have a surplus of comfort and resource. It was Lennon, not Marx, who said, “You can say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.”
What went wrong?
What almost always goes wrong is that evolution and revolution are out of sync. It is easy to say that people and society should first evolve for a while, and then at some critical moment, all that’s needed is that next faster-than-evolution event to take it to the next level.
That turns out rarely to be the case.
Evolution is slow, erratic, and always engenders resistance and reaction. The cliché is that people and society fear change, but that is too easy. They fear the unknown. The expression “better the devil you know than the one you don’t” sums it up. It takes a substantial leap—you might say a leap of faith—the walk into a vision rather than remain in a lesser but familiar reality.
Revolution is both an attempt to make evolution more real and to create conditions where that evolution can continue more broadly and forcefully. But, as pointed out with the Russian experience, it doesn’t always work that way. Revolution is conflict, and conflict creates its own set of conditions sometimes antithetical to evolution. “Fighting for peace” is oxymoronic (some would say just plain moronic), but we have had to live through that. (Note the moment in Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant film Dr. Strangelove where the President scolds his arguing advisers, “Stop it. There’s no fighting in the War Room.”)
One of the exceptional examples of evolution and revolution working together is the American Revolution. It is one of the reasons it worked so well. The founders may have been the fathers of our country, but they were the children of the Enlightenment. That multi-faceted evolution—philosophical, political, economic, spiritual—had gone as far as it could go when it hit a wall. They believed that if they could break through, which did mean war, they could establish an enlightened nation. And, to an extent greater or lesser than some might like or expect, they did.
Evolution, or lack of it, is at the heart of some current American problems.
America is heir to two great evolutions, sometimes unrecognized, often distorted. Some of those obstructionists who fight today hark back to the patriots who were mad as hell and wouldn’t take it any more, and so upended a cargo of British tea. Others who claim this is a Christian nation have the idea that if alive today, Jesus would certainly choose to be an American.
Every American in these dynamic times is free to pick the evolution they aspire to. There are plenty to choose from. We do have two very big ones on the menu. If a rabid revolutionary patriot, you might choose to follow the path of a 21st century version of Enlightenment; you might even study the work of those founding Enlightenists—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, et al.—for guidance. If a committed Christian it’s even easier. No slogging through the Federalist Papers, or even the whole Bible. Just read and read again the words of Jesus—the ones in red type—and consider just how much evolution he was asking for and expecting. Then again, maybe it’s not evolution he was talking about at all.
