The Classics Club

When I was discharged from the U. S. Army, I was awarded a 100-percent disability pension and lived with my parents in Galway. I was 19 years old and all my youthful hopes and plans for the future were gone.

I spent my time avidly pursuing the only activity open to me – reading. I subscribed to the Walter J. Black Classics Club. Each month I received in the mail one or two books by the authors who helped shape the definition of what has been called “Western Civilization.” Physically, I was severely restrained; mentally, I was free to roam through time and place - to go wherever the best minds of our civilization chose to take me while they shared their best thoughts with me. I devoured the contents of the books as a starving man devourers food.

Walter J. Black’s publications nurtured me through the most difficult period of my life and, incidentally, gave me a firm foundation for an intellectual life. I have the Classic Club books still. I should point out that, for me, books are like friends. You may lose track them over the years, but you never throw one away.

From this experience I learned: Words matter. So read and live in your mind. When overwhelmed by adversity, only from your mind can a defense be mounted. Both the intellectual and emotional reserves you need to resist your fate are drawn from your character, and your character is strengthened and deepened by the knowledge you gain through reading. When most needed, the thoughts of authors you have read will come to you and sustain you, and you will know you neither alone nor helpless.

In my case, it was the words of Robert Service in his poem The Quitter:

“You’re sick of the game!” Well, now, that’s a shame.
You’re young and you’re brave and you’re bright
“You’ve had a raw deal!” I know – but don’t squeal,
Buck up, do your damndest, and fight.
It’s the plugging away that will win you the day.”

The Importance of Competence

When the parishioner who had the job was drafted, I, a teenager, became the part time sexton of our church in Galway village. The church was a 150-year old wooden structure with three large, coal-burning, iron, pot-belly stoves. During the week, I cleaned the church. On Sunday mornings in the winter, I opened the church three hours before the first service and fired up the stoves. I also, with great vigor, rang the single, large bell high in the church spire, letting the long rope pull me off my feet.

Since I thought of myself as working alone in God’s House, I fell into the habit of speaking aloud to God as I worked, prattling on about my seemingly endless adolescent concerns in hope of receiving guidance. God never spoke to me, but in voicing my problems, I found answers. “Perhaps,” I thought, “God doesn’t speak; perhaps he just creates realizations in your mind?” This led me to conclude I had a direct line to God, and needed no priest or institution to intercede for me.

This insight cost me my job, for I took to leaving for home just as soon as I had rung the final, call-to-service bell. One Sunday, a deacon stopped me as I was leaving for home, and said I must attend service and leave with the rest of the congregation. I made the mistake of politely pointing out to the man that I had just spent three hours with God, which was more than the arriving parishioners would spend.

They fired me and replaced me with a more overtly devote adult. Several weeks later, the church burned down. It seems the new sexton was careless when firing up the stoves.

From this experience I learned: That competence is far more important than devotion.

Rambling Memories Of A Lifetime of Adaptation And Learning

I had a completely wonderful childhood in spite of it occurring during the Great Depression. My father made a modest salary based on having a 10-week summer vacation when school was out. He was a teacher at the Allen-Stevenson School, a prestigious, private boys school in Manhattan. In those days, teachers at the school were expected to hold summer jobs approved by the school. Many of the younger teachers accepted jobs as camp counselors, an employment encouraged by the school. My father’s annual salary was sufficient for our needs.

To earn extra money, my father offered to take the young and energetic students out their parents Manhattan apartments for a full day. He called it The Saturday Club. For a fee, he would hire a bus and, on each Saturday during the school year, he took twenty to thirty, pre-adolescent, Allen Stevenson boys on tours of interesting places in and around New York, such as the Statue of Liberty, the, then new, Empire State building, the Brooklyn Naval Yard, Grand Central Station, and even West Point.

As soon as I was old enough, I was allowed to join the group. But in so doing, I had to adapt. For these boys were different than the boys from my neighborhood. They wore different clothes, they spoke differently, and, above all, as sons of very wealthy parents, they were, generally, very self assured. I adjusted as best I could to fit in, and was accepted by most of the boys. This was my first adaptation.

The second adaptation came during the last years of World War II, when my father retired from Allen-Stevenson and both my parents took war work at General Electric in Schenectady in upstate New York. My parents bought a farm outside the tiny village of Galway, a few miles west of Saratoga Springs. This move required a very large adjustment on my part. I had been attending The Scarborough School, a private school in Westchester County and was a typical teenage preppy. Oxford shirt with button-down collar, gray flannel slacks, navy-blue blazer, and rep-striped tie from Rogers Peet store in Manhattan. Now I was a country boy in jeans. All my classmates and friends were children of dairy farmers. Once again I adapted, fit in, and was accepted.

I believe that these painless adaptations during the most formative period of my youth were the foundation of my later successful international consulting career. For I learned to accept different peoples and their cultures simply as I found them without judgment or prejudice.

With this series of anecdotal postings, I intend to share what I learned from working from within different cultures.

Seventh Letter To Isla

Dear Isla:

By my reckoning when last I wrote to you on ethics you were six years old. How you have changed since my last letter. Your intellect and your emotions are now coming forward in full strength. You are well into molding the views of self and world that you will hold as the adult individual you will shortly become.

This much delayed and rather brief seventh letter begins with a discussion of a particular view that I have found satisfying for my inner world and effective in dealing with the external world which tends to bring to your attention all manner of vexations.
Stated in the most basic terms, this view can be stated simply as: "Don't sweat the small stuff." By which I mean you should save your intellectual considerations and emotional responses for that which really matters. If someone is late, or forgets an unimportant appointment with you, forget it and move on, noting only that the person may not be reliable in the future. On the other hand, if you feel an injustice has been done, a dissembling act has occurred, or a circumstance you feel is important has been trivialized or not completed explained, then bring all your intellectual faculties to bear and let your feelings show in your action.

As we experience life, all humans come to know what pleases us and what displeases us. This entirely natural process started for you at your birth and will continue for the rest of your life. Each person's set of likes and dislikes is one of the most basic distinctions between individuals. However, there is a downside to this process of which you should be aware. In the unconscious effort to move toward that which we know pleases us and avoid that which we know displeases us, we tend to limit our choices because we unknowingly generalize our dislikes. Thus, as we age, we tend to become set in our ways and avoid new experiences from fear of not enjoying them.

The trick is to remain open to new experiences by recognizing our tendency to
generalize. For example, a person who does not particularly enjoy the snow and cold of a London winter, might assume they would not enjoy snow skiing and refuse an invitation for a holiday at an Alpine ski resort. However, snow skiing in the Alps has absolutely nothing in common with winter in the city. It is all about the beauty of the mountains, the feeling of freedom when moving rapidly down a slope of snow, and the joy of belonging from the close camaraderie in some snug and warm bistro in the evenings. At the end of such a holiday, a person may decide that snow skiing is not for them, but at least she will have based her decision on actual experience and not on generalized conjecture.

I urge you to be a person who is open to new experiences by particularizing your dislikes. I am, of course, speaking of experiences that neither harm nor risk your health and well being.

Finally, although not strictly an issue of ethics, but rather because computers are now becoming a major tool in your life, I wish to discuss a common but important misconception. In order to make good decisions in a digital world you need to understand what is meant by: "data," "information," and "knowledge." Although these three constructs of the human intellect form one of the foundations for the entire digital age, the media (and even the professional literature) consistently get them wrong, using one term when another is meant.

Because of the pervasive misuse, you need to understand the true distinctions between these three basic commodities of the digital world, so let's set the record right:
Data: Data are accepted facts.
Information: Information is an interpretation of data in a specific context that leads to understanding.
Knowledge: Knowledge is the insight gained through experience, education, or reflection into the meaning of the information that leads to decision and action.

A simple illustrative example: Your watch tells you it is 9:15 - that's data. Based on this, you remember you have promised to meet someone in 45 minutes - that's information. From your experience of the meeting-place location, your mind tells you that you should leave in 15 minutes in order to arrive in time - that's knowledge.

The important point is that decision and action must always be the result of knowledge, not information. That is to say, you can get information from a database, such as a railway schedule. What you do with the information must be based on knowledge in order for the action/decision to be valid.

All my love,

Your Godfather,

Sixth Letter To Isla

Dear Isla:

In this sixth letter I will discuss adopting a personal philosophy toward life so as to provide a basis for understanding and evaluating each situation you find yourself in as you go about your daily activities against some larger, dispassionate whole. More specifically, I will discuss the essential need for viewing life as a learning process and for setting goals for oneself.

As I have said in a previous letter, to do its best work, the mind must be focused. We all understand this need in terms discrete, concrete tasks such as studying for a class, accomplishing a complex job at our work, or trying to figure out how to afford to buy an automobile or house. Few, however, understand the need to focus the mind on the larger, more abstract task how best to live life to realize the most pleasure, comfort, and security possible. As a result, most people, as Thoreau pointed out, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”

What I am saying, with 65 years of hindsight, is that I believe we members of the educated, middle class have a choice. We are free to adopt a means for imposing some degree of control over future events in our lives or we can live our life reacting to events as they come. The former decision leads, I believe, to a life with the most possible pleasure, comfort, and security; the latter to quiet desperation. (I introduce the class issue only because the uneducated poor all too often have no choice at all.)

Am I implying we can know and control the future? Absolutely. Knowing the future is merely a question of precision. We cannot, of course know, the detailed events that will occur in the future, but we can both know and select settings -- the context -- in which at least some of the detailed events will transpire. For example, if next weekend I decide to motor to Wales, much of whatever happens to me is going to happen in the context of the trip. If, on the other hand, I decide to spend the weekend at home working in the back garden, much of whatever happens in my life will happen in the context of my home and garden, which is necessarily a different set of events than if I had traveled to Wales. And so it is with everything in our life. By selecting a career, employment with a particular firm, a neighborhood in which to live, a roommate, and so on, we select settings for events that will take place in the future. It seems to me only prudent that one should consider the nature of the event-sets of the more important decisions. It also seems prudent to prepare oneself for the inevitable adversities and disappointments that await us in all actual futures. I have evolved a personal philosophy that helps guide my thinking and understanding of the events that make up my life.

I have never come across a single school of philosophy with which I agree completely. Instead, I have adopted bits and pieces from one philosophical school or another into a hodgepodge of beliefs that works for me. I will state this philosophy as a series of beliefs with the original sources of these beliefs stated in brackets.

I believe:

· Nothing can come from nothing [Epicurus]. Each of us comes into this world through the “labor” of our mother. Thus, our life itself and everything in it is the result of our own or someone else’s effort. That is not to say that hard work is always rewarded. Rather, that for any chance of reward, one must first make an effort.

· All things are in flux, in a continual state of change or state of becoming [Heraclitus]. Moreover, if left unattended, this flux tends to be negative. One’s job, one’s relationship with others, one’s health, and so on, if left alone, will deteriorate. Input effort is constantly required.

· There is no evil on earth except for individual humans. Neither nature nor fate are evil [the Stoics]. Both are indifferent to human desires and needs. All evil in the world is caused by individual humans. That being the case, we have nothing to fear and everything to hope for from the future, except that affected by humans. There is, however, nothing in human nature that makes evil in individuals inevitable [Bertrand Russell].

· We must set goals and objectives for ourselves in order to avoid being distracted by external events that fall upon us [Marcus Aurelius, probably the best known Stoic]. By setting goals toward which we direct our efforts, we not only select the context in which much of the events of the future will happen but we also provide the focus for our mind to its best work.

· To strike the right balance between ends and means is both difficult and important [Bertrand Russell]. On a personal level, in selecting goals (ends) toward which to focus our mind and effort, it is important that we chose a means of attainment that depends primarily upon our own efforts rather than upon others or on chance. It is futile, for example, to set a goal of becoming rich by means of winning a football pool because there is nothing you can do, beyond buying a ticket in the pool, to affect the outcome. In this case the goal is valid, the means is not. On the other hand, setting a goal of becoming rich by means of writing popular novels can require a lifetime of effort. In this case both the goal and means are valid, but not balanced because of the extreme effort required. A more comfortable balance can be achieved by scaling down the goal to that of merely supporting one self by writing popular novels. On a larger level, because the media does not, you must constantly remind yourself that politics, economics, and society as an organization are not ends onto themselves but only means to the goal of a good life for all.

· Forethought, which involves doing unpleasant or inconvenient things now for the sake of pleasant things in the future, is one of the most essential marks of a fully-developed, adult intellect at work [Bertrand Russell]. Forethought is difficult because it involves the control of present impulses. Yet without forethought, a mind is undisciplined and childlike, and however brilliant, cannot be relied upon.

· Upon laying down to sleep, adopt the practice of resolving in your mind, the arguments and emotional issues that may have occurred during the day. Unresolved issues in your life are a drag on both your focus and your pleasure [Bob Baker]. Don’t let them go on longer than a single day by resolving them, at least in your own mind, before you sleep the day of occurrence. That way, you will awake each morning with the thought that today is another chance to have an enjoyable and rewarding day.

The effect of adopting this philosophy is to turn your life into a learning process. By setting goals, by attempting to balance the ends with means, by facing and addressing all that happens to you, by continual making efforts to work your way toward the current goal, and through doing today that which must be done to secure tomorrow, you learn. You learn about yourself, about the important aspects of your relations with others, and about how best to proceed toward realizing the most pleasure, comfort, and security. And in so learning, you improve as an intellect and as a person. And most importantly, you enjoy each day.

With that happy thought, Isla, I will end this short letter.

Your loving Godfather,

Fifth Letter to Isla

Dear Isla:

In my last letter to you, I put forth a concept of God and reality that emphasized the primacy of the human intellect and its constructs. In this, my fifth letter to you, I will explore the nature of the human intellect and what it means to be an intellectual.

In Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell poses the question that is central to understanding the nature of the human intellect: "What things are there in the universe whose existence is known to us owing to our being acquainted with them?" (By acquainted, Russell means anything we have experienced directly that is real rather than imagined - a definition that includes such things as reading fiction, since the authors' thoughts expressed in the writing are real even though the events and characters are not.) Russell's answer to the question is that each of us can know only three things through acquaintance: knowledge derived from awareness of self, knowledge derived from the data provided by our senses, and knowledge derived from inference.

Inference? "And just how does a very young and still illiterate child acquire the skills of inductive and deductive reasoning?" you may well ask. The answer is the child is born with them. For example, having once placed its tiny hand on a hot cooking pot and experienced pain, even a young child will thereafter approach any object it suspects of being a cooking pot with caution because it infers that the pot may be painful to touch. As the child's mind develops, it unconsciously adds sense-data, such as observed location, to the inference equation, e.g., cooking pots seen to be stored in cupboards are probably not painful to touch. The point is that the human intellect is a natural inference machine and, given the opportunity, reasoning from knowledge of self and knowledge of sense data is what it does best.

Although reasoning from knowledge is the subject of this letter, you should understand that reasoning is not the only function of the human intellect. The human intellect is also capable of imagination and emotion, which are the sources of music, art, and poetry.

The first thing to know about the human intellect is that intelligence (the ability to reason) is not a commodity. It is not some kind of "stuff" that you are born with more a less of than someone else. Talent, the part of the human intellect dealing with creation using imagination and emotion rather than reasoning, is thought to be a commodity. Intelligence, however, is thought to be an operational consideration. That is a person's reasoning power depends primarily upon how well the mind functions. It is true, therefore, that minds of some individuals work better than most others, and the minds of some individuals do not seem to work very well at all. However, for most us who are neither a genus nor a moron, mental achievement seems to be more a matter of how we use our minds than the congenital intellectual ability we were born with.

What I am saying is that most people rarely, if ever, give their mind an opportunity to do its best work. They go through their daily life treating their mind as they do their motor car. That is, they buy a motor car with a top speed of 120 mph, but spend 99 percent of the time driving below 60 mph - less than half the speed the car is capable of - and never drive anywhere near its top speed. And so with their minds. They appear to go through life using only a fraction of the inference power available from their intellect. From this observation, I conclude that although we all think, some of us are more oriented toward thinking about our thinking than others and have, therefore, an intellectual nature. To borrow an expression from the philosopher Socrates, a true intellectual is someone "whose soul engages in an endless conversation with itself" - someone who lives in their mind and who converses more with themselves than anyone else.

I urge you, Isla, to be a true intellectual; to live in your mind. How do you do this? Well as you go about each day, think about each piece of sense data you receive along the way and what it means; then evaluate the inferences you derive from them. Adopting a style of living in which you are constantly searching for meaning and understanding of what is happening to you and around you will cause you to use more of our inference "horsepower" than those whose mental style is to remain largely unaware of their surroundings and then avoid thinking about the sense data that does get through to their consciousness.

Why should this be true? Is the mind like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the more effective it becomes? No not really. It seems that the mind works best when it is focused. As one scholar has observed, "Purpose is what organizes the diverse means of the mind to creative ends." In other words, if you adopt a mental life style in which you first observe then draw inferences from most of what your senses are signaling is happening around you, as it is happening, you will provide a fundamental purpose to direct you mind toward its best work. The good news is that you can train your mind to observe and evaluate to the point where it occurs continuously and unconsciously. I know because I did exactly that.

When I was a boy and first read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I decided that I would try to be like Sherlock Holmes. I would observe everything and draw inferences from the clues I observed. It took awhile just to become aware of everything that was going on around me; it took even longer to be able to really see what I was observing and hearing. But I kept at it until I began to become good at it and could use it to show off. Once my family was in a car driven by my Uncle when he stopped at a unguarded railway crossing to make certain no train was approaching. From the back seat, I suggested that there hadn't been a train in weeks and that he could go ahead and cross. My mother, a bit put out with my precocious behavior in telling an adult what to do, said that I could not possibly know that no train had been through in weeks. I pointed out that the rails were rusty and weeds were growing up between the tracks - facts no one else had noticed.

Last evening, some fifty years later, during the ABC network news show on the TV, I was watching a story about an American Jewish organization that was caught illegally spying on American Arab leaders. During an interview with one of the Arab leaders, the reporter asked the leader why he thought the Jewish organization felt the need to spy on him. The man said he supposed it was because they thought he is anti-Semitic when in fact he is not. The instant he said that, I knew the man was being disingenuous. That he was hiding the truth behind a false impression of giving an honest answer. Like the Jews, the Arabs are a Semite people. Of course he is not anti-Semitic. The question he avoided answering was is he anti-Jewish? No one at ABC news caught the error because in America the terms "anti-Semitic" and "anti-Jewish" are synonymous in common usage - as the Arab leader undoubtedly knew - and because the reporter was not really hearing and evaluating the actual meaning of the words used by the leader in his response.

The point of these rather windy personal stories is to impress upon you that to be acquainted with the knowledge derived from your senses, you must first be aware of what is actually going on around you. To do that, you must experience the details of your surroundings not merely the generalities. Playing the "Sherlock Holmes game" is one way to train yourself to become aware of the details of what you are experiencing.

Finally, we come to the central issues: What is the purpose of the reasoning powers of the intellect why must we be aware of the details of our experiences to realize this purpose?

The purpose of the reasoning powers of the intellect is to separate fact from fantasy and truth from falsehood in order to create knowledge of what to do - to decide on what action is appropriate to take. However, reasoning from inference is tricky and prone to error due to assumption of a false premise. Thus, recollection of the details of our experiences (knowledge derived from sense data) is the only basis we have for deciding on appropriate action. For example, the probable function of a nail can be inferred from careful observation of its form. It is flat on one end and pointed on the other. Obviously, the pointed end is intended to be put against a yielding substance and the flat end is then hit with a hard object, driving the nail into the substance. All good reasoning. The problem is that such reasoning is equally valid for a bullet, which is shaped very much like a fat nail, but which ought not be struck on the flat end with a hard object. It is only through experience that we learn the difference between the "nails and bullets" of our life. Sound reasoning requires sound empirical knowledge which can be gained only through experience.

The classic example of the limitations of inference is the chicken and the farmer. A very smart chicken observes the farmer’s behavior toward the chickens. Each day the farmer feeds the chickens, changes their drinking water, places fresh straw in their nests, and cleans the floor of the chicken house. From these nurturing activities. the very-smart chicken infers that the farmer loves her. Each morning the observed data confirms the smart-chicken’s inference. Right up to the morning when the farmer chops her head off and has her cooked for Sunday dinner.

The point is that when reasoning from inference, always stop and check your premise by asking yourself: Is it love or are you simply being fattened for the pot?

As I have said, the purpose of our reasoning power is to decide on appropriate action. But mere decision making is not enough. In order to benefit ourselves and others, we must actually undertake the action decided upon. Our private world created by our intellect is of no value until the knowledge and decisions reached in our mind are communicated to others through action. Whoever of us sees a clearer truth, a better way, is burdened to communicate their thoughts to others in attempt to affect a change in the status quo. To be an intellectual is to participate in the endless conversation we call civilization that has been going on since humans first learned to speak. I urge you to become a person who writes e-mails to politicians and editors, who maintains a Web Log (Blog). A person who makes her views known to all.

One final thought. As you develop your observation and evaluation skills you will find fault and error with the reasoning of the people you encounter during your day. Be forgiving and discreet in your judgment of others, and remember you also are making errors in your reasoning. We all do so unknowingly. The human tendency for error is the fundamental basis for Christian forgiveness. Develop a sense of proportion; learn when an error must be commented upon and when it can be left uncorrected. You will find that individuals will accept criticism of their reasoning more readily when in private conversation than when in a group.

More importantly, learn to attack a person’s ideas without attacking the person. All that is usually required is to begin your criticism by pointing out the positive aspects of the idea before attacking the negative aspects. People tend to accept your criticism of their ideas if they believe their ideas were fairly considered.

Your Loving Godfather,

Fourth Letter To Isla

Dear Isla:

In this my fourth letter to you, I will address the nature of God, the nature of reality, and the distinction between truth and belief. The subject was suggested to me by my rather feeble response to a recent question put to me by our good friend, Patsy.

During a late night discussion one Saturday in November, Patsy asked me, in essence, how I knew God existed. My mind was dull from the evening's wine and good friendship so my response to this most fundamental of religious questions was anecdotal rather than philosophical and, thus I fear, woefully inadequate. However, the question did start me thinking, resulting in this letter to you.

The concept of God is a human construction. To understand the meaning of this statement we must turn again to Cartesian Dualism. We know from Descartes that there exist two different realities: physical reality and intellectual reality. Physical reality consists of material things external to the human mind. Physical reality contains the things around us: the human brain and body, food, clothes, furniture, buildings, cities, land, the planet earth, the solar system, the galaxies, and, ultimately, the entire universe itself. Physical reality is what we mean when we use the term "nature." Intellectual reality consists of non-material, functionings of the mind which is internal to and formed by the brain. Intellectual reality contains what we mean when we say "I", our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, our expectations, and the human constructs by which we share our thoughts and feelings with other minds.

Physical reality simply is as it is and need concern us only in its relationship to intellectual reality. The nature of intellectual reality is more complex. First, intellectual reality exists in a private form held by each individual human mind and in a common form held by all human minds through the constructs of mankind. Each individual's private intellectual reality is mortal and ceases to exist with the individual's death. On the other hand, common intellectual reality continues beyond the death of any individual and is the tangible form of human immortality.

Human communication is the most fundamental of all the constructions of mankind and is the basis for all human social activity. We humans are driven to communicate so that we know we are not alone. For when two humans communicate, they each share some part of their private, individual intellectual reality and, in so doing, modify the reality each held previous to beginning the communication. Thus, by communicating our individual thoughts and feelings, we are linking our minds into an intellectual network many times more effective than the mind of any single individual. We refer to this phenomena of human intellectual networking when we use the term "knowledge", for knowledge is not found ready-made in nature. Further, it is by means of the construct of communication, that individual humans ensure the continued endurance of a portion of their private intellectual reality beyond their death.

I may have died years before you read these words that I am at this instant writing. And with my death, my private intellectual reality dies with me. Yet, by means of the construct of this letter, you are able to share my thoughts and, hence, my intellectual reality. Homer, Aristotle, Mozart, Newton, Arnold, all are long dead, but the products of their intellectual realities continue to guide and influence human thought and emotions today. Thus, by means of communication, we humans assure the passing of the memories and learnings of one generation to the next and provide for the accretion of human knowledge.

It is important to note that this accretion of knowledge through communication occurs simultaneously at both the individual and common levels. When an individual communicates with another in any form, the individual gains knowledge simply by the act of framing the communication. For example, this letter has taken me over a month to write because I am not able to communicate to you my thoughts on the nature of God, truth, and belief until I have contemplated the subject in detail for some time. That is, in attempting to communicate my thoughts to you on this (or any other) subject, I learn what my thoughts are. Thus, communication is both a "sharing" and a "discovery" process.

From this we can see that communication is the means by which an individual's private intellectual reality is enlarged and enriched. All communication expands and cultivates your intellectual reality. However, for a young person, by far the most important enlargement and enrichment is that resulting from the formal communication process we call "education." Particularly, that education provided by a four-year university leading to a bachelor of arts degree.

The reason for this is that all programs of education leading to a bachelor of arts degree require a minimum course of study of what I call Western Civilization. Taking four-years to learn and truly understand the thoughts of the greatest minds of our civilization from Homer to Hawkins will not necessarily make you a better person nor will it directly increase your chance for happiness or even the chance for a good job after you graduate. It will, however, significantly enhance both your mental ability and your intellectual reality and, thereby, profoundly change forever the way you view the world and yourself within it. Putting it differently, all holders of bachelor degrees have achieved a recognized level of intellectual reality and mental development. This achievement forever sets us apart from 99 percent of the people in the world. This shared reality, this participation in 2500 years of accumulated human knowledge, this education, does not make us better, just different.

Isla, here comes the first, but short, lecture from your Godfather.

Acquiring this education is not easy; it demands a four-year commitment of your time and a great deal of mental effort. I urge you, however, to make the investment, for the intellectual rewards endure a lifetime.

I know that, to a young person, four years of study seems a long, long time. But I also know that 25 years after graduation, the four years at university are remembered as a single, golden afternoon in the springtime of your life. To put it precisely:

"Is it no small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...?"

That is the way I have long remembered my undergraduate days at Columbia College of Columbia University between 1952 and 1956. Four years of hard mental work and little money, but full of wonder as the best of human minds and talents were revealed to me by my professors. Isla, if you don't instantly recognize both the name of the poem and the name of the great English poet who exactly expressed for me my feelings in this letter far better than I ever could, I urge you to go to university and find out.

If you do recognize the quote, I congratulate you for your education is well begun. But there are more, many, many more equally great minds awaiting you at university. Having hundreds of such articulate and learned friends forever resident in your head as you go about your day, ready to leap to your mental assistance when you most need their ideas and words, is very, very, very reassuring. By giving us possession of such knowledge and the accompanying intellectual assurance, university education changes us. I urge you to come, come join us Isla: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."

Enough. On to the nature of God and the difference between truth and belief.

The other fundamental constructs of the human intellect are science, which seeks to understand and explain the nature of physical reality; philosophy, which seeks to understand and explain the nature of intellectual reality; the arts such as literature, painting, and music which seek to express feelings common to all humans; and technology which seeks to change physical reality to better suit humans through the application of the products of the other constructs.

A second aspect of the nature of reality is that intellectual reality invariably and unceasingly attempts to understand and shape physical reality to its own ends while introspectively contemplating itself. That is, the fundamental constructs of the human intellect have been applied independently by all humans everywhere throughout the entire history of our species in order to better human physical and mental condition. For me, this long history demonstrates that intellectual reality, of itself, strives to first understand and then improve. Thus, I conclude, that intellectual reality appears to have purpose.

Now we finally come to the heart of the matter. Purpose implies design in the sense of intent, and I can think of no natural process by which purpose can be designed into the human intellect. The origin of the design of the human intellect, therefore, must be outside the processes of nature. I call the origin of the design of the human intellect God. For me, the human intellect is the divine spark that is the human soul.

I also consider God to be the origin of physical reality. My intellect tells me that even a cursory contemplation of the origin of physical reality will very quickly take you to a point where there are questions that have not and, perhaps, cannot be answered. For example, if the universe began as a Big Bang, from what source came the process, the matter, the energy, and the physical laws governing the phenomenon? And, equally important, to what end was the universe created and to what purpose does the universe exist? The answers to all such questions I ascribe to the existence of God. I see God as the ultimate source of all that exists, including purpose. My personal cosmogony is that God did not directly create everything that exists, rather, God created creation.

Now for the tricky bit. I accept that these definitions are merely expressions of my own intellect and, thus, demonstrate only that this concept of God is a construction of my private intellectual reality. Thus, I cannot demonstrate that God exists. Nor can anyone. Nor can I or anyone else logically argue that God exists, in spite of the fact that some of the greatest minds in Western Civilization have attempted to do so.

What can be done is what I have done. I postulate the existence of God because it suits my personal intellectual nature to do so. That is, the nature of my intellect is such that I desire a concept of an ultimate creator that brings reason and order out of an otherwise chaotic and purposeless universe. To so postulate comforts my mind by completing the intellectual picture I have of the structure of reality and my place within it. Without postulating the existence of an ultimate creator, I could not answer such simple questions as: From whence came all of this and why? Without answers, my private intellectual reality would be formless and without structure, and I could not place myself within it. My mind rejects, nay abhors, a chaotic concept of reality. My intellect is ardent in its demand for a reality that has structure, order, and purpose. It is the essence of Me. So I postulate God.

For similar reasons of intellectual comfort, I choose to accept and participate in the continuing ancient myth that God chose to walk amongst us in the form of a man called Jesus Christ. Did Christ really exist? Was he actually the son of God? I do not know but I accept the premise until proven otherwise. I accept Christ as a belief, a working assumption, and, thus, I need no proofs, no demonstrations, no confirmations. God and Christ are part of my intellectual reality and, therefore, are as real for me as are all the other intellectual constructs I use daily, such as language and mathematics. However, I can neither explain nor defend my belief.

You, as do millions of others, may not feel the need to postulate the existence of God. Or your concept of God may be significantly different than mine, particularly, concerning the myth of Christ. All of which is perfectly acceptable because we are dealing here with beliefs not truths.

All beliefs are constructs of the human intellect and may or may not represent truth. Thus, all beliefs are valid, and, if they do not do injury to anyone, are acceptable. The Christian religion, as are all religions, is but a myth that each of us is free to accept or reject as truth. This fact is particularly important when faced with the supposed “words of God,” claimed by some religious fanatics. You would do well to respect their views, but ignore their claims as mere beliefs.

There are two general classes of truth: physical truth and intellectual truth. Statements concerning the characteristics of physical reality are all physical truths. The earth orbits the sun, water runs downhill, John is a male, Mary has natural red hair, my sock has a hole in the toe, and so on, are all statements of physical truth.

Statements concerning the constructs of intellectual reality may be intellectual truths (they may also be beliefs). Two and two are four, earth is part of the solar system, water runs downhill because of the force of gravity, I was born in 1928, and so on, are all intellectual truths because mathematics and physics are truth constructs of the human intellect as is the calendar.

But notice the difference between physical reality and intellectual reality. If your sock has a hole in it today, it will have the same hole tomorrow and every day thereafter wherever you take it in the world. But the statement that I was born in the year 1928 is true only by one calendar currently in use in one particular area of the world. By other calendars in other times and places, the statement is not true. So physical truths are unchanging, whereas intellectual truths may change with time and from place to place and from people to people.

Beliefs are even more variable constructs of intellectual reality. Generally, all statements concerning the affairs of mankind are beliefs. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Infallible proof is impossible in human affairs, and therefore the conjectural probability of the rhetorician is adequate." Meaning that people are persuaded to believe one thing or another by arguments based more on conjecture than truth and that this process, like it or not, for good or for ill, is acceptable in matters concerning human affairs.

What this means is that there is very little truth in any news report of any kind, including gossip between friends. Usually, only the initial statement of an event or activity is true, all the rest is the reporter's conjectural beliefs. Books on history and sociology, newspapers and TV, and all political speeches and statements are especially prone to the problem of more conjecture than truth. What you must learn to do is to sift truth from conjecture by questioning everything you hear or read concerning human affairs. Constantly ask yourself: Is that fact or conjecture? Basically, you arrive at an answer by comparing the statement made to your view of reality. Remember, that at any single moment, in any situation, your instant view of reality is truth.

With that thought Isla, I will leave you until next year.

Your loving Godfather,

Third Letter To Isla

Dear Isla:

In this, my third letter to you on ethics, we come to that most troublesome of all human attributes: emotions. What are they and how do we best handle them? I am afraid getting at the answer to these two questions is a bit involved, but if you will follow me through my reasoning, I think you will find the answers themselves quit simple.

To start, understanding human emotions begins by understanding that aspect of modern philosophy known as Cartesian Dualism. In the 17th Century, René Descartes, a French mathematician and philosopher, laid the cornerstone for our modern view of the nature of things by logically demonstrating that each human exists simultaneously in two separate and distinct worlds. That is, each individual human exists in an external physical world of matter that is common to all humans and includes the individual's body. At the same time, each human individual exists in a private and unique, non-physical, intellectual world internal to the mind of the individual and includes the individual's memories, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self (what an individual means by the personal pronoun "I"). (Descartes’ actual words are: "I think therefore I am.")

We humans are provided with two related connections between these separate worlds: emotion and communication. Emotions are our perceptions of and our feelings about the meaning of occurrences in the external physical world to our internal intellectual world. Communication is our transmittal of our reaction to these perceptions to other humans. The two are very closely related.

For example, whenever I first see you, the emotion I experience is one of love. My reaction to this emotion is to want to put my arms around you and hug you to me because hugging is one means for communicating my feelings of deep affection for you. In the same way, the emotions of fear will cause physical changes in the body through the outpouring of adrenalin as our muscles prepare to flee or fight. Feelings of extreme fear are often accompanied by a shout or a scream in an unconscious attempt to sound a warning and call for help. Similarly, we tend to react to emotions of extreme anger or frustration by striking out at someone verbally or even physically in attempt to communicate our feelings of rage.

The point is that human emotions are both physical and intellectual in nature and create an almost overwhelming desire for instant communication of our feelings. Thus, experiencing and communicating emotions is merely being human.

From this, several ethical questions arise: are there good emotions and bad emotions; should one permit oneself to feel all emotions or should some be suppressed; should one show one's feelings and, if so, to what extent and to whom; if, in a social situation, one does not show one's true emotions, is one guilty of deceit?

As I have said, it seems to me that nature intends us to feel emotions deeply and to show our feelings freely. Thus, the suppression of emotions is unnatural and, I hold, unhealthy. In fact, I believe the more deeply one feels and shows emotion, the more human one becomes. It is a question of appreciation through contraries. Just as a warm and colorful spring is particularly appreciated for having first experienced a cold and bleak winter, so, having once experienced sadness and despair, one can truly appreciate feelings of happiness and joy. Each emotion seems to be coupled with a contrary - to have one is to have the other. Thus, the result of going through life avoiding or suppressing feelings of sadness, despair, hate, or anger is to fail to find happiness, joy, love, or tranquility. Which is why I believe one should accept and show fully whatever feelings arise from the immediate situations in which one finds oneself.

We can now see the answers to the ethical questions. Firstly, emotions are neither good nor bad; they just are. Further, like thoughts, emotions are private, and our feelings may be whatever they may be. As we shall see, proper behavior concerns only our outward reaction to our emotions. Secondly, emotions should never be suppressed. You are always perfectly free to feel fully whatever emotions you happen to feel at the time. More importantly, in social situations, you should always feel free to communicate your feelings to others. For one reason or another, you may choose not to show your feelings, but you should know that you are always free to express your true feelings whenever you desire. I urge you to become a person who is open emotionally to others. The type of person of whom others say: "What you see is what you get."

Which brings us to the question that most people have the most difficulty answering: When must one show one's true emotions to avoid being guilty of deceit? The answer is simple, but most difficult to live by. One must communicate one's true emotions in any situation where, by remaining silent, one appears to support or permits to be perpetuated an injustice or wrong against an individual, against a group, or against society as a whole.

It is vital that each thinking person's private feelings against social, environmental, and economic injustices and wrongs be communicated to those in a position to stop the wrongdoing. Situations requiring you to communicate your emotions can arise in both professional and social settings. In either case, you may fear that expressing your true feelings may jeopardize some position you have or are hoping to establish within the group present. However, if you feel an injustice or wrong is perpetuated by the group, you must disassociate yourself from the wrongdoing by at least some statement such as: "I do not agree with anything being said here and will not participate further in this discussion." If no one will listen to your reasons for making such a statement, you must leave.

For example, if a group you are part of makes untrue and insulting remarks about an absent friend of yours, you cannot remain silent without being deceitful. You must speak up in defense of your friend whatever the social cost to you. Better to have a very few friends who know they can truly depend upon you and you upon them, than to have a world full of mere acquaintances. Besides, if you are known as a person who will defend her friends, then people will seek you out to become your friend. "It is no small thing," as Matthew Arnold said, "... to have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes." If you are willing to do this at any cost, you will never in your entire life lack for firm and close friends.

Your Loving Godfather,

Second Letter To Isla

Dear Isla:

A year has past since last I wrote to you. For you, I am sure it has been a year of growth and exploration. For the world we all live in and that you will inherit, it has been a year of tremendous change. The people's desire for freedom has overwhelmed the dictatorial governments of the Soviet Block countries, causing political, economic, and social changes as fundamental as any in the long history of Europe. Although some risk remains, it seems the possibility of general war in Europe is less than at any time since I was your age, and we can, perhaps, look forward to a long period of peace and increasing prosperity in the East.

Which brings us to the subject of this second letter: What is desire and what role does it play in human ethics?

Understanding human desire begins by understanding that, at the most basic level, all living things have desires. A seed from the most humble garden weed "desires" to sprout and grow. Wild animals "desire" food and water. Forest trees "desire" the sun and, in seeking it, will shape their growth. Perhaps the most dramatic example of desire in nature is the breeding habit of salmon that drives the species to exhaust themselves swimming miles and miles against quick-flowing, river currents to reach a particular place to spawn. In this basic sense, desire is seen as the engine that drives all living things to fulfill themselves.

Desire, then, is a natural attribute that humans hold in common with all creatures and plants. Because human desire is God given (natural), it cannot be ethically wrong to possess a particular desire. I should point out that ethics concerns only deeds, so that, there are no unethical thoughts or feelings only unethical behavior. We are allowed our private thoughts and feelings, whatever they may be.

Such was not always the case. In times past, our society (lead by the church) believed that the mere feeling of certain desires was a sin, that some thoughts and feelings were wrong and base even if one did not act upon them. Today, we know better. But, because you may come across a person who still believes such nonsense, it is important for you to understand that you are free to privately hold any desire, feeling, or thought whatsoever. The workings of your mind are fee of any guilt; you are accountable only for your behavior resulting from these workings.

Human desires can be categorized as those belonging to the primeval beast and those belonging to the civilized being in all of us. The primeval desires such as preservation of self, food, sex, love, revenge, and security are probably encoded in our genes. The more complex desires such as freedom; peer acceptance; intellectual, athletic, and social achievement; and material acquisition are probably impressed upon the individual by our society. But whatever the source, several things can be said about all desires. First, desires set goals for each individual and, in so doing, give purpose, meaning, and direction to the individual's life. Second, an individual's specific set of desires is probably unique and, thus, tend to differentiate one human from another. Finally, converting a desire from a feeling to overt action ought to be an intellectual process involving selection of alternatives and weighing of potential consequences.

Although the first and second aspects are of philosophical interest, it is the third aspect of desire that is of ethical importance because it is the one that concerns the behavior of the individual within society.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter and to the central question of ethics that has been debated since antiquity. That is: If desires give meaning to each individual's life and are unique to that individual, is each individual therefore free to pursue a course of action leading to the fulfillment of his or her desires without regard to the effect of that action upon other individuals, and if not, by what standard does one determine the ethical course of action?

There is no definitive answer. Each society in each age has had to answer the question for itself. I can only share with you the moral principles by which I live and hope that they will serve you as well in your age as they have served me in mine.

Essentially, one is free to undertake a course of action leading to satisfaction of some desire only: (a) when the action will not adversely affect yourself, (b) when the action will not adversely affect another individual or group, and (c) when you are not under an obligation to forego such action.

The first condition is easily explained by noting, for example, that in fulfilling the desire for food, one ought not to pursue the desire to the point of obesity and endangerment of one's health. Sounds trivial until one considers that this is the precise reason that the sale and use of drugs is fundamentally immoral. Pursuit of pleasure at the expense of your health is not acceptable behavior.

The second condition gives rise to the notion of social courtesy and recognizes that, since we humans must all live together on this earth, the quality of life for everyone will be better if each individual's actions show consideration for all others. It is consideration for others that causes the ethical person, for example, to forego shoving their way through crowds, going to the head of a queue to avoid waiting, to avoid making loud noises when others are sleeping, and all the other hundreds of small courtesies that come under the heading of good manners.

Make no mistake, although these examples seem trivial, good manners are fundamental in gaining initial social and professional acceptance. When first we interact with new friends or colleagues, we are judged as much by our manners as we are by any other standard, for good manners are considered to be the visible sign of much deeper ethical convictions. That is not to say that scoundrels cannot have good manners, the fact that they often do has been the subject of some England's greatest literature. What can be said, is that people with good manners are more readily accepted and trusted than those whose behavior is self-centered and impolite.

During the past ten years, violation of the second condition has become so wide spread in urban United States that the decade of the 80's has been categorized by social philosophers as the Decade of Greed resulting from the rise of the Me-First Generation who follow the philosophy of Taking Care of Number One. I hesitate to predict whether this breakdown in America's social fabric will have reached the United Kingdom by the time you read this letter. If it has, then so much the better for you, since your good manners will undoubtedly cause you to be much in social demand.

Finally, there is the condition of obligation which is, at the same time, the most important of the three and the most difficult to live by, for from this condition, arises the notions of duty and personal honor. The obligation of duty arises when I, for example, agree to come to your flat at 1500 and help you move your things to a new flat. Having told you I will help you, I am obliged to do so because you are depending upon me. As an ethical person, I cannot later change my mind and not help you. I cannot make up some excuse and not appear. If for any reason I cannot come, then I am obliged to send someone else in my place because duty are those actions that you have promised or sworn to perform and that others depend upon you to perform. One must either perform the duty or find someone to perform it in your place.

The notion of personal honor arises from the willingness to assume and discharge the obligations of duty regardless of the cost to yourself. When I was a young man I married just before entering college. My wife worked and supported both of us for four years while I attended university. When I left the university and began my profession as an engineer, my wife quit work and I supported her while she attempted to further her career as an actress. It soon became obvious to me that we were growing apart and should divorce. However, because she had supported me for four years while I received the education that made my career possible, I felt it was my duty to support her until her career was established. I came to hate the life she lead and longed to be free of her and her theatrical friends. I felt that she had to initiate divorce proceedings, as an honorable person I could not. Fortunately, she soon did ask for divorce and I was free to leave and get on with my life.

The point is that affairs of honor are never any fun, and obligations involving your honor should not be entered into lightly. My mistake was not only in marrying too young, but also in accepting four years of financial support and the attendant moral obligation to repay it in kind. From this experience I learned to consider all the potential costs to me of becoming obligated to someone else. You would do well to learn from my experience.

With that, Isla, I will end my second letter to you. Until next January, I wish you a good and happy year.

Your loving Godfather,

First Letter To Isla

Dear Isla:

I am very pleased to introduce myself as your godfather, and to assure you I take my small role in your life very seriously.

"What role is that", you ask?

My answer is that my role as your godfather is to provide to you ethics that have both intellectual appeal and practical application to situations in everyday life.

You see, ethics are the fundamental spirit of a person that shape both the person's behavior and views of self and world. If a person is endowed with the proper ethics, that person will understand him or herself and will intuitively know the correct behavior for all situations. This of course does not mean such a person will necessarily always behave correctly, only that such a person will recognize incorrect behavior when they meet it.

My job is to provide you with the "proper ethics,” which are essentially Christian in origin.

In addition to instruction, I see my role as answering as honestly as I know how any questions you may have and, also, to hold myself available to discuss privately with you subjects you may not care to discuss with others.

In short, what little wisdom I have acquired, is yours to command.

How shall I speak to you?

You recently celebrated your first birthday. Recently, I celebrated my 60th birthday. You and I are therefore forever separated by more than half a century of age. Shall I speak to you as a child, as a teen-ager, or as an adult?

It seems to me that none of these will do. Instead I shall speak to you simply as an intellectual equal, since the intellect knows no age. If you read these words with understanding and interest, what does it matter how old you are or how old I am at the time? Our minds are in communication across all the years that separate your life from mine.

Which brings us to the main subject of this first letter. It seems to me that before we can begin a discussion of human ethics, we must first understand what humans are and are not. Thus, the question to be answered by this letter is: What are humans?

The first thing to understand about humans is that for all our cultural and technological achievements we humans are still animals. The genetic coding that determines the most fundamental traits of every human alive today originated eons ago in simple beasts. The human traits that we call civilized behavior are not encoded within the genes of individuals; rather these traits are imposed upon the individual by social contact with other civilized humans. Thus within each of us there are two distinct and separate selves - a primeval beast and a civilized being.

All human behavior can be explained as the success or failure of the civilized being in controlling the primeval beast. When a person behaves selfishly, the beast is in control. When a person gives freely of themselves to others through love or charity, the civilized being is in control. It is the beast in us who hates and the civilized being who forgives. Throughout each waking moment as we go about our affairs of the day, the humor and joy felt by the civilized being is in constant struggle with the waiting anger of the beast within.

Fortunately, this struggle between our two selves is totally unconscious until some threshold is crossed and we recognize that either we or someone else has behaved badly. When this happens to you, you should first realize that all us rarely get through a single day without the beast breaking loose at least once. We all behave badly to some extent regularly - that is merely being human. What is important is that each of us be able to recognize and acknowledge our bad behavior both to ourselves and to others. It is, therefore, very civil to apologize for your own bad behavior and to forgive it in others.

The second thing to understand about humans is that because civilization is imposed upon individuals by contact with others, the standards of acceptable social behavior as well as social values vary from place to place. It is this variation that gives rise to different cultures. The society you are part of is British; whereas mine is American. They are only slightly different because the founders of America were English. There are, however, cultures that are significantly different, and one must recognize that the behavior of individuals in these cultures will be different from that of ours.

The final thing to understand about humans is that of all the animals on Earth, only mankind appears to possess a destiny. Save for mankind, continued existence seems to be the sole purpose of all life on Earth. Human intellect, however, has pondered the purpose of its existence and its destiny for millenniums. Throughout this long, long period the subject was of academic interest only. Now, when you read these words, you will know that the subject of man's destiny is of paramount practical importance for I fear your world will most likely be overpopulated, over polluted, and under resourced. My belief and my hope is that it will be clear to the major governments of the world and to the educated citizens of their countries that the destiny of mankind is to populate the universe.

I believe God has given humans all the attributes needed to go forth from Earth and settle on distant planets. I believe that everything mankind has accomplished has been unknowingly directed toward this ultimate purpose. My intellect tells me that, unless mankind undertakes such exploration, we will eventually perish as assuredly as the dinosaurs perished. Because it may take hundreds of years to develop the technology needed to successfully make distant space voyages of exploration and colonization, we should formally recognize our destiny in your lifetime and adopt it as a universal goal for all mankind.

Isla, with that thought I will end my first letter to you. I will speak further on these subjects in subsequent letters. Until next January then, I wish you a happy new year of physical and intellectual growth and all the joys of youth.

Your loving Godfather,

Bob

Letters to Isla

Isla was born in 1987 in London. Her parents did me the honor of asking me to be her Godfather. I, of course, was pleased to accept.

But I foresaw problems with fulfilling my role as Godfather to a child living in London while I lived in Los Angles. During the Anglican Christening ceremony, the Godparents of the child swear an oath to protect the child from the devil. How could I do that, when at best, I visited Isla randomly a few days every year or so.

I thought about the problem and came to realize I believed that the devil is ignorance. That being the case, I could fulfill my obligation to Isla by writing a series of letters giving her a guiding philosophy for living an ethical life.

I wrote seven letters. Which reveals the extent of my own ethics. Isla is now a young woman, and I am certain she, having absorbed their contents, has forgotten all about them. However, with the current misbehavior in U.S. business and government, I have decided to publish the letters in hopes they may influence some other young person seeking guidance.

Thoughts on the Coming Midterm Elections

In the summer of 2004, in preparation for the coming Presidential election, I downloaded and read the Democratic and Republican Platforms.

I found the Republican Platform to be seriously flawed in that it goes against the traditional Republican position of States Rights, separation of state and religion, and less Government interference in the lives of individual citizens. As such, it defined a Republican position that I could not identify with, much less support.

The 2004 platform contains two planks that caused the schism: Protecting Marriage and Protecting a Culture of Life. These planks call for amendments to the Constitution that forbid gay marriages and abortions. In my opinion, these planks are based solely on the religious beliefs of Christians and, ultimately, are claims for what the Christian God has ordained. Thus, these two planks call for a theocratic agenda for the nation at the most fundamental, constitutional, level, different only in degree from that of Iran and the Taliban.

At the time, I was terribly concerned and somewhat angry. As an agnostic, I don’t pray, but if I did, I would pray that the people at the state level can control this terrible trend for transforming our nation into a theocracy. Make no mistake, I believe abortion and gay marriage are only the beginning. The misguided zealots who truly believe they are doing God’s work, cannot stop at taking control of their bodies away from women and denigrating committed homosexual relationships as unholy unions. The mind boggles at the retro infringements on individual freedoms that God wants. Since no one can prove what God does or does not want, any religious group can make up the rules as they go. And the 2004 Republican Platform defines two rules they made up.

When Bush was elected I was really worried. Who would have thought the nation would elect a Republican President by a large majority who promised to amend the Constitution to limit individual freedoms. Talk about going down the rabbit hole.

I began referring to the President as Ayatollah Bush, thinking that he now had a mandate and legislation on abortion and gay rights would soon be forthcoming.

I was, of course, naïve. I was relieved to find the two planks I was so worked up about were in the Platform merely as cynical ploys for garnering votes from the evangelical religious right. No related legislation has been proposed by the Administration. And, very likely, never will be.

For the Bush administration has proven itself to be one of deceit, cronyism, and, the worse charge of all, totally lacking in forethought. Bertrand Russell claimed that forethought was the hallmark of an adult mind. In which case, the current administration is childlike. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq as a key operation in our war against terrorism. Yet because of its lack of forethought, the administration did so in a manner that actually created and armed terrorists. Now we’re stuck with our winnings and cannot withdraw.

So what’s the Republican plan for the midterm elections? The plan seems to be to localize each congressional contest that has nothing to do with what’s going on at the national level. Seems simplistic to me, but the great political puppet-master, Karl Rove is on the loose ready to take on the Democrats.

It is going to be a very, very, interesting summer. Unfortunately, only the fate of the nation is at stake.

Me? The Republican Party abandoned me in the summer of 2004. Left me standing alone in the middle of the conservative road while it wandered off into the far-right Bushes. Accept for John McCain, I’m voting to keep all Republican candidates out of all offices - - city, county, state, federal.

A Pleasant and Useful Retirement Activity

When my mother died at the age of 92, my father having died some years earlier, I inherited several reels of Kodak 8mm colored movie film of the family my father shot during the 1930s. Since 8mm home projectors are ancient technology, I had to take the reels to a professional photo lab and have the film transferred to CDs in order to be able to view the contents. The process was quite expensive.

When I got home and viewed our music library, I realized my wife Terry and I were creating a similar legacy problem for our children, and decided to do something about it.

Let me explain.

When Terry and I met in that glorious spring of 1967 and married that September, we combined our collections of 33-rpm stereo music albums. When we moved to Venice Beach in ’72, I hand-soldered a hi-fi stereo system consisting of a pre-amp, 400-watt amplifier, and speakers with 14-inch woofers centered around a very good and expensive Technics turntable. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, we bought tons of albums. When cassette tapes replace 33-rpm records, I added a Kenwood tape player to the system.

Now forty years later, modern recording technology has rendered the old analog records and cassettes unplayable on modern digital stereo systems which are now centered around audio CD and DVDs. The excellent hi-fi stereo system I built in 1973, was long ago discarded because the vacuum tubes on which it ran burned out and replacements were no longer available. With well over 100 albums and cassettes of the music of our youth unplayable in today’s digital world, I decided, since I am retired and have the time, I would digitize the analog music of your youth and re-record it on CDs.

I dug out the 30-year old Technics turntable and Kenwood tape player from where they were buried in the store room for almost 20 years. I bought a analog/digital converter (A/D converter) and a modern pre-amp to boost the output signal from the turntable and hooked the system up to this computer via a USB cable. The A/D converter came bundled with Nero audio recoding software since that is their principal use today.

I loaded the software, connected up the system, and turned power on. Miracles of Miracles. It worked. Luckily, the turntable stereo cartridge (needle) was intact since new ones are not available. I then began cranking out CDs.

The really fun part of the job was making the labels for the CD and the jewel case. I bought a package of Avery CD labels at Staples and discovered the package contained software for printing labels on my HP ink-jet printer. The software makes it very simple to put a photo on the front of the jewel case along with the album title and date. Since all our family photos are pre-digital photo technology, I went through the dozen or so photo albums and found photos that I digitized with my HP Photosmart scanner. I put a family picture on each jewel case front taken around the time the album on the CD was released, or at least purchased.

Lots of fun and useful way to spend my time.

The only question is will CDs still be a readable technology 25 years from now when our children might inherit the music? Seems to me we elderly folks could make good use of the digital equivalent of a safe deposit box. A site where we could securely store digital files that would be forever readable by our heirs using the technology of the day.

Thoughts on American Jobs Going Overseas

Received an e-mail this morning lamenting the loss of American jobs due to U.S. employers outsourcing work to foreign countries. I totally disagree with the thrust of the e-mail. What the writer of the e-mail and the laid off workers ought to do is read Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book, The World is Flat. Then they’d realize that they had better upgrade their skills to stay employable in the U.S. Globalization is here and it’s not going away.

My question is: Who do the laid off workers, be they blue collar or professional, think is responsible for their continued employability in today’s market place? Their problem is not American jobs going out of the county. Their problem is their failure to stay employable as the world moved on. It is a pathetic fallacy for American workers to blame anyone other than themselves for not staying employable in the changing marketplace. The introduction of new technology has always changed the workplace.

In the Fourteenth century, the gun put amour makers and castle-builders out of business. In the Nineteenth century, steam-power put wooden ship builders and its infrastructure out of business. More recently, the introduction of the automobile put buggy makers out of business along with entire the horse-drawn infrastructure, such as harness makers and buggy whip makers. In the 1930s, electric home refrigeration destroyed the Ice Mens’ jobs along with the entire natural ice-industry collection, storage, and distribution infrastructure. The PC put pool typists and stenographers out of business. E-mail put the final nail in the telegraphers coffin when Western Union folded. And, as Freidman explains, the Internet is putting thousands of American retail phone-order takers, Call Center personnel, and programmers out work.

So what’s new? Nothing is new. As always, each of us is responsible for maintaining our skill set at an employable level. If you wish to live in an non-evolving, stagnant economy, emigrate to any one of many Muslim countries where your employable skill set is sure to last several life times in a Seventh century society.

Thoughts on the Immigration Issue

Lately, the status of the 12 million largely Hispanic illegal immigrants now in the U. S. has become a national issue with lots of media coverage , but damn little thoughtful analysis of the true situation.

Criminalization of the illegal immigrants, as the current, mean-spirited Republican-controlled House of Representatives would have us do is clearly simplistic and unworkable. It seems to me that the key to devising a workable and just solution is how we handle those Hispanic families consisting of a mix of illegal and legal immigrants and American citizens. To my mind such families are a worst-case situation. Solve it and you have solved all cases.

Here’s what I’m getting at. My understanding is that there is on the books in California an Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1985. Under this act, any patient requesting emergency treatment at a hospital, must be treated regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. It certainly is a vital humane statute, but it not only costs much more than that of the medical treatment, it creates families of mixed immigration status.

Pregnant illegal alien females come to hospital emergency rooms in LA to have their babies delivered for free under EMTALA. However, the instant the baby of the illegal mother is born, the baby, of course, becomes an American citizen. As such, I’m told, the baby, mother, and siblings become eligible for welfare. Since you cannot deport a native-born American citizen, and you really ought not separate an infant from an undocumented mother, in LA, these babies are called “Anchor Babies” because they, in effect, hold most of the family safely in residency without fear of deportation.

In my view, we should begin with the premise, that the revised immigration legislation must maintain every immigrant family intact, regardless of current immigration status of individual family members. If we can figure out how to do that, all other aspects of the problem with fall into place.

Bob's Epilogue

I was born in 1928 into an entirely different world than today. World War I was fresh in adult memory, the AM radio was the hottest consumer product. Horse-drawn wagons delivered milk, ice, and laundry to our house. Middle-income families saved to buy both an automobile and an electric refrigerator, transportation was by steam-powered trains and ships, most country roads were unpaved, and the era of silent films was just ending. It was a slow-paced, analog world with direct and strong connections to past centuries.

My very earliest memory is having my collar bone broken when my cousin, Joan, who was six months older than I, literally kicked me off the bed on which our mothers had placed us, head-to-feet, for a nap. Being undeservedly kicked out of bed by a female at such a tender age undoubtedly warped my view of self and the world for evermore. Looking back from an advanced age of almost eighty, it seems my life has been little more than a series of random anecdotes. I survived four long months in an Army hospital bed, I earned a Masters degree, I had two books and dozens of articles and papers published, I managed to stay married to the same wonderful woman since 1967 and raised two beautiful daughters to productive and loving adults, and, finally, I pursued, but never quite caught up with, an international consulting engineering career. But in accomplishing these life-time achievements, I have little more than anecdotal memories of the trivia that seems to have filled my life. Perhaps I set my goals too low as young man; perhaps my desire to merely support my family while I enjoyed my career were too self serving and mundane.

Bob's Epilogue

From October 1956 to when I retired in March 2004, I worked in the defense industries of one Western nation or another as an engineer. It was a wonderful career. I was well paid to work with the brightest minds around, on the most interesting and challenging projects, employing the very latest technology, and had the personal satisfaction of knowing I was helping to defend the free world.

This most enjoyable employment was fueled solely by the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. From a Defense Industry point of view, there were only two fundamental rules governing the Cold War: (a) Don’t launch, and (b) Don’t quit.

Damn Commies, you never could trust them. In 1991 they gave up, leaving me and several hundred thousand other Cold War warriors scrambling for employment.

So from the forested-mountain home where my anchor is down, I raise my bottle of beer and say: "So long USSR, and thanks for all the threats."

In this blog, I intend to share the thoughts and memories resident in my 77-year old mind. However, I caution you that you will find little wisdom on this site. At best, you may find some humor and a small measure of insight into life and the nature of humans.

What I'm Learning About Retirement

I suppose like many, my concept of retirement was simply that I no longer had to go to work, and could spend my time as I wished. Turns out, my concept was simplistic. Retirement is changing me in ways I had not anticipated.

Two years after I retired, I find that, the essence of my retirement has been arrested growth, disengagement, stabilization of my position in the world, and erosion of essential professional (i.e., career-critical) skills.

During my entire life prior to retirement, I was intellectually and emotionally engaged with all aspects of the world in which I found myself. My personal welfare, my family, my friends, my career, the politics of my nation, city, and neighborhood were all of vital concern to me. I was informed and had opinions on the myriad of issues that arose. From the mundane, such as picking a pre-school for our daughters to the sublime: how to engineer a series of major design changes to the F/A-22 fighter without delaying the delivery of aircraft, were of vital concern to me.

Without the slightest hesitation, I accepted the responsibility for the successes and failures of my decisions. In the process, I learned, I changed, and I grew intellectually and emotionally. My entire life since birth was one of continuous growth. What I was yesterday, is not what I am today. For decades, I awoke each morning with the thought that today was a new opportunity for me to become a perfect human

Up to the moment of my retirement.

For me, retirement is a process of letting go. For the very first time in my entire life, in retirement, I am no longer driven to affect the outcome of the important issues in my life, including the emontional growth that allowed me to rise to the critical occasions as they came. Thus, retirement is fundamentally letting go of striving. Especially, forsaking striving to change myself. Finally, I’m done. Finished with becoming. For good or for ill, I am what I am. And, fortunately, I am content with who I am.

As a youth, the need to be accepted and liked, was a powerful engine for self change. As an adult, the need to earn money by means of a career, was the fundamental impetus for growth and improvement of myself and my marketable skills. One unintentional consequence of the abandonment of my career by retirement was the removal of a prime impetus for personal change.

When retirement removed striving from my life, tranquility moved in. My world became not only quiescent but also stable. My 39-year marriage is rock sold. My daughters are both married and doing a good job of raising our grandchildren. The work of my 48-year career is completed. Our income is sufficient to maintain us.

I have, however, discovered a down side to my retirement. With the disengagement from career, earning, and striving, came also disengagement from current political, social, and cultural affairs. I read the New York Times and the LA Times, every morning, but with the interest of a bystander. The news no longer concerns me personally. I find I now react to the daily news reports the same way I reacted to news in the London Times when I was living and working in England. Interesting, but no real concern of mine. Only occasionally, do I react to what I know to be gross misrepresentation of the facts.

Finally, my fine tuned engineering skills upon which I depended for so long are rusting away. Which is OK for I have put down the mental tools that served me so well and faithfully.