Altrusexual, Finally, a Pithy Word for LGBTQIP2SAA, etc.

Altrusexual

Finally, a Pithy Word for LGBTQIP2SAA, etc.

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I have an answer to the problem of finding a pithy term to describe the community of people who do not identify themselves as heterosexual:

Altrusexual.  

Okay, the word does not easily leap off the tongue. But how much better is it than this daily-changing and impossibly awkward flood of abbreviations: LGBTQIP2SAA!

Altersexual would be a more euphonious choice than my altrusexual, but, as with so many other ideas, the term has either been preempted by earlier users or shunted into vortexes of confusion by the problem of equivocation, namely, the troubling fact that the same word has come to mean more than one thing, and sometimes many more things than the one thing you want to pin down with a good name.

Do you doubt me?  

Think of “liberal,” deriving from the Latin liber, meaning liberty, freedom, but now perversely meaning not one who advocates individual rights and capitalism but instead government control of every blooming little thing.  Think of competing and contradictory definitions of the Good, of true, false, faith, knowledge, profit, morality, induction, art, fact, opinion, equality, objectivity, and freedom.  Need I go on?  It’s a dogfight out there! 

I’ll explain below why the word “altersexual” will not work for what I mean. 

Why should I care about an issue like this which, in the opinion of much of the world, affects but a relatively small community of “sexual minorities,” as the academics might describe them?

For one thing, I have close family, deeply loved, there among this community.

For another thing, the absolute size of this community does not begin to capture the gravity of this issue, starting with humanity’s widely varying experience of sexuality, and of the explosive feelings that this matter arouses across the spectra of politics, religion, morality, and psychology.   

So, as for my choice of “altrusexual” as a pithy term for the non-heterosexual, let me discuss how different cases may be made for and against this word:

Against the word, for starters, is the troubling fact that it’s my word, a neologism, which is a category of language that has long been attacked by our most thoughtful users of language because these unprecedented words can muddy the waters and are so often pretentious, self-aggrandizing, or worse.  Nevertheless, I believe this instance may be one of those rare cases where a new word is justified.

Not long ago, I would have thought that “homosexual,” “asexual,” “queer,” and maybe “anti-sexual” would have been perfectly good terms to describe those who are not heterosexual.  But the community of non-heterosexuals seems to have risen up and rejected all of these words.  So their opinion on what they want or do not want to be called should be acknowledged.

For another thing, again, their community has not embraced a description of themselves as homosexual, queer, and so forth.  Surely their opinion ought to be respected for how they themselves might like to be called.

Now, because I am surely not alone in my confusion over this constantly changing string of characters, let us unpack what we are talking about when we say, “LGBTQIP2SAA.”

I, for one, have failed to keep straight (sorry...) this ever-shifting alphabet soup, like a stream of letters poured into a pot from a kettle of random letters plucked from the Roman, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets.  Today, the heat is turned up to the boiling point, and because this community rightly feels itself to be persecuted, when we fail to address them respectfully, it can provoke the howls of wounded and angry voices from a thorny briar patch. 

So what are we talking about here?

As I say, let’s unpack this stream of letters.

Before I start, let’s be clear that I am not making fun of this altrusexual community.  The matters involved here make a riveting contemporary conundrum.  Moreover, and emotionally most to the point, as I said, I have family and friends I love with all my soul who live there, and they absolutely know me to hold the deep belief that love is love is love—and that the more love there is in the world, the better.

Alright, back to the matter at hand:

So far, everybody knows the letters LGBTQ—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer

Now, “I” means “inter-sex,” for people with two sets of genitals, or who have certain chromosomal anomalies.

“P” is for pansexual, meaning sexual activity with people of any sexual orientation or gender.

“2SA,” means “two spirit,” to describe those who recognize the male and female spirits inside everyone, but more specifically to name a tradition among some “First Nations” that believe that some minority of people have both male and female spirits inside them.  I am guessing that this may be congruent with more modern conceptions, like those of Jung and others, which is to say that all men and women, by their nature as human beings, have both male and female elements of their psychology.

“A” for asexual.

“A,” again, for Allies, meaning those who, although not a part of this community, feel a deep support for them.

If you feel any confusion or hostility to this ever-shifting landscape of language to describe this community, let me remind you of how other groups have undergone changes that are similarly difficult to keep track of:

Think of how Negro became Colored, Black, and African-American.

Think of how Indian became Native American, Amerindian, and, lately, First Nations.

Think of how Handicapped became Disabled.

Hmm.  This brings to mind how “Disabled” never made it all the way to “Differently Abled,” which drowned in the waters somewhere between the River Euphrates and the River Euphonious. 

I am also reminded of how I remember seeing on my boyhood street a “Home for Incurables.”  What must the patients in such a home for the incurables have thought of their prospects in life?  I can't know.  Did this moniker encourage them to feel hopeless?  And is not a feeling of hopelessness a self-fulfilling prophecy?  I do know that how you think is damn near everything in life.  If you think you are incurable, then you surely are.     

You may already have heard the term “altersexual,” so what’s wrong with this idea?  

I did think that this would be a better term for this community of the non-heterosexual, but my google search revealed that the word has been preempted, like so many good words that have been rendered unusable by prior convention.  I found a use of “altersexual” by some mean-spirited wag who derides as hapless the poor soul who says, “I don’t know if I want to be with a guy, a girl, both, or neither.”  Not to mention the matter of, “I don’t know if I want to be a guy, a girl, or both, or neither.” 

I also saw the usage of “altersexual” in a way that might suggest that the idea is wrapped up with a leftist conception of social justice, and it is not my intention to confine my idea of “altrusexuality” to the left side of the political spectrum.  As a libertarian-minded person, I find it ironic that such a big proportion of the non-heterosexual seem to be advocates of leftist politics and therefore proponents of statist control of everything.  Government regulation of everything seems fine only to those whose gang now has the levers of power.  Just wait until the next gang that hates you grabs those levers!

Now, I just said above that the opinion of this community should trump anybody else’s opinion on what to call themselves, but here I must say that I must respect my own measured opinion, which agrees with the altrusexual community that “altersexual” is not a good term, but disagrees with it that their best interests are served by the party of plunder and thought control. 

My term, altrusexual, is derived, of course, from alter, and altru, Latin terms for “other,” plus the Vulgar Latin alterui, the oblique case that modifies “other” with part of -cui, -ui, which means “to whom,” and adds an adjectival “L.”

We could speak of “altrusexuality,” using the same grammatical form as for “homosexuality.”  Perhaps we could also use the term “altrusexism,” which unfortunately echoes “sexism,” a bad belief, but it is not bad to bring this formulation into the realm of belief itself, onto the turf of philosophy, in other words—because it is therefore a term which, being a belief, is subject to examination and therefore to acceptance or rejection as a matter of logic.  By logic, I mean a controversial idea, but, in my opinion, an idea that is true nonetheless, namely that we acknowledge the law of non-contradiction (which says that nothing can be entirely black and entirely white at the same time and the same respect) and apply this concept with thoughtful examination to the evidence of experience.  This formulation may be another name for the idea of objectivity, which is also controversial.  The idea of objectivity is controversial because it is rejected by cultural relativists, and yet is upheld by many who falsely conflate it with their various flavors of religious absolutism and revealed wisdom.  How bizarre!  How common!  How invisible to most!  How senseless!  To my knowledge, only Ayn Rand’s full theory of concepts can bring sanity to these conundrums. 

Now, consider the coincidence that my terms altrusexuality or altrusexism might make one guess that they are derived from “altruism,” which takes the Latin for “other” and mates it with “-ism.”  This term was coined by Auguste Comte, who strove to create a secular morality that would pull the fangs out of the cruel and mass-murderous head of religion and to address all the other predatory behavior in the world as well.  

Objectivists will plotz at the suggestion that any good can come from anything that Comte wrote, but surely it is a good motive to want to create an ethics that could drain the world of murderous, screwball, supernatural ideas and predation.  

So, what to call the LGBTQIP2SAA community?

Altrusexual.

In the end, let us celebrate the fact that love is love is love is love, and the more of it, the better!

E   P   N

2017.1128
revised 2017.1130
and again, 2017.1229

1,700 words

Playing the Piano with Speed and Ease

Playing the Piano with Speed and Ease

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I've been thinking about the pianist's problems recently--so much more engaging and serene than pondering the world's gyrating vortex of insanity!  Nevertheless, on more than one occasion, these problems of the pianist have reduced me to clinched-up knots of frustration.

Here are some thoughts on this matter that accompanied a piece I published last year at sheetmusicplus.com.  These remarks appear as a preface to the score:

This piece is a free adaptation and a complete reworking of a study by Felix Le Couppey (1811-1887), Étude number 12, from his L'Agilité, Opus 20-- 25 Progressive Studies for Mechanism and Light Touch.

In its original form, this study was a charming little piece of musical fluff. But getting it up to speed reduced me to tears! It also gave me an epiphany of immense power that transformed my technique. Suddenly I could play faster than I had ever thought possible, and I could do so with a thrilling ease! 

This epiphany emerged from the spluttering frustration I felt over my inability to play these sixteenth notes at Le Couppey's metronome marking of 144. It dawned on me that I couldn’t play fast enough because I was tripping over my own fingers when I used the overly articulated technique of moving the fingers by the “lift, throw, relax” method. This superfluous motion creates an impenetrable barrier, a speed wall, as does playing legato scales by passing the thumb under the palm, when shifting hand position up and down the keyboard. So I found another way—which I’ve since learned was known to every pianist who ever achieved prodigious speed. Here’s how to bring this piece up to speed with ease:

Be sure to practice this piece with each hand alone. For each group of sixteenth notes, gently place the four fingers down simultaneously, to get the feel. Think of your arm, from elbow to fingertips, as something like a kitchen utensil, such as a spatula. Moving your right arm as a unit, place your finger tips down into the key bed, depressing all four notes at once, as a block chord. Make sure that all the fingers remain stiff (not rigid with tension, but just stiff enough to resist collapsing upwards.) Slowly lift and then play each group by placing all the fingers down with a rotation of your forearm, calm and relaxed, with the fingers rolling through the notes at the speed of a brief snare drum roll: Rrrrip! To rip through this group of notes like this takes no more effort than to place those four fingers down, calmly, all at once! Then, with a quick shift up or down the keyboard to get into position for the next group, that’s the whole trick for playing such passages with astonishing speed and ease! It takes time and effort to get the knack here, but the result can be transformative and thrilling! 

As for my adaptation of this study, I believe it offers intermediate advanced players the chance to enjoy a great leap in technique like the one I experienced, and also offers a piece of music that one might not blush to play outside the practice room—perhaps bringing it at least into the living room for a soirée, if not into the concert hall. To make this adaptation, I wrote a grumbly bass line with lungs, and nice fat chords to flesh out most of the skinny little triads that accompany the original study’s fast passages. I added a brooding, chromatic introduction that features as a melody the accompanimental figure of a broken triad that Le Couppey wrote a few times on the second page, in various inversions. I employed this broken chord figure several more times in both hands, and also added a little coda, sprinkled with sparkle. 

Playing time is about one minute 30 seconds.

E   P   N

2017.1028

Making Our Way Home from the World Trade Center

Making Our Way Home from the World Trade Center

by

Eric Paul Nolte

On the early morning of September 11, 16 years ago today, I was at Newark airport, right across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center.  I was picking up my flight papers at the Concourse C-3 weather room, where the pilots did their pre-flight planning.

As usual, I had left my car at the employee parking lot F, on the south side of the airfield.  When I parked there I always looked up fondly at the Trade Towers just across the marshes and the river. 

I had lived in New York twenty years before, driving a taxi cab while a student, and I watched the towers going up a little every day.  My feelings about those buildings were personal. I had a visceral affection for the awe-inspiring majesty of the structure and, as I learned more and more about sound economics, I came to harbor an intellectual appreciation for it as well.  I came to understand how this vibrant center played a central role in the global financial networks that served the creation of so much wealth in the world. I had also learned that a relatively few people actually understand that these financial markets are not merely a bunch of paper pushers exploiting everybody else.  But grasping the nature of financial markets is difficult for many because their work is so abstract and arcane, but nonetheless crucial to directing the flow of scarce resources into those ventures that directly benefit everybody in the free world—and the freer the nation, economically, the greater the benefits. 

Immediately outside the weather room where I stood, in the near distance, the Boeing 737 I was scheduled to fly was there at Gate 80.  In the middle distance was the WTC, and my view of it was as if I were near the front of an auditorium, watching someone on stage.

I took a break and walked over to the Garden State Diner and ordered breakfast. 

As is my wont, I sat at the counter of the diner with my nose buried in a book.  

I vividly remember what I was reading—economist Russell Roberts’ didactic, yet somehow touching novel, The Invisible Heart: an Economic Romance.  The novel is about two academics in love, one of whom is a liberal progressive who believes that government control of things is vital to our well-being in life.  Where the one character sees victims in life, the other sees victors and creative heroes.  This other protagonist is a passionate champion of free markets and believes that government regulation tends to create perversely unintended consequences for almost everything it touches, and that the economic freedom of capitalism dramatically, stupendously supports peaceful, voluntary trade in the world, trade for mutual benefit, and thereby enables people to flourish better than any other system ever to appear in history anywhere in the world.

I kid you not!  This is the truth!  Such a nerd!  Yet I was indeed reading Russ Roberts' book and I remember this fact as vividly as I remember where I was the day President Kennedy was shot. 

Then I heard a woman cry out, “Oh my god, an airplane just flew into the World Trade Center!” I looked up and witnessed the first puff of smoke beginning to billow out of the north tower of the WTC.

I thought to myself that the jagged and bloody hole a big airplane would make on the side of that tower would be an ugly scar that might take months to repair.  More importantly, the tragic loss of all those poor souls who died in this accident would certainly leave behind bereft relatives and friends whose grief might never subside or heal. 

But this awful event was already jangling my nerves, so I settled up for breakfast and went directly back to the weather room for my flight papers.  My departure time was just an hour later and I needed to meet my crew down at the airplane.

As I stood at the window in the flight planning room, the second airplane blasted a mushroom cloud of fire and flesh and steel and glass out of the south tower.

At that moment, all the pilots in the room knew that these were no accidents, these were acts of terror. 

Everybody there knew that our world was listing gravely towards a loathsome and dangerous ocean. 

I stood with my colleagues, weak and stagnant with horror.

And then the south tower fell in a pall of smoke against that pellucid blue sky like an ugly smear of paint thrown against a beautiful painting by some stinking little punk.

I never imagined that there was the remotest possibility that one of the towers could ever collapse as a result of an airplane’s crashing into it.  

Then the second tower collapsed.  

The authorities closed the airport then and I joined a miles long refugee column of dumbfounded, shattered and woozy humanity, and, pulling my roller bag and flight kit, trudged the three miles back to my car at the far end of employee parking Lot F.  

In the bewildered traffic jam that followed, I began trying to make my way home.

In a sense, like every decent person in the world, I am still trying to make my way home. 

E   P   N

2017.0911

What is a Facebook Friend?

What is a Facebook Friend?

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I recently embarrassed myself when I behaved a bit like a horse’s ass on the Facebook Message site.  What?  Little old mild mannered me?  I, who have often been called a warm and kind man of gentle soul?  Yup.  

How did this happen?  

In the wake of having my friend request denied, I exchanged testy salvos with the wife of a young man I greatly admire. This man is the author of books I have placed on my short list of the best books I own.  I’ve met this man a couple times at talks he gave in New York when he was on book tours, and our meetings were warm and respectful, in contrast to the exchange between his wife and me.

Now, I rarely ask anybody to be a Facebook friend of mine, but I did so in this case because his wife had written something on her husband’s Facebook page that made me like the way she thinks and inspired me to ask her to join my circle of friends.

This little episode brings into sharp focus the question of what a Facebook friend is.  This woman and I clearly had clashing ideas on the matter.

So, just what is a friend, really, and how might this concept align with or differ from the kind of person we befriend on Facebook?

Aristotle is always a good place to start with deep questions.  Aristotle said that friendship is a benevolent and mutual bond between people whose ties are independent of the familial or sexual.  There are three levels of friendship: 1. The useful, as between those engaged in a common project or work.  2. The pleasant, as between companions who hang out together for mutual entertainment.  3.  The good or virtuous bond between people who are drawn together by mutual esteem.  In essence, at its deepest level, this mutual esteem between the like-minded makes one think of the friend as almost another self.  

I would think that a Facebook friend can rightly fall into any of Aristotle’s categories here.  But a Facebook friend can also be someone we have never met; many of mine are.

For me, a Facebook friend is many things.  Yes, I have close personal friends and family here.  I also have old college buddies and colleagues from work and other adventures.  Yet I have also received Facebook friend requests from people I have never met.  

By what criteria should we allow others into our Facebook circle?  

Now, I have the possibly delusional notion that as I continue to nudge my music and writing out into the wider world, my Facebook page and other social media may prove to be an advantage for me, so I have never insisted that I must personally know someone before accepting a friend request.  

For me, when I get a FB friend request, I always go to that person’s FB page to sniff the air and verify a whiff of sanity, and if we also have some FB friends in common, I usually have no fear of accepting the request.

Without having given the matter any thought, I had assumed that my own criteria for FB friendship were universal and really the only reasonable view.

For this person who denied my FB friend request, there is another standard: she said that before allowing others into her circle, she demands that they have met personally, no exceptions.  Hers is a far more restrictive standard than mine.   So be it.  There is nothing wrong with that, but I had never considered the matter.  

In the end, what is a Facebook friend?  As it turns out, to my embarrassed surprise, when I gave the matter some thought I realized that, of course, a Facebook friend is, like every other value in life, whatever you want it to be!  It’s your choice.

Once again, confirmation bias, humanity’s Original Sin, rears its ugly head.  I could see no farther than what I myself believed was the reasonable standard of online friendship.  Mea culpa.  I’m so sorry!  

I foolishly expressed surprise and indignation at having my FB friend request denied, and the gal responded by blocking me from her FB page!  Then I felt both ridiculous and embarrassed.  Here I was denied even the salve of being able to apologize for my apparently boorish expression of indignation and wounded pride.  So, wife of that wonderful author, if you read this—you know who you are—please accept my apology here.

E   P   N

2017.0602

c. 750 words

To Plundering Politicians: Get Off Our Backs!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

A blurb from Turning Point USA points out the irony that Elizabeth Warren is agitating for a $22/hour minimum wage-- but doesn't pay her interns.

Whether Elizabeth Warren pays her interns or not, support for the minimum wage can only come from a dizzy, feel-good ignorance of the law of supply and demand. 

So if $22/hour is such a good thing, why not $100/hour?  Or how about $1,000/hour?  Why not? 

A minimum wage hurts the very people it is designed to help-- and hurts them worse than anybody else because it makes many unskilled workers unemployable for a first job. If some workers are so unskilled that they can't produce more wealth than their pay, an employer will not hire them. Without such a first job, the unskilled may never get a leg up into the workforce and learn better skills that can lead to their advancement. To be sustainable, workers' pay can never be greater than a fraction of the revenue they are able to generate for their employer. To an employer, workers' pay is just another factor of production, like steel or wheat or energy, and these companies have to compete with each other to attract and keep workers. 

Unbeknownst to Elizabeth Warren, this competition for workers is what explains why 97 percent of the workforce earns more than the minimum wage! And it's not labor unions which goose up the pay for most workers because, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the portion of the workforce belonging to unions in 2016 was barely 11 percent, down from 17 percent in 1983, and down from its peak of 28.3 percent in 1954. (As a telling footnote here, in 2016, the percentage of union workers in the private sector was 6.7 percent, and in the public sector it was 35.3 percent.) 

Warren and her ilk are infected by the ridiculous politics of unwarranted, unearned self-congratulation for how good they feel about their well-intended policies, no matter how badly these policies play out in the real world.

Still worse than their being oblivious to the actual results of their policies, they display a feckless contempt for the legitimate rights of individuals to their own life, liberty, and property.

They support so-called rights to all kinds of goods and services which do not grow on trees and the provision of which will have to be taken from others whose willingness to cough up the goods is deemed irrelevant.  "We're all in this together," so it's a good thing to "spread the wealth around," as President Obama once put it on the campaign trail. Never mind just how this spreading around is to be done.

Warren et al are infected by the idea of economic egalitarianism--not political equality, not the equal treatment of all before the law, but equality of income and wealth, which could never happen unless the government or the mafia were willing to rob Peter to pay Paul. 

On this point, see Don Watkins and Yaron Brook's fabulous books Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, and Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government.  Those of Warren's mind believe that they know better than we how to run our lives, so they are happy to grab the reins of our lives.  They do not want a government of laws so much as they want a government of Lords (to lord it over us.)  

Let us get this straight: there is no equality among individuals!  It is a destructive delusion to believe otherwise.  We are each unique and irreplaceable in our attributes!  There can be no such equality in the real world!  We differ from each other in every way-- we are unequally endowed in health, intelligence, ambition, the circumstances of our birth.  Moreover, it is this inevitably rainbow panoply of traits that makes the world go around--these differences of gifts and tastes offer the basis for trading to mutual benefit.  One person's trash is another's treasure.  When we are free to deal with each other voluntarily, the outcome in wealth can never be equal, but this freedom to trade with each other without government interference is the road to optimizing the creation of a rising tide of wealth that will lift more of the boats than any other policy.  This freedom is the very basis for any possibility for true cooperation between people and the coordination and direction of all the resources in the world.  Government regulation of these matters usurps the choices of the people.

Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education often said that government is like a clenched fist.  Government is force.  The role of government should be strictly confined to those areas where a fist can be effective, such as a police force to restrain domestic predators and a military to protect us from foreign aggression.  A fist is incapable of shaking hands or writing a symphony or stroking a crying baby.  Everything apart from wielding protective force in accordance with a rigorous policy of protecting the rights of every peaceful individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, should be left to the citizens' discretion.     

Liberals don't understand that government has no funds of its own. Every dollar government has comes from the citizens, and if we do not cheerfully hand it over to them, they take these funds out of our hides by force.  

If you say that I am mistaken here because the government can create its own money through the printing press, let me remind you that such fiat money dilutes the value of the existing currency and therefore destroys the value of the money we hold as private citizens.  In other words, this phony-baloney printing press money is no different in its effect on us than if the government were simply to steal our money outright. Printing-press money is no different from just another tax on us.  

Liberals truly fail to understand that the root of all evil in the world is the willingness to use other people against their will. Every despicable practice of humans is an example of this concept, if you think about it. 

What else is murder but the willingness to use another against his will? Rape? It's another example of using others against their will. Slavery? Genocide? Theft, fraud--you name it! All of these are examples of using others against their will.

But this willingness to use others against their will is the soul of the "progressive" ... and of sundry others as well... they are political predators, whether they know it or not.

I say learn to live and let live! And lend a helping hand, if you can do so by your own lights and in a way that you believe will actually do any good.

Ms. Warren, you need to learn that making the world a better place will most effectively begin if we each take full responsibility for ourselves, and embrace the challenge of unfolding our gifts in a way that allows us to offer others something that they will value enough to pay us for it. As Ayn Rand formulated it, we should live by the trader principle, voluntarily exchanging values for mutual benefit.

Where, through no fault of their own, some others cannot take care of themselves, help should come to them voluntarily from others who lend a helping hand out of the benevolence of a heart made full perhaps by the gratitude we may come to feel from having achieved a good life.  The situation of the helpless is morally compromised by any aid that comes to them as loot plundered by a welfare state.  Such plunder has the perversely unintended consequence of transforming the goodness of voluntary aid that is given to the helpless as charity, and turns this goodwill into a policy that poisons the relationship between citizens.  Where aid comes as loot taken by force from some citizens and given to others, anyone who owns anything is encouraged to look upon other citizens as a potential threat, not a potential benefit.

Frederic Bastiat captured the nature of this relationship between citizens and governments when he wrote, "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." And then he pointed out the inevitable consequence of this attitude: "Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."

To Elizabeth Warren and all the rest of you like-minded predators, I say get off our backs!  Get a life!  Get a life of your own and produce something of real value that others will voluntarily want to trade with you (as opposed to your politics of “trading” our money for our life.)  

                                                 E   P   N

2017.0509

c. 1,490 words

Make Passengers Walk? Let Money Talk!

Make Passengers Walk? Let Money Talk!

Voluntary Trade Benefits Everybody

by

Eric Paul Nolte

As a recently retired airline pilot with 41 years in the business (most recently at United Airlines, not incidentally), I know the airline industry better than I know my family tree, so I speak with authority when I tell you that the media are not telling you the whole story about David Dao, the hapless Vietnamese-American doctor who was recently bullied, bloodied, and dragged off a United Airlines flight in Chicago.

We hear that United Airlines summarily removed four passengers to make room for its own employees.  The reports say that the flight was overbooked, and there is widespread resentment that airlines engage in such perceived selfishness and disdain for the rights of passengers.  

No passengers were willing to give up their seats when the company offered a few hundred dollars for each seat.  When no passengers volunteered, four of them were singled out for involuntary denial of passage according to company procedures.  Since these passengers were already aboard the airplane, they were asked to leave the ship.  Dr. Dao refused to deplane, so the Chicago airport police were called in, and when Dr. Dao resisted arrest, the police cruelly forced him off the airplane, as we know from the video of the horrible scene that shortly went viral on YouTube.com.  Dr. Dao suffered several serious injuries.

We share the outrage over this kind of brutality that we would not expect to see outside of a police state.  But the media’s reporting of this incident displays little understanding of the real situation or of important details of the airline business.

Of course, the first concern is to wonder why did this situation get so out of hand that the airport police were called in?

Airport security these days is spring-loaded to deal with terrorists, not to intervene on behalf of some little misunderstanding over the seating arrangements of passengers and airline employees.  

To call in the cops is overkill, like unleashing attack dogs over a little disagreement at a hot dog stand.  This was an unwarranted and frightening threat of lethal force to resolve a little mix-up between customers and a service provider.

The police should not have been called in to resolve this dispute.  

The airline could have easily solved the problem if they had put into practice a little understanding of the law of supply and demand.  The airline should have realized that they were in an overbooked situation and that the goal here should always be to resolve the problem voluntarily, with good will, and with an eye towards achieving an outcome that is of mutual benefit to company and passengers.  It only makes sense.  To paraphrase a recent ad for Southwest Airlines, we want to beat our competition, not our customers!  This good will is central to maintaining the good reputation that is crucial to prospering in business and life.  

How would this seeding of good will work in this case?  We have an auction here.  If no passengers are willing to give up their seats for $200, then offer them $400.  If $400 is not enough to entice passengers, keep raising the offer until somebody is finally willing to make the trade.

The airline did offer some money for the seats, but no passengers were willing to give up their seats for the amount offered.  The company should have offered more money.  The police should never be called in unless there is a threat to life or limb.

Why would an airline be willing to buy their passengers’ seats back?  It is simple economics, but the press has not displayed much understanding of it.

The media have shown some understanding of why airlines overbook flights —they do so in order to fill seats left empty by no-show passengers, and the actual number overbooked for each flight is artfully calculated on the basis of specific flight data and statistics.  

But I have seen little in the reporting of this incident that displays a grasp of why the company would feel compelled to remove paying passengers to make room for airline employees.  

This is a situation I have seen often enough over the years and the reasons for it are easy to explain. 

For example, suppose an airplane is at an outstation where no aircrew members are based.  At the outstation there will be no crews available to be called into work on short notice.  If a plane at the outstation has a mechanical problem that delays them long enough, the crew will run into a government regulation that prohibits them from being on duty for too many hours.  The flight would either have to be canceled or delayed until the crew has been given a rest period required by the federal aviation regulations.  But if a fresh crew can be called up and ferried out to the outstation to replace the first crew, the flight can be salvaged.  Canceling an airline flight can cost the company millions of dollars!  So it makes good economic sense to pay some customers enough for them to want to give up their seats so as to make room for a replacement crew who can be dispatched to prevent a costly cancellation.

Now, the fine print of an airline ticket reveals a contract that allows the company to deny boarding to passengers under certain conditions.  It is not true that a passenger has a right to an airline seat after purchasing the ticket, contrary to widespread opinion.  There are too many situations where it might not even be possible to transport a passenger as originally agreed by the ticket purchase.

There is a world of confusion and chaos over the nature of rights—those of humans, animals, Gaea herself, welfare rights, liberty rights, positive and negative rights, the rights of races, genders, nations, and, to the point here, airline passenger rights.  

As with so many of the contentious matters with which she wrestled, I believe that Ayn Rand cut through this cloud of confusion with greater clarity than anybody since the time of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.  Rights are conditions of survival tied to each individual’s life in a social context.  Rights belong to each individual, and these “individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law,” as she put it in her essay on “Man’s Rights.”  The source of these rights is human nature, not an arbitrary social convention dreamed up out of the largesse of governments who bestow goodies on warring special interest groups for political power and advantage.  (Yes, I know that this view is contrary to much of contemporary legal thought.)

So, like all of us, Dr. Dao has a right to his own life, liberty, and property—a right to be protected against the unwarranted initiation of physical force against him.  The purpose of government is the protection of every individual’s right to life, liberty, and property.  The purpose of the police is to restrain the predators among us and keep the peace.  The police are granted the power to intervene and restrain anybody in a civilian dispute until they can figure out what is going on and how to restore law and order.  As an individual who unwittingly wanders into a fight, when the police show up, you are obligated to cooperate with their efforts to sort out the problem, and if you display the poor judgment to resist them you can put yourself in mortal danger, as happened to Dr. Dao.

I believe that the company was legally entitled to deny boarding to those passengers, much as we dislike the way they handled the matter, but to call in the gendarmes under these conditions was to risk creating a big stinking brouhaha, especially when Dr. Dao resisted arrest so adamantly.

So, what of the unfortunate Dr. Dao?  Again, in my humble opinion, the company could have prevented the whole mess by raising the price it was willing to pay until some passengers would have cheerfully given up their seats.  

Nevertheless, what happened to Dr. Dao was reprehensible. 

Having said that the brutality against Dr. Dao was deplorable, I have to ask what on earth was the poor man thinking when he resisted arrest?  

The situation strikes me as comparable to driving your car and being pulled over by a police cruiser.  You may be convinced that you were doing nothing wrong at all, but any fool knows that if you resist arrest, you risk getting your ass pounded or worse!  How could Dr. Dao think that anything good can come out of defying a trio of police officers who are pumped up and primed to fight terrorists?

I hold the police blameworthy for failing to exercise better judgment in this situation.

I hold the unfortunate Dr. Dao responsible for exercising poor judgment in the face of his admittedly terrible predicament. 

I hold the airline responsible for failing to keep the police out of a situation in which they should never have been called out.  

I also hold the airline responsible for failing to arrange matters so that the problems caused by overbooking and crew transportation could have been prevented in the first place through the peaceful, voluntary trading of good things between people for the benefit of all concerned.

E   P   N

2017.0418 

c. 1,550 words

Formulations of a God that Even Ayn Rand Might Embrace

Formulations of a God that Even Ayn Rand Might Embrace

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Recently, M. Zachary Johnson, compelling composer and author of brilliant books on music, posted this thought on Facebook:

“I recall Leonard Peikoff saying that Ayn Rand once told him she had come up with an argument for the existence of God that was better than any of those anyone had come up with. But when he asked her what it was, she wouldn't tell him. Does anybody remember where he said this?”

David Hayes responded to Matt with the reference and wrote:

"Letters of Ayn Rand," pg. 185, within a letter to Isabel Paterson dated August 4, 1945, contains this paragraph by Ayn Rand:

‘Incidentally, I know some very good arguments of my own in favor of the existence of God. But they're not the ones you mention and they're not the ones I've ever read advanced in any religion. They're not proofs, therefore I can't say I accept them. They are merely possibilities, like a hypothesis that could be tenable. But it wouldn't be an omnipotent God and it wouldn't be a limitless God.’

“Following this, an editorial remark has been added which reads: "[AR never mentioned these arguments again.]

“I don't [know] of a passage of Leonard Peikoff's on the same point.”

*   *   *

Why would anybody ever be interested in naming a formulation of god that even Ayn Rand might approve of?

It might seem apparent that the very idea of god is so tainted, so fraught with awful history and practice that surely no good can come of trying to nail down a definition that a rational person could live with.  Why even try?  

I got into a similar spot when I once tried to craft a non-altruistic argument for charity as a sort of “thank you” from me to the universe.  I feel deeply grateful for the lucky roll of the cosmic dice that endowed me with a good mind and health that allowed me to work hard and make something deeply rewarding of my life.  What did I do to deserve this luck?  Nothing.  I could just as deservingly been born dead, or crippled, or in a brutal dictatorship.  My gratitude inspires me to want to lend a helping hand to deserving others who were not so lucky as I.  But to call this impulse “charity” may be wrong-headed because the idea of charity turns out to be so laced with religious calls for mindless self-sacrifice for the lives of others.  Ultimately I found the word untenable for my purposes.

But I do have a couple good ideas about what a rational concept of a god might be, and I believe I can show you how these formulations comport nicely with my Objectivist view of the universe.  

The most important point speaks to why all the peoples of the world have wrestled with some version of a god or gods.  Moreover, these ideas may offer a good tool for outreach to persuade others whose religiosity might otherwise render them deaf to our way of looking at the world.

So let me offer these ideas for your consideration.  

A little background first.

*   *   *

I was born to a communist musician who made of me a “red diaper baby,” as they say of the babies of red-flag waving Marxist-Leninists.  It took me decades to recover my mind!  

I came of age in the Unitarian Church of the 1960s. Then, as now, an atheist or a Buddhist could be welcomed into the fellowship, but back then their book store still sold copies of Atlas Shrugged along with works by and about the iconic figures of the church and secular saints like Jefferson, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens, William Ellery Channing, and many other brilliant lights.  

At that time one could openly profess admiration for Ayn Rand and capitalism without causing Unitarians to suffer a dizzy moral seizure.  

This is no longer true!  

When I grew up in the Unitarian church, one could still openly advocate a morality of reason, objective reality, individual rights to life, liberty, and the peaceful pursuit of personal happiness and profit through trading value-for-value to mutual benefit—in a word, capitalism.  That church is dead.

But, to the point here, I did get something wonderful out of growing up Unitarian, which was the idea that God, or any god or gods, was not irrevocably tied to the God of Abraham—not necessarily an anthropomorphic creator of the universe, not a personality of omniscient or omnipotent powers, and requiring neither mystical nor magical thinking.  

Let me explain.

*   *   *

Why God?  

Not, “Tell me why, oh dear God.”  

Rather, why is there any idea of a god?

Why this imaginary friend, this bizarre delusion that arose nearly everywhere on earth?  Why did an idea of god arise among almost all the ancient peoples of the world?

What gives rise to the concept of a god? 

There is no evidence for a god, the anthropomorphic creator of the universe, that will hold water, much less walk on water, so why and how did any idea of a god ever come to mind?

I believe that the idea of a god arose because, for one thing, Homo saps are in the unique position of knowing that we must die.

Now, you can quote literature that says elephants, dolphins, and chimps are also aware of death among their own kind, but there is an unbridgeable gulf between humans and all the other animals: they are adapted to their environment.  We must daily wrestle with the challenges posed by our being physically ill-suited to living in the wild—we must adapt the environment to us.  It is our uniquely advanced minds that allow us to bend the world to our needs.  We are endowed with the unique power to accumulate knowledge and capital. 

Humans are the only animals who hold their knowledge in fully developed, propositional concepts, and therefore we are the only creatures who can possibly know of our own impending personal death and grapple with the shattering consequences of this foreknowledge.

The foreknowledge of our own death is shattering because it challenges the very meaning of our lives.

If everything we have ever worked to achieve disappears in the flash of death, then … what’s the point?  

If it all disappears with the finality of a falling guillotine’s blade, then what’s it all about?  

If all the wealth and knowledge we have acquired, if all the love we have given and received, if all this earthly web unravels and sinks to the bottom of life’s ocean, then what is the meaning of life?

Death levels the Prince and the Pauper, the saint and the sinner, the wise and the foolish.  Death shatters us.

This is the point that Forrest Church often made, that all religions have as their animating purpose the search for meaning that arises with the foreknowledge of our own death.

(Footnote: Forrest Church was for many years the senior minister of the First Unitarian Church in Manhattan, a prolific author who edited the arresting and wonderful volume, The Jefferson Bible, which shows how Thomas Jefferson was as close to being an outright atheist as one could be in the 18th century without getting burned at the stake.) 

You can say that the idea of god was humanity’s ruse, our self-deception, an aspect of whistling past the graveyard on a moonless night, pretending that though we must die, we don’t really have to die because we can imagine an afterlife in which we persist forever with everyone we ever loved.

You can say that we would all be vastly better off without this pretense, this profound lie, and that embracing reality clear-eyed and brave is always more life-serving than self-deception and cowardice.  I agree.

And yet, there is another aspect of the reason that Homo saps ever dreamed up the idea of god.

If by the idea of god you mean the impersonal force that somehow animates the universe, well then what’s wrong with that?  

I believe that it’s obvious that something is going on in the universe!  Some impersonal force or forces energize everything.  We do not know what all these forces are.  We do know that these forces are real, we do know what many of them are, and by declaring that we do not know what all of them are, we leave open the possibility for discovering them as they become available to us.  By our profession of a certain ignorance here we inspire those who have the goods to go sniffing down that road in search of better answers.

So this is the idea of god as the impersonal force that animates the universe, and surely this is a plausible explanation for why the idea of god might have arisen in the context of early Homo sapiens, before the rise of science.  This explanation also speaks to the point of why people might still turn to the idea of god when they wonder, awestruck about the yawning sea of ignorance that yet lies not so far off the shore we know and on which we live today. 

Here’s another idea of god that even Ayn Rand might entertain as tenable:

Suppose, by “god” you mean the state of mind to which you repair when you feel aware of the cosmic sweep of the universe, when you confront the awe-inspiring beauty of the earth that is available to anybody who pays attention to the amazing phenomena of life and the world.

Think of the astonishing displays of light and its refraction through all the mists of cloud and water.  

Think of the soul-shaking power of a thunderstorm felt up close… or as experienced from inside the belly of the beast, as I myself have seen it up close and first hand as an airline pilot!  My god!  

I think of what I often saw in my 35 years as an airline pilot, plying the high choir loft, miles above the haze layer—when I would sometimes turn down the cockpit lights just to gawk at the stunning spectacle of all those stars on a moonless night!  I think of the many times I saw huge, mind-boggling displays of light, wriggling and dancing in the firmament, the aurora borealis seen from seven miles high while nearing the North Pole!  Oh, my god!  

If by “god” you mean the state of mind by which you engage with the enduring mysteries of existence, who can argue with this?  Nobody knows it all!  What is the universe?  Where does it come from?  Or is it that by simply being everything that is, the concept of the universe does not admit to such a question?  

Is the universe finite?  Is it infinite?  Either one of these propositions once inspired outright dizziness in my mind and those of many others.  Is the universe eternal?  Doomed to destruction by heat death and the second law of thermodynamics? 

Everything in the universe is finite—it is what it is, independent of our wishes, fears, doubts, illusions, prayers, delusions, blindness, or indigestion.  So if everything is finite, surely the universe as a whole must be thus limited.  And if the universe is finite, as Socrates might have put it in the fifth century BC, surely the universe must have a boundary.  If the universe has an edge, surely you could throw a javelin through it!  And if you can throw a spear through the edge of the universe… then… what’s on the other side?

But if the universe is infinite, this would contradict the nature of everything we know about anything, because everything is finite… everything is definite, something specific.  It is what it is, whatever it is, and surely to be infinite would have to mean being open-ended, without limit.

Now, there are rational ways to deal with these apparent problems with the idea of the infinite, but you can plainly see that the matter begins with an intellectually vertigo-inspiring conundrum, like so many things dreamed up by the ancients (think of Zeno’s paradox, for another related example of the problem of the infinite.)

Think of what life must have been like to our ignorant ancient ancestors, cowering before the fear-fraught facts of existence—the storms and earthquakes, the predators and mysteries of the night and day!  My god!

*   *   * 

All right, now we have some ideas of god that may be tenable.  

We have god as the impersonal force that animates the universe.  

There is god as the sacred hall of our awe and wonder at the beauty and power of life and the world.  

We have god as the chapel to which we repair when we wrestle with the enduring mysteries of existence. 

But there is still a big problem here because by calling these ideas “god” we can find ourselves cast adrift in intellectually shark-infested waters!  

Why?  Because the idea of god has a long and tainted history!  We cannot employ any idea of god without risking association with some of the worst craziness that has ever infected the human race!

So why bother with the idea of god at all?  Why not just call it science or poetry or music?

Because we also want to engage people in the world with fact-based values by which to guide us towards harmony with everybody on the earth who can be reached by the power of life-serving reason and evidence.  

So much of the world is wedded to some formulation of Dostoevsky’s notion that without a god everything is permitted.  They say that unless there is a god dispensing rewards and punishments, it’s all subjective, and only moral relativism is available to us.  

But as Objectivists know, there are facts of reality to which we can appeal for moral guidance towards a life of unfolding happiness, a vision like the world as Ayn Rand saw it, and in Aristotle’s Eudaimonia.

So maybe these secular formulations of god can serve to engage those who now believe in some version of god.  

Maybe by our employing these secular conceptions of god, some of these believers might be persuaded to move away from the false and destructive idea that faith offers an alternative to reason. (Remember that faith denotes a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence, and so it can never be an efficacious alternative to reason.)  

By the path of offering some rational formulations of the meaning of god, we may be able to persuade more people that reason, logic applied to the evidence of experience, gives us the rational alternative to thinking about values, morality, and happiness.  This outcome would benefit us all. 

E   P   N

2017.0301
revised 2017.1031