HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
~~~~~
Monday, June 13, 2011
Gelb fil Gelbi
Sunday, June 12, 2011
$26,000,000
In a day-dream long ago I thought about "falling into" a medium-sized fortune. I'm sure this hasn't happened to anyone else ;=)
This day-dream, however, didn't compute - made no sense to my right brain. This is because my parents were solidly middle class - and because I consider the Lotto a tax on the computationally challenged and won't have anything to do with it. From somewhere, nevertheless, the very specific number of $26,000,000 came to me (the origin of that number is lost in a twilight dream). By today's standards, this would be more like a small fortune
I first thought that I would build a round turret-shaped study, something that Louise had always dreamed of. For the record, she loves her current study with a territorial view of Clark County and a peek at Mount St Helens. She's more than earned it: raising 5 kids in harsh circumstances in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, going back to school - starting from scratch twice after a long absence - to first earn an MA in Linguistics and now an MS in Biology-Ecology. Her typical work-week is 60 - 80 hours. She deserves something nice - but I can't even talk her into a camera for her birthday. Sigh.
I next thought that I would buy a house in the neighborhood for each of our kids - a nice house. Then I thought of investing in Don's med school education so he didn't have such a hideous debt, and Cory's college, and Jared's film industry career...
But a house in our neighborhood would effectively clip their adventurous wings; all five kids have lived for extended periods of time in three or more foreign countries, speak multiple languages - and what could they do here? Walk in the rain a lot, that's certain.
I also thought about getting a trawler for myself: a motor-vessel around 15 meters long that I could motor up the west coast to the remote coves and bays of SE Alaska that I used to work in.
Then reality set in:
Three of our kids who completed high school in Switzerland while we lived in Saudi Arabia had up-close contact with the children of Russian billionaires and wealthy mafia bosses... and my kids couldn't stand even one of them. They were spoiled, incredibly self-absorbed, and every one was startlingly unhappy.
I can't think of a better way to ruin your kids than to throw money at them. They would never learn how to make their way through the world on their own, and would have badly skewed perceptions of their own self-worth and that of others around them. Might as well break both legs - they would at least recover from that.
And I can't even buy jewelry for Louise: she politely accepts any ring I buy her and promptly stashes it in some un-findable safe place so it doesn't get lost.
Finally, I faced the reality of my motor-vessel dream: In my professional work I have had a lot of experience on motor vessels in rough seas. I've done geophysical mapping from a ship in southeast Alaska. I've developed a (now patented) electrical geophysical towed-streamer technology to map minerals buried beneath the seafloor. In all the sea-trials, I am now 4-for-8 for getting seasick. The old saying is that "Five percent of human beings never get seasick, five percent never recover, and the rest of us fit somewhere in between." True that. I'm personally acquainted with puking shoe-peg corn through my nose. Ech.
Finally, the most unhappy person I have ever known up-close for an extended period of time was my sister's second husband, who would never tire of letting me know that he was worth $10,000,000 or $15,000,000 or $20,000,000 (the number evolved over time). He lived for his next toy, but a toy for him was a Ferrari, or a Steinway player piano (he couldn't play it; he never applied himself to anything except weaseling money from widows). The day after any new toy arrived he was unhappy again.
In a detailed study of 10 people who had won the Irish Lottery, nine of them said that it had completely ruined their lives - and 8 of the 9 were in debt! A similar study of winners of the Virginia Lottery was 100% ruination: in debt, kids messed up, the whole works. The lone exception in Ireland was a shepherd who lived in a dirt-floored hut on an island. He put the money in the bank and forgot about it. Ten years later he was living in the same hut and said he was quite happy, thank you.
What was I thinking?!??
~~~~~
This day-dream, however, didn't compute - made no sense to my right brain. This is because my parents were solidly middle class - and because I consider the Lotto a tax on the computationally challenged and won't have anything to do with it. From somewhere, nevertheless, the very specific number of $26,000,000 came to me (the origin of that number is lost in a twilight dream). By today's standards, this would be more like a small fortune
I first thought that I would build a round turret-shaped study, something that Louise had always dreamed of. For the record, she loves her current study with a territorial view of Clark County and a peek at Mount St Helens. She's more than earned it: raising 5 kids in harsh circumstances in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, going back to school - starting from scratch twice after a long absence - to first earn an MA in Linguistics and now an MS in Biology-Ecology. Her typical work-week is 60 - 80 hours. She deserves something nice - but I can't even talk her into a camera for her birthday. Sigh.
I next thought that I would buy a house in the neighborhood for each of our kids - a nice house. Then I thought of investing in Don's med school education so he didn't have such a hideous debt, and Cory's college, and Jared's film industry career...
But a house in our neighborhood would effectively clip their adventurous wings; all five kids have lived for extended periods of time in three or more foreign countries, speak multiple languages - and what could they do here? Walk in the rain a lot, that's certain.
I also thought about getting a trawler for myself: a motor-vessel around 15 meters long that I could motor up the west coast to the remote coves and bays of SE Alaska that I used to work in.
Then reality set in:
Three of our kids who completed high school in Switzerland while we lived in Saudi Arabia had up-close contact with the children of Russian billionaires and wealthy mafia bosses... and my kids couldn't stand even one of them. They were spoiled, incredibly self-absorbed, and every one was startlingly unhappy.
I can't think of a better way to ruin your kids than to throw money at them. They would never learn how to make their way through the world on their own, and would have badly skewed perceptions of their own self-worth and that of others around them. Might as well break both legs - they would at least recover from that.
And I can't even buy jewelry for Louise: she politely accepts any ring I buy her and promptly stashes it in some un-findable safe place so it doesn't get lost.
Finally, I faced the reality of my motor-vessel dream: In my professional work I have had a lot of experience on motor vessels in rough seas. I've done geophysical mapping from a ship in southeast Alaska. I've developed a (now patented) electrical geophysical towed-streamer technology to map minerals buried beneath the seafloor. In all the sea-trials, I am now 4-for-8 for getting seasick. The old saying is that "Five percent of human beings never get seasick, five percent never recover, and the rest of us fit somewhere in between." True that. I'm personally acquainted with puking shoe-peg corn through my nose. Ech.
Finally, the most unhappy person I have ever known up-close for an extended period of time was my sister's second husband, who would never tire of letting me know that he was worth $10,000,000 or $15,000,000 or $20,000,000 (the number evolved over time). He lived for his next toy, but a toy for him was a Ferrari, or a Steinway player piano (he couldn't play it; he never applied himself to anything except weaseling money from widows). The day after any new toy arrived he was unhappy again.
In a detailed study of 10 people who had won the Irish Lottery, nine of them said that it had completely ruined their lives - and 8 of the 9 were in debt! A similar study of winners of the Virginia Lottery was 100% ruination: in debt, kids messed up, the whole works. The lone exception in Ireland was a shepherd who lived in a dirt-floored hut on an island. He put the money in the bank and forgot about it. Ten years later he was living in the same hut and said he was quite happy, thank you.
What was I thinking?!??
~~~~~
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Either/Or
In the side of my desk-bookcase I have a Gary Larson cartoon. It's just a single frame, with a befuddled man standing in front of two doors. Above one it reads "Damned if you DO" and above the other "Damned if you DON'T"
Behind him is a tall creature with a goatee, horns on its head, a tail, and two hooves for feet, poking the man in the back with a trident. "Come on, come on," says the devil, "It's either one or the other."
Agency doesn't mean having easy choices.
Coincidentally in that same book case is Kierkegaard's book "Either/Or" (1843), written under a pseudonym "A" as was his wont. In it, Kierkegaard writes about different ways of living.
Most people when they hear this name think of the expression "Leap of Faith" - under the somewhat mistaken understanding that Kierkegaard somehow intellectually justified exercising faith in God. In a roundabout way, he did. He postulated that most people live their lives in one of two ways: the Aesthetic Life, where we live in the present and have beauty in some form(s) as our goal. Another way to live is the Ethical Life, where we try to live in accordance with the truths of morality. Kierkegaard found both to be unsatisfactory for a thinking, rational individual. He proposed as an alternative a third way" living a Religions Life - but acknowledged that this wasn't really a rational choice, either.
Kierkegaard distinguished between Objective Truth and Subjective Truth. Objective Truth is a scientific undertaking, designed to sync our beliefs with the external world around us. Subjective Truth on the other hand was where the relationship between an individual and the world around her/him is built into the system of belief. However, there are internal contradictions (at least in the religious traditions that Kierkegaard was aware of at the time he wrote this book): How could Jesus, for instance, be both God and man at the same time? Kierkegaard felt that a Leap of Faith was required to reconcile oneself with Subjective Truth. To believe in God in order to conform to society is worthless; even in the 19th Century, most nations had a State-sanctioned religion. We must instead make a passionate leap into a faith-based, subjective belief - this is the only way Kierkegaard felt we could achieve fulfillment as human beings.
Lost you yet? This has been a problem with most philosophers: their turgid prose was comprehensible to few but contemporary philosophers. To that end, you will not see a summary on this blog of Immanuel Kant.
But if you re-read the summary above, you can at least say you sort of understand one famous philosopher. I admire Kierkegaard for trying so hard with what little he had. Personally, I find that there is an utterly pragmatic and self-consistent philosophical framework underlying my LDS faith. One of the greatest compliments ever given to Shakespeare by contemporaries (and my Shakespeare professor at Berkeley) was that he could talk to two or even three different audiences at the same time, occupying the different tiers of the old Globe Theater in London.
My perception of LDS doctrine, however, is that it can talk to all human beings in a manner consistent with their current intellectual development. More than just broadly satisfying, it helps us all understand this life in a manner that makes it incredibly satisfying. Like Objective Truth, however, it is also consistent with everything I have encountered in this world and beyond (see my earlier blog entry on Hymns and Cosmology).
I pity my atheist friends - but not too much. We all must sleep in the bed we make ourselves. At the same time however, I am satisfied that no matter how wasted their time on this planet may be, they will be taken care of, too. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink: God will force no man to heaven.
While I periodically worry about my inactive kids, I know that the meaning of family is far greater than changing diapers and paying for college - it extends to helping each other through all generations of time. The template is in the Atonement. In the meantime, I won't try to mess with their agency - that would be a terrible thing for anyone, especially anyone I love.
Agency is the most important key and characteristic of godhood.
Sure must be scary for some people in the Final Foxhole, however.
Behind him is a tall creature with a goatee, horns on its head, a tail, and two hooves for feet, poking the man in the back with a trident. "Come on, come on," says the devil, "It's either one or the other."
Agency doesn't mean having easy choices.
Coincidentally in that same book case is Kierkegaard's book "Either/Or" (1843), written under a pseudonym "A" as was his wont. In it, Kierkegaard writes about different ways of living.
Most people when they hear this name think of the expression "Leap of Faith" - under the somewhat mistaken understanding that Kierkegaard somehow intellectually justified exercising faith in God. In a roundabout way, he did. He postulated that most people live their lives in one of two ways: the Aesthetic Life, where we live in the present and have beauty in some form(s) as our goal. Another way to live is the Ethical Life, where we try to live in accordance with the truths of morality. Kierkegaard found both to be unsatisfactory for a thinking, rational individual. He proposed as an alternative a third way" living a Religions Life - but acknowledged that this wasn't really a rational choice, either.
Kierkegaard distinguished between Objective Truth and Subjective Truth. Objective Truth is a scientific undertaking, designed to sync our beliefs with the external world around us. Subjective Truth on the other hand was where the relationship between an individual and the world around her/him is built into the system of belief. However, there are internal contradictions (at least in the religious traditions that Kierkegaard was aware of at the time he wrote this book): How could Jesus, for instance, be both God and man at the same time? Kierkegaard felt that a Leap of Faith was required to reconcile oneself with Subjective Truth. To believe in God in order to conform to society is worthless; even in the 19th Century, most nations had a State-sanctioned religion. We must instead make a passionate leap into a faith-based, subjective belief - this is the only way Kierkegaard felt we could achieve fulfillment as human beings.
Lost you yet? This has been a problem with most philosophers: their turgid prose was comprehensible to few but contemporary philosophers. To that end, you will not see a summary on this blog of Immanuel Kant.
But if you re-read the summary above, you can at least say you sort of understand one famous philosopher. I admire Kierkegaard for trying so hard with what little he had. Personally, I find that there is an utterly pragmatic and self-consistent philosophical framework underlying my LDS faith. One of the greatest compliments ever given to Shakespeare by contemporaries (and my Shakespeare professor at Berkeley) was that he could talk to two or even three different audiences at the same time, occupying the different tiers of the old Globe Theater in London.
My perception of LDS doctrine, however, is that it can talk to all human beings in a manner consistent with their current intellectual development. More than just broadly satisfying, it helps us all understand this life in a manner that makes it incredibly satisfying. Like Objective Truth, however, it is also consistent with everything I have encountered in this world and beyond (see my earlier blog entry on Hymns and Cosmology).
I pity my atheist friends - but not too much. We all must sleep in the bed we make ourselves. At the same time however, I am satisfied that no matter how wasted their time on this planet may be, they will be taken care of, too. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink: God will force no man to heaven.
While I periodically worry about my inactive kids, I know that the meaning of family is far greater than changing diapers and paying for college - it extends to helping each other through all generations of time. The template is in the Atonement. In the meantime, I won't try to mess with their agency - that would be a terrible thing for anyone, especially anyone I love.
Agency is the most important key and characteristic of godhood.
Sure must be scary for some people in the Final Foxhole, however.
~~~~~
Friday, June 10, 2011
Flattening the Curve
When I was young, I would watch my parents (I had four; divorced and remarried), and my grandparents. It was like I was watching two different species, the difference was so substantial. My maternal grandmother was dead of a tobacco-fueled heart-attack, and my Grandpa was well along into a long-term dementia.
My paternal grandmother stayed with my Mom after her son had left us, and raised me and my sister. I just assumed this was normal at the time, but that grandmother had been abandoned by her husband, and knew what that was like. She also didn't like hearing that one housekeeper had drugged me with Laudanum to keep me from disturbing her day, and the replacement had beaten me senseless with wooden hangers. My Mom figured that one out when she found most of her hangers broken in a trash can. Grandma Wynn stayed with us for seven years and raised me, taught me my ethical principles, and my work-ethic. She seemed quite a bit different than other older folks I knew as a child... she had wrinkled skin, but boundless energy and wit. She spent all her time helping and taking care of others.
But to the story at hand: Why were my grandparents so different from each other, and so much more different than my parents? As a young adult I picked up on the idea du jour that normal human beings "peaked" at around 25 - 30 years old, and it was all a long, slow downhill from there. Fall apart slowly and then die. A humped curve: like the Pike's Peak Marathon, the second half was all downhill. Sheesh.
I became a Mormon at age 21 and began to notice right away that older Mormons didn't seem to follow that pattern. It was apparently the norm for Mormon Church Presidents to be hale, articulate, and vigorously active well into their 90's. They traveled all over the world, directed a complex organization... and seemed to be inexorably happy.
I learned some principles which I have shared with each of my kids: keep active, eat right, avoid tobacco and alcohol and a couple of other obvious vices - and that humped curve flattens out. Too late (for my neck, face, and forearms, anyway) I also added onto their lesson-list to avoid excessive Sun exposure. I'm still glad I'm a geophysicist/geologist.
I won't belabor you with the details of what "active" or "eat right" mean - fully a quarter of any modern magazine stand dwells on this in exquisite detail. There are two more things that I would add to this list, however.
1. To be happy, you will have to stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about how you can help others. My former Kaiser physician told me that she worked a year or two at a time so she could serve for a year in a free clinic for the homeless. "I need my community service 'fix'" as she put it.
2. You will also have to get yourself to a place where you are comfortable with being a person doing the right thing: conformable with your Manufacturer's guidelines, so to speak. No sane person would pour gasoline into their car's oil crankcase, for instance, but I've watched human beings do the equivalent thing all the time - and wonder how they got to look so beaten up. The old fashion way of saying this is "avoid sin."
Instead of a "humped" curve, then, you will reach a peak - and stay there for many decades. It really IS possible to "flatten the curve". I'm quite a bit happier at age 65 than I was at age 50... and for my birthday I biked up to the top of a neighboring hill that you cannot climb even in 1st gear on any sit-down bike. You must "jump the stirrups" - jump and power down on each peddle all the way to the top of the hill. It's fantastically aerobic, and I just did that particular route at the same average speed - about 19 kph - as I did it 9 years ago. I will test for my 5th degree black belt this coming August. My skin and white hair say one thing, but Louise says my energy and joie de vivre convey something entirely different.
It's fun to be on a flat curve. I just don't want to hang around here forever, though, and my faith makes a huge difference in how I view both my purpose in life and my inevitable departure.
But not for another 25 years, at least. There's too much fun stuff yet to do.
My paternal grandmother stayed with my Mom after her son had left us, and raised me and my sister. I just assumed this was normal at the time, but that grandmother had been abandoned by her husband, and knew what that was like. She also didn't like hearing that one housekeeper had drugged me with Laudanum to keep me from disturbing her day, and the replacement had beaten me senseless with wooden hangers. My Mom figured that one out when she found most of her hangers broken in a trash can. Grandma Wynn stayed with us for seven years and raised me, taught me my ethical principles, and my work-ethic. She seemed quite a bit different than other older folks I knew as a child... she had wrinkled skin, but boundless energy and wit. She spent all her time helping and taking care of others.
But to the story at hand: Why were my grandparents so different from each other, and so much more different than my parents? As a young adult I picked up on the idea du jour that normal human beings "peaked" at around 25 - 30 years old, and it was all a long, slow downhill from there. Fall apart slowly and then die. A humped curve: like the Pike's Peak Marathon, the second half was all downhill. Sheesh.
I became a Mormon at age 21 and began to notice right away that older Mormons didn't seem to follow that pattern. It was apparently the norm for Mormon Church Presidents to be hale, articulate, and vigorously active well into their 90's. They traveled all over the world, directed a complex organization... and seemed to be inexorably happy.
I learned some principles which I have shared with each of my kids: keep active, eat right, avoid tobacco and alcohol and a couple of other obvious vices - and that humped curve flattens out. Too late (for my neck, face, and forearms, anyway) I also added onto their lesson-list to avoid excessive Sun exposure. I'm still glad I'm a geophysicist/geologist.
I won't belabor you with the details of what "active" or "eat right" mean - fully a quarter of any modern magazine stand dwells on this in exquisite detail. There are two more things that I would add to this list, however.
1. To be happy, you will have to stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about how you can help others. My former Kaiser physician told me that she worked a year or two at a time so she could serve for a year in a free clinic for the homeless. "I need my community service 'fix'" as she put it.
2. You will also have to get yourself to a place where you are comfortable with being a person doing the right thing: conformable with your Manufacturer's guidelines, so to speak. No sane person would pour gasoline into their car's oil crankcase, for instance, but I've watched human beings do the equivalent thing all the time - and wonder how they got to look so beaten up. The old fashion way of saying this is "avoid sin."
Instead of a "humped" curve, then, you will reach a peak - and stay there for many decades. It really IS possible to "flatten the curve". I'm quite a bit happier at age 65 than I was at age 50... and for my birthday I biked up to the top of a neighboring hill that you cannot climb even in 1st gear on any sit-down bike. You must "jump the stirrups" - jump and power down on each peddle all the way to the top of the hill. It's fantastically aerobic, and I just did that particular route at the same average speed - about 19 kph - as I did it 9 years ago. I will test for my 5th degree black belt this coming August. My skin and white hair say one thing, but Louise says my energy and joie de vivre convey something entirely different.
It's fun to be on a flat curve. I just don't want to hang around here forever, though, and my faith makes a huge difference in how I view both my purpose in life and my inevitable departure.
But not for another 25 years, at least. There's too much fun stuff yet to do.
~~~~~
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Ethics
The chief ethical counselor of the US Geological Survey defines ethical behavior as doing the right thing even if you knew that no one was watching. Unclear where nose-picking fits into this.
A major issue of contention between atheists and believers is that ethical behavior comes from a religious tradition. Atheists say no - it's inherent to the human species. Look at me - I'm ethical, they say.
Other atheists - the kind that attribute everything to Darwinian natural selection no matter the paucity of evidence - argue that ethical behavior is a societally-promoted evolutionary end-product. Those who weren't ethical in earlier, less forgiving eras... were killed by tribal or vigilante groups. Conform, help the group - propagate your genes. Thieves and murderers produce fewer children. Case closed.
I challenge any reader to deny that their parents ever corrected their unethical behavior when they were children or teenagers. "You will come with me as we return the toy you stole. And you will apologize." This would seem to imply that people are not born with ethical principles, but I disagree.
It's clear that there is perceived room for interpretation: taking a cheap pen from a hotel room? Taking a towel? Taking a TV? Where do you draw the line? I knew a senior scientist in the USGS who would buy and bring his own drafting pencils to work for fear of using a government pen or pencil to write down a personal note. I watched another scientist ridicule him for this... and once sat beside that other scientist a year later, eating lunch on the edge of a fjord in southeast Alaska. I pointed out a seal watching us from the water... and was stunned when the man pulled out his .44 Magnum pistol and started firing at the seal! I jumped up and asked what the heck? "Everyone has his time," was the laconic reply. I asked him if he'd had a mother, and he didn't reply, but the seal was smarter than me and dove beneath the surface.
Clearly there is a breadth of interpretation about what is right and what is wrong, but surely there must be some basic core principles that everyone from all societies adhere to?
How about killing a human being? In Srebrenica, "Christian" Serbs murdered 8,000 innocent Muslim men and boys in 1995. On 9/11/2001, Muslim fundamentalists murdered 3,000 innocent American men and women - including a significant number of Muslim men and women in the Twin Towers. You could argue that this is just the behavior of sociopaths... but it took a lot of ordinary Serbs to bulldoze the burial trenches, to bus the victims to them, etc., and it took a lot of infrastructure and donations from a wide-ranging Middle East population to pull off 9/11. There was a vast infrastructure and population behind the Holocaust, including hundreds of thousands of "ordinary" people.
Niccolo Machiavelli argued in The Prince that it is better - in terms of stability, economic well-being, and the happiness of society as a whole - for a ruthless ruler (the Prince) to kill some individuals. These could be people who potentially threatened the ruler's power, or they could be innocent individuals being simply being used as an object lesson to instill fear and obedience.
No, left alone, mankind (as opposed to womankind *) seems to be able to carry out vast atrocities - history is full of these. There are far too many of these, in fact, to be attributable to sociopaths and psychopaths. Human beings appear on this planet as infants - nearly empty slates - and they can be molded to do most but not all things.
(* There are exceptions of course, but statistically, most of the murders and atrocities in our society's history are perpetrated by the male half of our dimorphic race.)
There is a history in my paternal line of infidelity - and a lot of women and children suffered terribly because of this. My gentle Uncle James (earlier blog) was a notable exception. The infidelity example, however, was before me as I grew up; I was reminded one way or another nearly every day that other kids had dads, and I didn't. I made a conscious decision as a young man that the infidelity buck, figuratively, stops with me, with my generation.
I believe this decision was rooted in both my childhood loneliness, a basic core level of empathy, and with my growing awareness of a Supreme Being. Even before I gave up atheism I had thought through this particular issue and made that particular decision. Ultimately, I believe ethical behavior stems from recognizing the expectations of our Maker.
Someone IS watching.
A major issue of contention between atheists and believers is that ethical behavior comes from a religious tradition. Atheists say no - it's inherent to the human species. Look at me - I'm ethical, they say.
Other atheists - the kind that attribute everything to Darwinian natural selection no matter the paucity of evidence - argue that ethical behavior is a societally-promoted evolutionary end-product. Those who weren't ethical in earlier, less forgiving eras... were killed by tribal or vigilante groups. Conform, help the group - propagate your genes. Thieves and murderers produce fewer children. Case closed.
I challenge any reader to deny that their parents ever corrected their unethical behavior when they were children or teenagers. "You will come with me as we return the toy you stole. And you will apologize." This would seem to imply that people are not born with ethical principles, but I disagree.
It's clear that there is perceived room for interpretation: taking a cheap pen from a hotel room? Taking a towel? Taking a TV? Where do you draw the line? I knew a senior scientist in the USGS who would buy and bring his own drafting pencils to work for fear of using a government pen or pencil to write down a personal note. I watched another scientist ridicule him for this... and once sat beside that other scientist a year later, eating lunch on the edge of a fjord in southeast Alaska. I pointed out a seal watching us from the water... and was stunned when the man pulled out his .44 Magnum pistol and started firing at the seal! I jumped up and asked what the heck? "Everyone has his time," was the laconic reply. I asked him if he'd had a mother, and he didn't reply, but the seal was smarter than me and dove beneath the surface.
Clearly there is a breadth of interpretation about what is right and what is wrong, but surely there must be some basic core principles that everyone from all societies adhere to?
How about killing a human being? In Srebrenica, "Christian" Serbs murdered 8,000 innocent Muslim men and boys in 1995. On 9/11/2001, Muslim fundamentalists murdered 3,000 innocent American men and women - including a significant number of Muslim men and women in the Twin Towers. You could argue that this is just the behavior of sociopaths... but it took a lot of ordinary Serbs to bulldoze the burial trenches, to bus the victims to them, etc., and it took a lot of infrastructure and donations from a wide-ranging Middle East population to pull off 9/11. There was a vast infrastructure and population behind the Holocaust, including hundreds of thousands of "ordinary" people.
Niccolo Machiavelli argued in The Prince that it is better - in terms of stability, economic well-being, and the happiness of society as a whole - for a ruthless ruler (the Prince) to kill some individuals. These could be people who potentially threatened the ruler's power, or they could be innocent individuals being simply being used as an object lesson to instill fear and obedience.
No, left alone, mankind (as opposed to womankind *) seems to be able to carry out vast atrocities - history is full of these. There are far too many of these, in fact, to be attributable to sociopaths and psychopaths. Human beings appear on this planet as infants - nearly empty slates - and they can be molded to do most but not all things.
(* There are exceptions of course, but statistically, most of the murders and atrocities in our society's history are perpetrated by the male half of our dimorphic race.)
There is a history in my paternal line of infidelity - and a lot of women and children suffered terribly because of this. My gentle Uncle James (earlier blog) was a notable exception. The infidelity example, however, was before me as I grew up; I was reminded one way or another nearly every day that other kids had dads, and I didn't. I made a conscious decision as a young man that the infidelity buck, figuratively, stops with me, with my generation.
I believe this decision was rooted in both my childhood loneliness, a basic core level of empathy, and with my growing awareness of a Supreme Being. Even before I gave up atheism I had thought through this particular issue and made that particular decision. Ultimately, I believe ethical behavior stems from recognizing the expectations of our Maker.
Someone IS watching.
~~~~~
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Rotational Management
In most universities and many (but not all) of Federal government science agencies, there is a practice called rotational management. The theory behind this is that in order to manage scientists, you must be a scientist. This is so that you can hold their respect without beating up on people (an extremely inefficient way to manage), but also so that you can understand what your scientists do - so you can help them do it more effectively. There's another paradigm out there: that you don't really need to understand what your scientists are doing, you just need to be a leader. No, that doesn't make sense to me, either, and I've noticed that scientists operating under this sort of paradigm generally just ignore the management... and hold it in deep contempt.
I've seen two management styles in the USGS. One style I would call collaborative - this is what I practice during my rotational management assignments. I find that when everyone works to set the goals together, they all feel some degree of ownership of those goals - and naturally work that much harder. Scientists living under this style of management are also happier - and naturally more productive as a result.
I've seen a few examples of what I would call totalitarian management. The most egregious example was one where an individual had a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince on his desk (in the original Italian), and openly stated that to be an effective manager one had to use intimidation and fear. He actually lasted as a manager for several years, until it became clear to everyone including his boss that he could no longer hold things together.
I've chalked the few examples of this latter style to inexperience - a scientist who has never managed and suddenly finds herself or himself floundering may reflexively do this. Also, I've seen several cases where a formerly decent person, when they feel they have some power over others, undergo a weird personality change. In two cases, I've seen this style develop in a team or science center when a sociopathic individual somehow was selected as the next leader.
You can guess how things might play out under these two different kinds of leadership. There is an old expression I've heard: "teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves."
During the 2004 eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State, people moved cots into their offices to sleep and were working 18 - 20 hour days to monitor the volcano (which killed 57 people in 1980). They felt they were actually doing something to help their country, to protect their fellow citizens. When the Secretary of the Interior visited the day after the first atmospheric blast on 1 October 2004, she held a press conference which I conducted. After the formal part was over, reporters stuck microphones in the faces of the senior scientists and Interior managers present, including me, standing next to my boss's boss's boss. One radio reporter asked me "What's it like leading a group of high-powered scientists like this?"
I stepped back off the sidewalk into the bushes behind me and replied "I've learned to get out of the way so I don't get run over."
That's why rotational management - when it's done collaboratively - works so well. I cannot imagine how you would otherwise get 80 people present in the Cascades Volcano Observatory at the time to work 186 hours in a single two week stretch (this happened).
I've seen two management styles in the USGS. One style I would call collaborative - this is what I practice during my rotational management assignments. I find that when everyone works to set the goals together, they all feel some degree of ownership of those goals - and naturally work that much harder. Scientists living under this style of management are also happier - and naturally more productive as a result.
I've seen a few examples of what I would call totalitarian management. The most egregious example was one where an individual had a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince on his desk (in the original Italian), and openly stated that to be an effective manager one had to use intimidation and fear. He actually lasted as a manager for several years, until it became clear to everyone including his boss that he could no longer hold things together.
I've chalked the few examples of this latter style to inexperience - a scientist who has never managed and suddenly finds herself or himself floundering may reflexively do this. Also, I've seen several cases where a formerly decent person, when they feel they have some power over others, undergo a weird personality change. In two cases, I've seen this style develop in a team or science center when a sociopathic individual somehow was selected as the next leader.
You can guess how things might play out under these two different kinds of leadership. There is an old expression I've heard: "teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves."
During the 2004 eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State, people moved cots into their offices to sleep and were working 18 - 20 hour days to monitor the volcano (which killed 57 people in 1980). They felt they were actually doing something to help their country, to protect their fellow citizens. When the Secretary of the Interior visited the day after the first atmospheric blast on 1 October 2004, she held a press conference which I conducted. After the formal part was over, reporters stuck microphones in the faces of the senior scientists and Interior managers present, including me, standing next to my boss's boss's boss. One radio reporter asked me "What's it like leading a group of high-powered scientists like this?"
I stepped back off the sidewalk into the bushes behind me and replied "I've learned to get out of the way so I don't get run over."
That's why rotational management - when it's done collaboratively - works so well. I cannot imagine how you would otherwise get 80 people present in the Cascades Volcano Observatory at the time to work 186 hours in a single two week stretch (this happened).
~~~~~
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Uncle James and the Bombing of Dresden
My Uncle James is 88 years old. He's a gentle soul, belying his experience.
As a 14-year-old, his father abandoned him and his mother, and he lived hand-to-mouth in the Depression, shooting squirrels for the family protein and going to high school only half time so he could work to support his Mom. The family farm was foreclosed and they had to move into an attic in Somerset, KY.
During World War II he was drafted and sent to the European Front. Because he had not landed at Normandy - he arrived a month later - he was treated like scum by the others in the regiment he "joined". He was just filling in for their dead friends.
On December 16, 1944, his platoon was at the German frontier with Belgium, the "Lead Dogs" of the push into Germany. He didn't realize until the next morning that what became known as the Battle of the Bulge had begun and was already engulfing him. As the Lead Dogs, they were the last ones out. Several non-commissioned officers, who had treated him and the other late-arrivals with contempt, sent them down a road to guard an intersection - then they headed north. Uncle James' platoon were the sacrificial lambs, and it took James nearly 15 years to come to grips with that horrific act. Of the 25 privates sent down that road to protect their NCO's butts, only 11 were alive by 18 December. I did some research on this on my own, and I believe that the NCO's who did this to James and his buddies were probably caught up in the Malmedy Massacre - where ~500 American captives were herded into a field near Malmedy, Belgium... and machine-gunned down by elements of Joachim Pieper's 1st SS Panzer Division. There is justice in this life for some people if not for others.
There followed 6 months of starvation and cruel slave-labor where James' weight dropped from 186 lbs to 95 lbs (he's 6' tall). He was deliberately poisoned once. His POW train was strafed by an American P-51 once. After six months of living with death all around him, James was repatriated to American lines by the Russians in mid-May 1945. All this time Aunt Alice and my Grandma Wynn had no idea if he was alive or dead. It must have been just as bad for them.
James was working on a Komando - a slave-labor team doing hard scut-work for the Third Reich - when the terrible bombing of Dresden took place, and he watched the scene unfold. The final bomb-rack was cleared only 30 meters from him. He described the horror of this period to me and I built a website to document it - and to honor him.
I have a photo on this website of James at graduation from Boot Camp in Tennessee, and the day he was repatriated on the Czech-German border. His sandy hair is the same, but he is skeletal by comparison. He pointed out that in 6 months his hair and fingernails didn't grow at all. He also mentioned in passing that his feet have been numb for the last 66 years from the frostbite.
There is a lesson in Uncle James' life: no matter what kind of a hand you are dealt, just do your best and be kind to people. James didn't blame the Germans (his mother had been born in Germany just 60 years earlier), and he got over his deep resentment toward the US Army for what they did to him and his little family. He harbored no resentment that he had to show his dog-tags, letters from the Red Cross, and his German POW tags to prove he was a veteran - because someone had lost all his paperwork. He harbored no animosity for the fact that a Bronze Star given to others in his Battalion for surviving the Bulge wasn't given to him until 60 years later... because he had been in a German POW camp at the time.
A record of this amazing story, with maps, photos, and additional details, can be found here.
James made two important points for me:
When he was in the Intersection of Death, hearing German infantry go from foxhole to foxhole and shoot and shoot and shoot, James became convinced he was about to die. He was profoundly aware of his failure to take care of his aging mother and his young wife. Then he heard a voice: "Just like you and I are talking now, Jeff," that they would be OK. That HE would be OK. For the rest of his life, James never doubted where that Voice had come from, and was determined to live his life in an appropriate fashion. He has never feared death since then.
In my last conversation with my Uncle James, he said this:
All that's really important, Jeff, is to seek and then follow The Lord's Will. If you do that you will be happy, because you will be doing what you are here on this Earth for.
I once heard an interesting expression:
Harboring hatred is like drinking poison, hoping it will hurt the other person.
As a 14-year-old, his father abandoned him and his mother, and he lived hand-to-mouth in the Depression, shooting squirrels for the family protein and going to high school only half time so he could work to support his Mom. The family farm was foreclosed and they had to move into an attic in Somerset, KY.
During World War II he was drafted and sent to the European Front. Because he had not landed at Normandy - he arrived a month later - he was treated like scum by the others in the regiment he "joined". He was just filling in for their dead friends.
On December 16, 1944, his platoon was at the German frontier with Belgium, the "Lead Dogs" of the push into Germany. He didn't realize until the next morning that what became known as the Battle of the Bulge had begun and was already engulfing him. As the Lead Dogs, they were the last ones out. Several non-commissioned officers, who had treated him and the other late-arrivals with contempt, sent them down a road to guard an intersection - then they headed north. Uncle James' platoon were the sacrificial lambs, and it took James nearly 15 years to come to grips with that horrific act. Of the 25 privates sent down that road to protect their NCO's butts, only 11 were alive by 18 December. I did some research on this on my own, and I believe that the NCO's who did this to James and his buddies were probably caught up in the Malmedy Massacre - where ~500 American captives were herded into a field near Malmedy, Belgium... and machine-gunned down by elements of Joachim Pieper's 1st SS Panzer Division. There is justice in this life for some people if not for others.
There followed 6 months of starvation and cruel slave-labor where James' weight dropped from 186 lbs to 95 lbs (he's 6' tall). He was deliberately poisoned once. His POW train was strafed by an American P-51 once. After six months of living with death all around him, James was repatriated to American lines by the Russians in mid-May 1945. All this time Aunt Alice and my Grandma Wynn had no idea if he was alive or dead. It must have been just as bad for them.
James was working on a Komando - a slave-labor team doing hard scut-work for the Third Reich - when the terrible bombing of Dresden took place, and he watched the scene unfold. The final bomb-rack was cleared only 30 meters from him. He described the horror of this period to me and I built a website to document it - and to honor him.
I have a photo on this website of James at graduation from Boot Camp in Tennessee, and the day he was repatriated on the Czech-German border. His sandy hair is the same, but he is skeletal by comparison. He pointed out that in 6 months his hair and fingernails didn't grow at all. He also mentioned in passing that his feet have been numb for the last 66 years from the frostbite.
There is a lesson in Uncle James' life: no matter what kind of a hand you are dealt, just do your best and be kind to people. James didn't blame the Germans (his mother had been born in Germany just 60 years earlier), and he got over his deep resentment toward the US Army for what they did to him and his little family. He harbored no resentment that he had to show his dog-tags, letters from the Red Cross, and his German POW tags to prove he was a veteran - because someone had lost all his paperwork. He harbored no animosity for the fact that a Bronze Star given to others in his Battalion for surviving the Bulge wasn't given to him until 60 years later... because he had been in a German POW camp at the time.
A record of this amazing story, with maps, photos, and additional details, can be found here.
James made two important points for me:
When he was in the Intersection of Death, hearing German infantry go from foxhole to foxhole and shoot and shoot and shoot, James became convinced he was about to die. He was profoundly aware of his failure to take care of his aging mother and his young wife. Then he heard a voice: "Just like you and I are talking now, Jeff," that they would be OK. That HE would be OK. For the rest of his life, James never doubted where that Voice had come from, and was determined to live his life in an appropriate fashion. He has never feared death since then.
In my last conversation with my Uncle James, he said this:
All that's really important, Jeff, is to seek and then follow The Lord's Will. If you do that you will be happy, because you will be doing what you are here on this Earth for.
~~~~~
I once heard an interesting expression:
Harboring hatred is like drinking poison, hoping it will hurt the other person.
~~~~~
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