Farewell, Columbia

The Second Space Shuttle Tragedy

Spontaneous Columbia memorial, courtesy of NASA

Yesterday morning, I was making pancakes while my wife went into the "Dog Room" to do a little yoga. She caught a bit of broadcasting as she put her DVD into the player. "I think you'll want to see this," she said.

On the television screen was an image of clear blue sky with a cluster of white streaks. It was the Space Shuttle. "Oh, shit," I said. "It broke up. They're dead." I had seen something like it seventeen years ago, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded during its ascent.

Once the investigation was over, I put the blame for Challenger where the facts pointed, on managerial arrogance at Morton Thiokol and NASA. This time, it appears to be a different form of managerial incompetence, one more deeply ingrained in the human condition, expressed in the bromide, "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp." Under the pressure of dealing with day-to-day difficulties, things that are not critical to be solved this very day — things that can wait because they've waited until now — wait indefinitely. All of us who manage must let things slide in order to keep up with the stuff we know is critical. In this case, the list of safety upgrades to Shuttle technology may have slid too long. Time and investigation will tell.

I say these things, not to start a hunt for scapegoats — there are likely to be none this time — but to direct the attention of my fellow believers in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to look to the Human Condition, rather than to Divine Judgement. In particular, I think of the Iraqi official who claimed that the accident was God's Judgement against Israel and the United States. By that same logic, one could attribute the decline of the Arab Islamic world with respect to the West since 1400 (as described by Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong) to God's Judgement against Muslims. As I assume the official in question would hesitate to do that, I consider that he should hesitate to declare God's Judgement concerning the Columbia.

But now we must turn to the human cost paid by the Columbia's crew — Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Blair Salton Clark, and Ilan Roman — and their families and friends. Their loss is the incalculable loss of seven worlds that might have been. Worlds that they all very much wanted. May God comfort the survivors according to their needs, and bring them in time to experience healing of their grief.

This human cost is also felt by the whole People of the United States, and by the peoples of India and Israel. The media will ask, is manned space flight worth the risk? Is it worth the money? Let me start with the second to answer the first.

Manned space flight has not been economically worthwhile since it began, and will not be economically worthwhile for the foreseeable future. We are not in it for the money.

Manned space flight has never yielded any scientific knowledge that could not have been gained by unmanned flight (other than the response of the human body to long-term weightlessness), nor is it likely to do so for a very long time. We are not in it for the science.

What manned space flight has yielded, is astonishing advances in engineering and engineering management — the twin arts/sciences/diciplines/practices of making and using things that work. But we are not in it for the engineering. We aren't in it even for the prestige — its no longer new enough to astonish the world with each marginal advance.

We are in manned space flight for just one thing — the adventure. If we turn away from that adventure, we turn away from a future as grand as the Universe to a smaller destiny sandwiched between the top of the atmosphere and the bottom of the sea. Never mind that we will tie the fate of humanity to the fate of one small, vulnerable planet — I'm thinking much shorter term than that.
If we turn away from manned space flight we will diminish our culture here and now. We will slip from a culture of boundless optimism to a culture of limits. We will achieve less, because we will attempt less. We will begin to stagnate. What the astronauts bought for us with their courage was Hope in this world.

Manned space flight is not worth doing in itself. It is worth doing because it helps make all the other things worth doing. Let us honor the courage, the drive, the spirit, and the sacrifice of Columbia's crew by doing what they would have us do — let us continue.

And some day, we will find a way up from earth's gravity well, and a way to fly through space, that will take us to the stars.

Editor's Note: The discipline required to do complex and dangerous things safely is practiced by High Reliability Organizations. NASA appears not to be one of them.

Under the Ban

Abortion before Roe v. Wade

I remember the way it was before Roe v. Wade.

One of my college classmates, call him Steve, had a girlfriend we'll call Lori, who went to another school. Despite their passion, they took their responsibility seriously, and used birth control every time. But she still got pregnant.

There was no question of having the baby. They were at critical junctures of their lives, in which continuing their educations was a make-or-break endeavor to escape poverty. They could not stay in college without help from their families, who would have insisted that they drop out and get married.
Instead, Steve managed to raise some money, and they flew secretly to a nearby state where Lori could get an abortion. They returned the same day, to make it look like a long, but ordinary date. The abortion was legal and safe, except for their rushing in, having the procedure, and rushing out to catch the plane. At the clinic, Lori was fine. On the plane, she hemorrhaged.

She bled for days. She felt weak, and hid her paleness with make-up. She knew she needed medical help, but she waited, hoping to keep her secret. By the Grace of God, the bleeding finally stopped.
Steve felt guilty for risking Lori's life, and for killing the life that would have been their child. He tried to believe in reincarnation — that somehow, the kid would get another chance. Not long after that, his relationship with Lori died, too. They haven't communicated in almost 30 years.

There is a lesson in this for both those pro-choice and pro-life. For the pro-choice it is this: According to the founding documents of our republic, we are endowed with rights by our Creator, including the right to life. To any thinking person of faith, it is blasphemy to assert that our Creator gives us the right to kill the lives that would otherwise become our children. Abortion is not a right — it's a wrong. It may be a need, given the state of human nature. As long as we guarantee access to abortion, it is a freedom. But it's still wrong. The pro-choice cause is hurt by pretending otherwise.

For the pro-life the lesson is this: Given the tragic state of human nature, good people — people more moral than most — are going to get abortions, with or without Roe v. Wade. It's just that without it, more middle-class girls will become injured or dead, more poor girls will become mothers, and more unwanted children will be neglected and abused. I know a conservative Christian who became pro-choice after working with abused children who had been made wards of the court.

Both sides need to admit that human nature is such that we knowingly do wrong, we deny that we know it, and we develop wrong-headed solutions to stop ourselves. Defending a woman's freedom to choose abortion will no more make you a good person than denying her that freedom. We cannot by our own efforts perfect ourselves — all attempts by societies to do so have ended horrendously, from gas chambers of National Socialism, to the Cambodian killing fields — and you know it.

I hope that bit of rhetoric pissed you off. You pro-choice and pro-life people out there might just drop your attacks on each other for a moment, and for the love of God, listen to each other. Give the other side its due when it tells the truth. Consider what reasonable limits we might place on the freedom to choose abortion — because all freedoms must have limits. Stop playing a single-issue politics that gives us is a corrupted judiciary and a demeaned public discourse. We ask our politicians, "Are you pro-choice or pro-life," when we should ask, "What is Justice?" and "How do you plan to lead us closer to achieving it?"

The freedom to choose abortion is the freedom to kill while you can still convince yourself that you're not killing your child. It's a freedom the majority of us grant to increase your odds (or your partner's odds) of surviving what some of you would probably do anyway. It is our way of helping our prodigal sons and daughters survive to return someday. But preserving the freedom to choose abortion is evil, and it is doubly evil to assert otherwise. It's just that letting girls like Lori die would be evil, too.

And for those who have had abortions, there is Forgiveness. It's free for anyone who knows they need it.

Thoughts on Peacemaking

The Necessity of Non-Violence

contributed by Robert Franklin

But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
All I ever had, is songs of freedom
Won't you help to sing, these songs of freedom
Cause all I ever had, redemption songs
Redemption songs
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the book
Won't you help to sing, these songs of freedom
Cause all I ever had, redemption songs
Redemption songs, redemption songs"
- Bob Marley, Redemption Song

Somewhere between starting a new book for an anthropology class and Goodbye Earl by the Dixie Chicks, I was struck by the powerful feeling that violence is inescapable. The book I was reading is entitled: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (Piccador, 1998). Striking as the title seems, what struck me more was the following paragraph:

"We went on through the first room and out the far side. There was another room and another and another and another. They were full of bodies, and more bodies were scattered in the grass, and they were stray skulls in the grass, which was thick and wonderfully green. Standing outside, I heard a crunch. The old Canadian colonel stumbled in front of me, and I saw, though he did not notice, that his foot had rolled on a skull and broken it. For the first time at Nyarubuye my feelings focused, and what I felt was a small but keen anger at this man. Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too." (p.20)

Gourevich describes the aftermath of a massacre, one of many in a planned genocide perpetrated by the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Upon flying into this village in Rwanda, Gourevitch is exposed to the aftermath of death — of murder, of brutality, of ... the product of human action.
Initially I wasn't sure why the paragraph I quoted struck me, why it got me thinking. Then it hit me - Gourevich unconsciously stepped on a human skull too. He had become angry with the Canadian colonel for accidentally desiccated a kind of sacred space, a grotesque and macabre combination of graveyard and slaughterhouse. Then, Gourevich found himself committing the same transgression - desecrating the remains of the dead.

Twenty-seven pages into We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families, I had to put it down and stop for a while since it had become too hard for me to read. It made me feel sick to my stomach. Why? The incident in Rwanda is nonunique. By now, with our history, you'd think I would be fairly nonplused by massacres. After all, how many have there been in the twentieth century alone? How much exposure have we, as a culture, and as individuals, had to this kind of violence? For starters, there was the Holocaust during World War II.

Art Spiegelman brings Auschwitz tortures to life in Maus:

"But after a few weeks I got too sick even to eat ... Typhus! I got very hot fever and I couldn't sleep. Typhus! Every night people died of this. At night I had to go to the toilet down. It was always full, the whole corridor, with the dead people piled there. You couldn't go through... You had to go on their heads, and this was terrible, because it was so slippery, the skin, you thought you are falling, and this was every night. So now I had Typhus, and I had to go to the toilet down, and I said, 'Now it's my time. Now I will be lying like this ones and somebody will step on me!'"

If Spiegelman's account doesn't move you, there's always Eli Wiesel's Night or perhaps Speilberg's Schindler's List.

Yet it goes on. The Killing Fields of Asia. The Scorched Earth Campaign in El Salvador. But this is nothing new, considering our blood littered history. Cortés and the conquistadors. The Spanish Inquisition. The Crusades. Violence seems to be the brutal and inescapable reality.

Considering the intrinsic nature of violence in our world overwhelms me. In our culture, we constantly immerse ourselves in violence. We entertain ourselves with violence: Our movies - Full Metal Jacket, Braveheart, The Godfather, to name a few (I have intentionally listed movies I count among my favorites); Our television; And our high culture, even the Immortal Bard - are infused with violence. One of my favorite works of western literature, Hamlet, has, at it's base, an act of violence. Even our children's toys. Thinking about it, almost all of my toys as a boy involved violence in some way shape or form, from the obvious G.I. Joe to my Legos. Even chess is, at the most basic level, a war game.

At this point all the pop culture sermons about the inculturation of violence are knocking around inside of my head. And I've decided to ignore them. Let me explain.

I am a pacifist.

I have chosen to live my life without intentionally committing an act of violence against another human being. This however, becomes something of a pragmatic and philosophical problem for me. As an American who is physically ineligible for police and military service (necessary violence?) and who does not own a gun — the odds of me killing someone intentionally are pretty slim. Besides, if worse comes to worse, I have no qualms about turning tale and running. Yet it's relatively easy for me to commit an act of violence against someone unintentionally or indirectly. I can easily do physical or psychological harm to someone I've never met by buying clothing made in a sweat shop and thus perpetuating the exploitation of an oppressed group of fifteen year old girls. I can say something in jest that does psychological harm to someone around me. I can ignore the cry of someone for help and commit an indirect act of violence by allowing violence to happen.

It seems violence is inescapable. Unless I choose to make all my own cloths from material I wove myself, never say a wrong word, and run to the aid of anyone who might remotely stand the risk of being in physical danger, I can't escape violence. And if I managed to accomplish all of those things, I'd be a mute Martha Stewart meets Ghandi meets Superman. That's not something I would choose to be, though I wouldn't mind being a little more like Ghandi.

I am therefore left with the inescapable, so what now?

Micah 6:8 says, "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

As with most things scriptural, the interpretation of this passage is up for grabs. I feel comfortable in saying four people I hold in the highest regard, all Saints in their own right, would each say something different about the passage. Roman Catholic Arch-Bishop Oscar Romero demonstrated his as he turned against the oppressive structure he had his origins in, and eventually was martyred for his (our) cause. Episcopal Arch-Bishop Desmond Tutu demanded justice on a global level for his (our) people. Mother Theresa lived her interpretation in the streets of Calcutta. St. Benedict had an intense personal understanding of humility.

I have chosen those four because each represents a different aspect of Micah 6:8 for me. Archbishop Romero and Archbishop Tutu demonstrated what it was to do justice. I chose them because they did not exhibit justice as most Americans today think of it. Their justice was not one in which individuals received due punishment or reward for their actions. On the most basic level, if we all got what we really deserved, based on our individual sins, we'd be in a lot of trouble. Romero and Tutu had a concept of peace making justice. Instead of demanding the blood of those who oppressed them, they demanded compassion and equity for everyone. Most importantly, they put themselves on the line for justice. Tutu marched countless times in protests and spoke out directly and clearly against the oppressive power of Apartheid. Romero celebrated the Eucharist with peasants after being stripped and humiliated by soldiers and was eventually martyred for his pursuit of justice.

Mother Theresa understood, on a level much deeper than I ever may, what it was to love kindness. She gave intense and personal care to the sick and dying that no one else would touch. If picking up a disease infested, maggot ridden, starving, smelly, dying beggar out of shit strewn sewers doesn't show what it means to love kindness, nothing does.

Benedict knew what humility meant. The first word of his Rule is "Listen." The Rule of Benedict teaches us to listen to others, and to defer to others without letting go of who we are and our own needs. We are taught balance and inner peace. These are the things we need for humility.

Yet these are not the only valid interpretations of Micah 6:8. Each of us must come to terms with our own world views. Each individual must come to terms with what being human means. Each of us must come to terms with what it means to cope with violence in our world.

I offer a few caveats though. It is not possible to shut ourselves off from the world. Just because something involves violence does not mean it looses its value. Exempla gratia, the movies I listed earlier. They all have tremendous value as cinema and art. As for Hamlet, anybody who tries to convince me that because it involves violence it has no value might as well take up arguing with brick walls. Violence is indeed a part of our culture, yet we are indeed called to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.

Sometimes, violence is inescapable for the oppressed. What options do the victims of a genocide campaign have but to try to defend themselves lest their race be wiped off the face of the earth? Can we say, in all fairness, that the Hitler should have been fought with only non-violent means?
Realistically, there is no way we will ever be rid of violence as long as humans run the world. Does pacifism then become an exercise in futility?

Not in the least.

Pacifism and peacemaking are no more futile in the dealing with violence than medicine is in fighting disease and death. Everyone will inevitably get sick and die. This does not make medicine useless or invaluable. Medical science keeps us healthy and improves our quality of life, it helps to advance us and to preserve us. Medicine makes whole what was broken. Peacemaking and pacifism do no less.

Those that choose to respond to violence with peace, with justice, mercy, kindness, and listening, are the brokers of healing in a world ridden with violence. When somebody has lost everything - family, home, land, worldly possessions, faith, and identity, the only thing left is a story that nobody can take away. A little over a year ago I got to spend a considerable amount of time with six massacre survivors from El Salvador. These folks experienced a whole sale exodus from their home to another country, across the mountains and back again. What they had to give were their stories. And the telling of these stories was a healing experience for them. The act of telling the story is an act of peacemaking.

Peacemakers are the recipients and the tellers of these stories. Yet to receive a story is not the end. There is a call to act on the story. Ask Desmond, Oscar, or Theresa.

It is painfully clear that peace does not immediately come from these stories; look to Northern Ireland. But they give us a starting point. Once we come to grips with the stories, we have a road map of sorts to follow. We know where the injury is and where the healing begins.

Gourevitch and Speigleman gave us stories. This is the way peace is made, by the telling of stories and by listening. How does this solve my pacifist dilemma? I accept that violence is a part of my world and de facto a part of my life. I choose to not directly perpetrate violence against others. I choose to avoid perpetrating indirect violence against others when it is in my power to do so. I choose to listen. I choose to act on what I hear. I choose to share what I hear with the masses, speaking truth to power. I choose to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with my God.

Pax domini semper tecum sit.

The Best and Most Useful Lie Ever Told

The Reality and Unreality of Calculus

We're going to make the lie true. - Maggie in Tennesee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1955

At a web site devoted in large part to the ethics of honesty over and against the ethics of moral purity, it is only fair to acknowledge the limits of honesty itself. After all, complete honesty requires complete self-insight, which none of us has unless it is a gift of God. Besides, sometimes something less than honesty can have great practical value, especially in applied mathematics.

Now mathematics itself can't lie, because it is its own context. It is a language that, if you follow its grammatical rules, guarantees truth, because it only talks about itself. The lie comes in the misapplication of mathematics to real-world situations. Or as Disraeli once said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." But let's skip statistics and get right to the root of it all - calculus, the subject I think every college freshman should study.¹

Calculus, especially differential calculus, is used to model almost all the physics we know. This modeling is based on the idea that we can evaluate a function of position and time at points that are arbitrarily close to each other. Suppose for example that we do not know the value of a function at point B, but we do in the region around B. We simply keep picking points A closer and closer to point B, and note the trend in the value of the function we're interested in. This is called taking the limit of our function as point A approaches point B.

To be concrete about this, suppose you wrote down the times you passed certain distance markers as you drove down the highway. For our function we could take the distance between any two markers (in miles or kilometers) and divide by the time (in hours) it took you to drive between the markers, giving your speed in either miles or kilometers per hour. That would give us your average speed between the markers. To get your instantaneous speed, we would have to measure your position at two points infinitesmally close together and divide by the infinitesmally small time interval it took you to go between them. While this may present a problem for actual measurement, it's no problem for mathematics.

Now, as long as we have gone this far, we could take the difference between your instantaneous speeds at two infinitesmally close points along the road, divide by the infinitesmally small time interval it took you to pass from one to the other and get your instantaneous acceleration - the instantaneous change in your instantaneous speed (in miles or kilometers per hour per hour). It is this instantaneous acceleration that Newton was referring to when he wrote "F=ma," or "force equals mass times acceleration," the equation upon which all our physics, directly or indirectly, is based.

The problem is that these limits as one point gets infinitesmally close to another don't really exist. The existence of such a limit presupposes that space and time have no gaps - that they are continuous - which means that you can go smoothly from point A to point B without encountering any holes in the "fabric" of space and time. In fact, the requirements are more stringent: also disallowed are creases, kinks, knots, edges, passageways like the holes in a sponge, etc. For the notion of limits (on which calculus depends) to be valid, the ride from A to B must be much smoother that it possibly can be.

Of course, you don't notice rough spots in space and time while driving your car or walking down the street, because they are quite small, much smaller than an atomic nucleus, or even a sub-atomic particle. But we suspect they're there, because of the probable existence of quantum gravitational zero-point oscillations, the so-called "spacetime foam" mentioned in a previous essay.² Such a foam may seem smooth to say, a sub-atomic particle, but would be far too rough for calculus to be valid all the way down to infinitesmally small scales.

Another reason I suspect the calculus of being invalid is macroscopic, the so-called Einstein-Poldosky-Rosen paradox,³ which begins like this. Suppose you had a sub-atomic particle that had no intrinsic angular momentum, or spin. Further suppose the particle decays into two more "daughter" particles, each of the same mass, that move apart because of the energy released by the decay. Conservation of linear momentum guarantees that the particles move in opposite directions at equal speeds. And conservation of angular momentum guarantees that each particle would spin in the direction opposite that of the other, so that the two spins would cancel each other out if the particles could be brought back together.

Now, according to our understanding of quantum mechanics, the axis about which the daughter particles spin does not come into existence until a measurement of the spin is made. (This is also a statement about the isotropy of the universe - since space is the same in all directions, there is no preferred axis about which the particles will spin.) The spin of the particle is a potential quantity, which gets made actual by the act of measurement.

And here is the paradox: The other particle, whose axis of spin is also undetermined, instantaneously assumes an equal and opposite spin about the same axis as the first particle measured, regardless of how far away the measurement was made. This appears to violate the principle of Special Relativity that no signal can travel faster than the speed of light.

The paradox is resolved by claiming that neither of the particles by itself forms a complete quantum mechanical system. The system is non-local, which means that until the measurement is made, the two particles are actually one quantum mechanical object. After the measurement, they are each a separate and complete system.

This non-locality is a nice bit of philosophical reasoning, and it's well supported by theory (the work of John S. Bell, among others) and experiment (particularly those of Alain Aspect and co-workers). But in order to make quantum mechanics conform rigorously to Special Relativity I think we need to go further.

In particular, a principal (albeit largely esthetic) tenet of the so-called "Einstein Programme" for theoretical physics is that all physics is local physics, and that all interactions are local interactions. This "locality principle" implies that there must be some sense in which the distance between the two particles in the "non-local" state is actually zero. Allow me to leap from science into speculation.

The particles in the "non-local state" are clearly separated by some distance in three-dimensional space (actually four-dimensional space-time). Perhaps the non-local state of the particles itself creates a bridge between them in one or more other dimensions, which collapses when a measurement is made on either one of them. The total separation between them would then have to be reckoned according to a five- or higher-dimensional formula, which would give zero, even though the three-dimensional part that we're currently aware of is much greater than zero. Figure 1 below shows a cartoon image of this concept. ⁴

Figure 1. Diagram illustrating a speculative interpretation of the EPR thought experiment. When the spin of either particle of the pair is observed, the quantum mechanical state "collapses" and the higher-dimensional zero-length topological connection between them is broken. The curved "strip of paper" in the figure is meant to represent three-dimensional space. Time is represented by the tracks of the particles, positions since their emission from the parent-particle decay process.

The existence of such a bridge would mean that little higher-dimensional pathways spring up and disappear all the time in our universe, which brings us back to the calculus. The universe may be too swiss-cheesy with sub-microscopic higher-dimensional holes for the smoothness requirments of calculus to be met. In other words, the idea that calculus actually describes reality is a lie.

But it's a good one, because it's so very nearly true that we didn't notice any problems with it for three hundred years. For the most part we still don't notice. We can calculate orbits that get people to the moon and back with calculus. We figured out electromagnetism with it, which gave us radios, televisions, computers, Walkmans, and so much more. And I guarantee that a more accurate theory will be much harder (if not impossible) to use for solving the problems for which calculus works well.

In conclusion, I can say that our mathematics is not so much a map of reality as a metaphor for it. Our current metaphor, the calculus, has such a grip on our imaginations that we physicists will do almost anything to save it, including inventing Supersymmetric String Theories.⁵ But for practical purposes thus far, calculus is extremely powerful and convenient. If it is ultimately a lie to describe physical reality with it, it is the best and most useful one ever told.

Notes

1. See, Teach Your Children.
2. See, Science and Faith.
3. The most complete discussion I know of this "thought experiment" is in John S. Bell's Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 1987. Since most of the discussions are somewhat technical, I recommend you check it out of the library rather than buy it, unless you've already taken an undergraduate course in quantum mechanics.
4. For the physicists in the readership, this means that I think that the "collapse of the wavefunction" may be linked to topology change for the case of non-local states. The dimensionality of the "bridge" is equal to the number of non-local quantum numbers describing the state. Janet B. Jones-Oliviera pointed out to me that this type of topology change is fundamentally irreversible. I wonder if any of this might imply altering current methods for calculating Feynman diagrams.
5. String theories were invented because taking the limit as point A goes to point B causes certain physical quantities like the self-energy of a point-like particle to become infinite. Although there are mathematically well established ways to handle these infinities in most field theories, they don't work with gravity. Therefore the current rage in physics is to do away with the notion of point-like particles and to pretend that all fundamental particles are closed loops, or strings. This fixes the immediate problem of the infinities, but still hasn't yielded a practical theory. I think this is because the "foaminess" of spacetime at this level has yet to be addressed with a mathematics that has no "points" (or point-substitutes) at all unless some physics makes them happen. Actually, space-time may be "foamy" (multiply connected) even at the macroscopic level, if my speculation regarding the Einstein-Poldosky-Rosen thought experiment has any substance to it.

Some Abortion Facts

Where are Men when we need them?

...I always asked, ‘What situation caused you to make this decision?’ I expected to hear tales of financial woe, yet nearly 90% of the women told me they had had their abortion because of a relationship – someone they loved, a boyfriend or a parent, told them to.... ‘I would have had that baby,’ I heard repeatedly, ‘if only I’d had one person to stand by me.’ – Frederica Matthewes-Green , National Review, December 31, 1997, p41

Facts:

• 1.4 million abortions are performed in the US per year, 44% on women who have had previous abortions, 82% on women who are unmarried or separated. This is enough for 43% of American women to have an abortion during their lives at present rates.
• 89% of abortions in US are performed before 12 weeks, 1% after 20 weeks (90% of these for non-medical reasons).
• D&X (Dilation and Extraction) A late-term (post 20 week) procedure in which the fetus is brought feet first into the birth canal, a large needle is inserted into its skull, its brain suctioned out, and the fetus removed. Popularly known as "partial birth" abortion.
• D&E (Dilation and Evacuation) A late-term procedure in which a serrated forceps is inserted into the womb, and the fetus dismembered and removed. More common than D&X, above.
• In D&X or D&E the fetus is usually, but not always, killed first, by cutting umbilical cord or via injection of digoxin or other lethal agent. The rationale for not killing the fetus before suctioning its brain or cutting it to pieces is a better medical outcome for mother, and that the nervous system of fetus not sufficiently developed to "appreciate pain."
• Women who have had late-term abortions for non-medical reasons tend to be young, living with their parents, and to have involved their parents in the decision. The inference is that it just took a long time for the families to reach a decision to abort.

– US News & World Report, January 1998, pp 20-32

• To survive, a very premature baby usually must have developed at least 23 weeks. – US News & World Report, March 30, 1998, p60.

Conclusions:

Women who seek abortion do so often because there is no one they can turn to for the love and help they need to raise a child. As long as so many of our men are not man enough to help raise their children, beating those women with the blunt instrument of the Law will generally be the wrong solution. We need to build consensus on abortion, rather than to continue a polarized debate that so far has led to a widening gulf between the political left and right that threatens the integrity of our society.

Late term abortions, however, are particularly grisly, whether the unborn fetus has its brains sucked out through a needle, or whether it is cut to pieces in its mother’s womb. Although there is national disagreement as to whether a fetus at a given stage of development is a baby, there is no disagreement that it is rapidly becoming a baby, and that late-term abortions tread perilously close to infanticide, especially considering that only about 10% of them are done for medical reasons. Fortunately, they are performed rarely enough that doing without them will not cause a major dislocation in our society. While we tone down the pro-life and pro-choice shouting, let us also back away from non-medical D&E’s and D&X’s, and do so in our morals, in our medical ethics, and in our Law.

To Kill a Mass Murderer

Timothy James McVeigh was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 men, women, and children. He stood accused with Terry Lynn Nichols, and a possible third man. I imagine that every prospective juror was asked the following two questions:

Given the press coverage of this case so far, do you think you can evaluate the evidence objectively?

Well, we have the press reporting a supposed confession by Mr. McVeigh. Did he really confess? And regardless of whether he did, did the defense leak something to the press so that later they could claim that they didn't get a fair trial, or did the prosecution leak something so as to gain credibility with the public? We live in an age of what the New Testament writers called pornoia, or whoredom, in which the legal profession and the press feed off each other in such a way as to undermine public confidence in our system of justice. I think I could evaluate the evidence objectively because I don't trust a word of what I've heard or read so far.

How do you feel about sentencing someone to death for this type of crime?

I could not support the death penalty for two reasons.

The first is a matter of principle:

I think the people of the United States, and their government should avoid killing people unless it's absolutely necessary to do so. An alternative to killing Mr. McVeigh, should he be found guilty, is life imprisonment. Which should mean exactly what it says. It should be impossible for a person sentenced to life in prison to come up for parole unless the sentence is modified to read, "life in prison, but with possibility of parole after twenty years, or age seventy, whichever comes last," or something similar. The only real reason to kill Mr. McVeigh, if he is found guilty, is because we fear that we do not have the will to keep him in prison, which means that we will be killing Mr. McVeigh because of our own character flaws, rather than his. It is also arrogant -- by killing Mr. McVeigh we would be denying that we have the same inner demons that he has, all the while enjoying the act of letting those demons have him as their victim.

The second is a matter of fairness:

The ways we kill convicted criminals — poison gas, electrocution, lethal injection — are far more gentle than the kinds of death nature has in store for most of the rest of us. I have even had lethal injections given to my sick and aged pets as acts of mercy. I would rather make a mass murderer wait in prison to take his or her chances with a death just as unpleasant as that which may await me, or say, my mother. I don't see that committing a heinous crime should guarantee a person a better death than the rest of us.

Editor's Note: I have since changed my mind about this after having studied and worked in the field of counter-terrorism. Kill the guy before he has a chance to publish anything or otherwise have his say.

Speak of the Devil

My friend's wife suspects me of being a carnal Christian, one given to rationalizing the Gospel to approve the pleasures of the flesh. Far from it. I am an intellectual Christian, one given to rationalizing, period. Since I consider my mind a gift to be used in the service of the One who gave it to me, I give it her litmus test of my faith.

"Do you believe in the Devil?" she asked.

The one about whom there are neither harmless questions, nor harmless answers. You have been warned.

If ever I have encountered the Devil, it was in church. I spoke briefly in favor of relaxing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's position with regard to gay church members at a convention of its Sierra-Pacific synod. As I spoke, and for a long time after, I could feel hate coming from the more conservative delegates. Hate willing me to stop speaking, to stop being. Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe it was body language and group dynamics. Or maybe it was a transpersonal malevolence originating in the Father of Lies. (A conservative reader will doubtless nominate the Wrath of God, but that feels like anger, not hate.)
As a scientist, I prefer the second of the above alternatives. We are a social species, and communicate in so many ways that Jung's idea of the collective unconscious makes sense. We can act and even feel together, with or without the mediation of many words. That is to say, we don't need the Devil in order to engage in individual or collective evil. We do it quite thoroughly on our own.
Popular Christianity, however, does need the Devil, and weaves a fabulous story about him. Satan together with his rebel angels wages war against God, who throws them out of heaven. Then, as summarized by Milton in the argument to Book III of Paradise Lost.

God sitting on his Throne sees Satan flying toward this world ... foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind; clears his own Justice and Wisdom from all imputation, having created Man free and able enough to have withstood his Tempter; yet declares his purpose of grace toward him, in regard he fell not of his own malice, as did Satan, but by him seduc't. The Son of God renders praises to his father for the manifestation of his gracious purpose toward Man; but God again declares that Grace cannot be extended toward Man without the satisfaction of divine Justice; Man hath offended the majesty of God by aspiring to Godhead, and therefore with all his Progeny devoted to death must die, unless someone can be found sufficient to answer for his offence, and undergo his Punishment. The Son of God freely offers himself a Ransom for Man...

One thing is obvious in this spiritual cosmology: without corruption, there would be no need for redemption, and hence no Redeemer. Without Satan, there would be no Christ.
Now making Satan, the source of all evil, necessary for Christ to be our Saviour is equivalent to making Satan co-equal with Christ — perhaps his meaner, weaker, younger brother, but in any case, of the same order of being. Since in Christian theology Christ is "of one being" with God, this makes Satan of the same order of being as God. The name for this theory is dualism, the idea that the universe is ruled by two gods, one good, one evil.
This point was not lost on the African genius, St. Augustine of Hippo, who has dominated Christian thought since the the Goths sacked Rome. He considered the Devil to be an angel, created originally good by God. The Devil then chose to love himself more than God, which was a turning away from God to a necessarily lesser good. This turning was itself evil, and diminished not God, but the Devil. Thus for Augustine, there is only one God, but God permits the emergence of evil as an absence of good, rather than as an independent quality in itself.
Augustine then argues in The City of God (XI, 18) that the existence of good is made more brilliant by the opposition of its contrary (or lack), and that therefore the existence of evil is itself ultimately good. Thus, the goodness of God cannot be impugned. In other words, Augustine reconciles the concepts of monotheistic benevolence and Satanic malevolence by sleight of rhetoric.
Less obvious than the dualism of Milton's godhead is the stupendous leap of imagination that Milton's story represents from anything found in the Bible. While it is true that Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tells of a talking serpent beguiling the original couple to disobey the only prohibition God had placed upon them, the War in Heaven does not appear until Revelations, the last book of the Bible, and could be read as a vision of humanity's future as easily as of its past. It occupies all of three verses (Rev. 12:7-9) of the Bible. There is also a phrase in Isaiah (14:12), "How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" It is part of a taunt (Is 14:4-23) against the then king of Babylon, who had fallen on hard times. Finally, Jesus congratulates his disciples by referring to this phrase in Luke (10:18), "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven," upon hearing of the success of his disciples in casting out demons. And that is it. If there is a written antecedent of Milton's story of the War in Heaven, it is outside the written Judeo-Christian canon.
It may be that the Jewish and Christian writers and editors of the Bible omitted this tale because it is absurd, as noted by the American revolutionary patriot Thomas Paine in the Age of Reason,

Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in Heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded - put Satan into the pit - let him out again - giving him triumph over the whole creation - damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, these Christian Mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together. They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and Man, and also the Son of God, celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple.

Small wonder that, as Christopher Ricks says in his introduction to Paradise Lost, "you could just about date the decline of the story itself, as a vehicle for moral and religious truth, from Milton's great telling of it." Yet this story still simmers beneath the surface of Christianity, for Paine referred to it more than a century after it was written as if it defined Christianity, and my friend identified it as defining Satan more than two centuries after Paine.
On the other hand, if we reject the War in Heaven as too poorly founded in scripture to define either Christianity or the Devil, we are left with the question, "Just who or what is this Devil, anyway?"
To begin with, the Devil so called is entirely absent from the Old Testament, and not just because the word devil comes from Greek rather than Hebrew. The wrathful, jealous God of the OT is a God of power, rather than goodness. He has sufficient character to encompass both good and evil, as we humans understand such things, and he denies our right to judge him. "Will you condemn Me that you may be justified?" he says to rebuke Job (Job 40:8).
Now it is true that in the book of Job God has an employee called an Adversary or Accuser, or in Hebrew a Satan, but this is not the Devil we know from the New Testament. The Satan asks, "Does Job fear God for nothing?" (Job 1:9) which precipitates God's test of Job's faith. This Satan is skeptical, and therefore dangerous, but not necessarily evil.
In fact, the Satan is not very important in the Old Testament. Other than in the book of Job, the Satan gets one mention in Chronicles, one in the Psalms, and two in Zechariah. Moreover, the Satan does not appear in Old Testament writings dating earlier than the time a large number of Israelites were exiled to Babylon. Presumably the Israelites there picked up some Zoroastrian influence regarding the conflict between Ahura Mazda, the God of Light, and Ahriman, the equally powerful God of Darkness. That is to say, the concept of the Devil that we have inherited from the early Christians seems to have come from a religion in which there are two gods, rather than one. (I am indebted to Homer W. Smith's Man and His Gods for this hypothesis.)
Nevertheless, this idea of the Devil had become current in various Jewish sects before the coming of Christ. It was written down, for example in the pre-Christian Book of Enoch (which is quoted in the epistle of Jude, and is available to modern readers in The Apocryphal Old Testament, H. F. D. Sparks, ed, Oxford University Press). Jesus apparently believed he was struggling against this sort of Devil, especially as personified in the actions of his enemies. Since then Christians have followed his lead, further refining their ideas of who the Devil was as they accused their oppressors or opponents of doing the Devil's work, even to the present day. (See Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan and Andrew DelBanco's The Death of Satan for a detailed history.)
That is to say, ever since its earliest days, the Christian Church has found the concept of the Devil to be useful. It is also powerful, considering the evil that has been done in fighting the Devil. One has only to mention the Inquisition, in which suspected heretics were tortured and killed in Europe, and the trials in Salem, Massachussetts, in which harmless old women were executed for practicing witchcraft.
And of course, the power of the concept comes from its source, from us. Speaking psychologically, the Devil represents everything we don't want to be, and for many of us, he represents those parts of our souls we don't want to acknowledge. Which, considering the mention of carnality at the beginning of this piece, brings us, for example, to one of humanity's favorite obsessions, sex.
Sexual promiscuity has never been a victimless crime. It is a crime against the whole society in that it threatens to undermine the prosperity of society by creating large numbers of poorly socialized, ill-fed (and thus sickly) people, who then commit crimes of property and spread disease and disorder. Even if promiscuity could be rendered harmless in terms of creating illegitimacy, it would still undermine society by creating an ecological niche for enterprising microorganisms (such as AIDS) to exploit. On the other hand, such rational, economic and public health arguments against sexual promiscuity have never motivated most people to repress their sexual urges.
Society has found it much more effective to threaten promiscuity with Divine Wrath, and to get its citizens to disavow their sexual urges by associating them with an external, terrifying, numinous agent — the Devil. That is to say, it is much easier to fight against an internal drive if you can divorce yourself from it, if you can get yourself to believe it doesn't come from you. And you will be much more motivated to perform this internal divorce if you are taught that this urge is really bad, so that you have to wall it off from the rest of yourself in order to be good. One consequence of which is that, since a psychic barrier within the self must always be in danger of breaking down, the person who erects one will often feel him or herself to be under threat from the Devil.
Now a person who disowns his or her sexuality is probably impaired in his or her ability to sustain genuinely intimate relationships, because the implicit sexuality in all human encounters (we are each male or female after all) may be threatening to such a person. To the extent that this occurs, a disowned sexuality that imputes desire to temptation by the Devil is itself demonic in that it impairs a person's ability to love.
In short, much of what is imputed to the Devil is really just ourselves not wanting to acknowledge who we are, to confess our Sin as it were. Instead, we disown parts of ourselves, and seek to injure, diminish, dismiss, or avoid people who call those parts of ourselves to mind. I wonder, for another example, if the revulsion some straight people have against gays is their way of guarding themselves against their own violently repressed (though normally slight) homosexual feelings.
And so, for the most part, I think we engage in human evil without the Devil. The story of the Fall is an allegory rather than a history. Regardless of exactly how it all began, we all choose after the fact to live in a world largely without reference or deference to God, even those of us who profess faith. And that is a rebellion against our dependence on God, a Fall without a Tempter. (Which is the same order of rebellion as ascribed to the Tempter — which may explain why we want a Tempter — we think we can be redeemed only because we are not as bad as That! See the Milton quote above.)
Still, there is the creepy dread I felt at that synod convention. My words seemed to stick in my throat. Afterward I meditated and read the Bible for hours before I felt I could do anything else. As Scott Peck describes in People of the Lie, there is something out there, a sort of opportunistic spiritual infection, about which the less I know, the happier I am. Charles Addams was on to something when he said in an old New Yorker cartoon, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Bogeyman."

Sex Education 101

If not making love, at least taking care

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. — Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

First of all, VCBC has to point out that the longer you wait, the better it is. Second, the best it ever gets is when you are in good health in a good marriage. Like championship ballroom dancing, it takes lots of practice with one partner.

Since these points seem to be lost on the majority of teenagers today, we here at VCBC would like you to survive the experience(s) with minimal harm to yourself and others. To that end, we have a few guidelines for those who cannot abstain until marriage.

1. Never have sex with someone you don't at least like and respect. Otherwise, you may end up disliking and disrespecting yourself.
   
   
2. Never, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason — no matter how exciting or adventurous or kind or caring it may seem — never have sex with anyone crazier than yourself. Ignoring this guideline is a quick way to derail your life. Or even end it.
   
   
3. Keep the number of different people you have sex with low. Promiscuity doesn't just put you and your partners at risk, it harms the whole society by creating an ecological niche for the sexually transmitted diseases of the future to occupy. That is to say, if you screw around, you are helping to create the conditions for the next pandemic. AIDS is not the first, the last, nor the worst of these.
   
   Besides, if you screw around a lot, we all know you're just using people as objects of gratification, which violates guideline number one. Or else you're trying to fill the hole in your soul with sex, because you're don't think you're worth love.
   
   
4. Remember that the person you're having sex with is in your care. This means that we want you to do what you can to protect your partner's physical and emotional health (as well as your own). After all, a euphemism for having sex is "making love," and loving means taking care, at the very least. This covers everything from safer sex practices to being very careful if you get into sadomasochism (yes, there are even safer ways to do that).
   
   
5. If you're straight, get informed about, and use effective methods of birth control, until you and your partner are really ready to make a commitment to each other and to your children.
   
   It takes a lot of money, long hours, and lots of love to raise a child well. And a mature patience to be happy going without enough sleep or time to yourself, and having spit-up on your clothes and diaper doo on your hands.
   

A Persian Gulf War Diary

Notes from the first Gulf War

 

revised 1995 

Bush the Elder showed that war doesn't have to be like Vietnam. This was written before Bush the Younger showed that it still can be.

Oh shame to men! Devil with Devil damn’d
Firm concord holds,men only disagree
Of creatures rational,though under hope
Of Heavenly Grace: and God proclaiming peace,
Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
Wasting the earth, each other to destroy:
As if (which might induce us to accord)
Man had not hellish foes enow besides,
That day and night for his destruction wait. - John Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 496-505, 1667

 

January 6, 1991. Ensign’s Log. We were sailing in the world’s largest oil-tanker, and it was a beautiful day. Suddenly, waves even larger than the tanker began to buffet us. The waves were in glorious hues of green and blue, topped with white foam, compellingly beautiful yet terrifying in their sheer height. I began installing standard olive-drab army-issue porthole covers so that the crew wouldn’t get so frightened that they couldn’t function. Captain Kirk ordered us to make for a region of quiet water that he saw to port. But the water was quiet because it was shallow – too shallow for the tanker. Kirk ran the boat gently aground, so as not to rupture the hull, and wait out the waves. The people on shore lived in rusting tin warehouses, and had some kind of syndrome that sapped both their pigment and their intellect – they had become white and stupid. People on the boat started getting it too, and I wondered if we would have the brains left to figure our way out of this mess. Then I woke up.

You can interpret this dream I had on the eve of war in the Persian Gulf in lots of different ways. But, on reflection, our nuclear weapons are like the porthole covers. In themselves, they do not make us strong, they merely make us dangerous, which is necessary, but not sufficient for deterrence (which is itself necessary, but not sufficient for peace). We use them to allow ourselves the illusion of security, while we ignore the thinness of the economic hull of our ship of state, and the environmental hazard of its cargo.

Nuclear weapons, along our whole military-industrial complex, have functioned like the potlatch ceremonies of the Northwest Coast Indians. Among these peoples one gained social status by hosting celebrations in which one gave away or destroyed enormous quantities of wealth.[1] We have sunk enormous investment into essentially non-productive capital equipment and activity in our tribal competition with the Soviets, who made the same or greater investment. Since capitalism proved more efficient and therefore had deeper pockets, such competition hastened the demise of communism. The future of capitalism is still unfolding.

January 16, 1991, Strategic Air Command Headquarters, Offutt AFB, Omaha, Nebraska. I was at a routine meeting between SAC and some scientific and engineering people. When the war broke out we went on with business, except during the breaks, when we watched the war on the TV down the hallway. But even during the meetings one of the attendees kept leaving the room every few minutes to watch the news. Finally I asked him what his particular interest in the war’s progress might be. "My son is flying one of those planes," he said.

January 21, 1991: I think it was St. Augustine who came up with the idea of a "just war." Of all people on earth, Christians with their idea of forgiveness of sin ought to be able to give up the habit of self-justification. There is no such thing as a just war.[2] War is what we make when we confront the evil in someone else with the evil in ourselves. We Christians need to stop trying to justify it. We also need to stop trying to self-righteously condemn it, as if merely condemning war would make us good.

For the United States in the 20th century, war is what we trap ourselves into because we fail to prepare the ground for peace. In WW II we failed to prepare the ground because we were isolationist and pacifist. We wound up fighting such a terrible war because we entered it about five years too late, and we did so because our leaders waited until the country was united in its will to wage war. By waiting instead of acting, we silently colluded with Hitler’s and Hirohito’s evil, and wound up fighting them anyway. To have avoided WW II completely, we (the US) would have needed to be active in the world ever since 1914, and even that may not have been sufficient.

In the case of Iraq, our country is divided because we went to war only a few weeks too late. Well, maybe we could have used sanctions longer. But we would have needed to keep sanctions in place until Hussein dies of natural causes in twenty years, and maybe the necessary presence of our armed forces (to maintain the military stalemate across the Saudi border) might have tipped the political balance in favor of Islamic Fundamentalists who would have undermined the Saudi government. My point is that sanctions might have failed because we lack the moral authority in the world to wield them effectively. And we lack it because we maintain a foreign policy that embraces the pragmatism more strongly than morality. So here we are at war.

You see, another definition is that war happens when we start to miss God’s Judgment so much that we seek it out. I would have liked to see us stick it out with sanctions, but that would have required that we take the Islam seriously, not just as a political force, but as a way of encountering God’s Truth, and that the Arabs seriously consider the Truth in the western world view, including Judaism and Christianity as well as the secular elements. Sanctions would have required a real commitment of our cultures to one another.[3] We might have had peace. Well, since we don’t, let’s fight it out. If war is Judgment on all parties (as suggested in Lincoln’s second inaugural address), Saddam and his people certainly need to face it, too. The Iraqis have not only failed to prepare the ground for peace, they have done little else other than prepare it for war.

That is, we are only partly, rather than totally, responsible for this war. Anti-war activists need to realize that the United States is not so all-powerful that it alone can decide for war or peace in this world. They need to give up "over owning" the world situation for the United States. By encouraging other countries to blame all their problems on us, they allow them to avoid taking ownership of the problems that they themselves can solve: thus the "over-owning" activists contribute to future wars. And considering the thousands who were killed around the globe by acts of group violence between August 1990 and January 1991, [4] I would hesitate to describe the mere absence of war as peace.
To have peace, the vast majority of nations must prepare the ground (the historical antecedents, the policies and actions) for it. Otherwise, the world will continue to rely precariously on deterrence alone. The events of recent months show us how safe that is.

February 4, 1991. "How are you doing with this war?" I asked a fellow churchgoer. He was fine, no relatives in the Armed Forces, no direct personal connection, he said. But he worked with several Arab-Americans, who were having some problems. A schoolteacher, trying to be helpful, said to one of their children in class, "You’re an Arab, and you don’t like Saddam Hussein, do you?" It doesn’t matter what the child said in reply. He had been singled out. That was all it took for a bully to make him his target.

"My God," I said. "It reminds me of the Church fingering the Jews for the Nazis!"

"I’m sure the teacher meant well," reassured my friend.

I’m sure, too. I’m still appalled.

February 24, 1991. The ground war is one day old and going well. Thousands of Iraqi troops have surrendered. US casualties are reported as 12 killed and less than 30 wounded.
Welcome to high technology warfare.

It seems that in the last twenty years certain people have been hard at work inventing gadgets to make ordinance go where we want it to, and to hit missiles with missiles. "Pac Man Wars," said my wife.
Well, not quite. Scientists and engineers, people not normally known for their aggressiveness, strength, or physical courage, have invented devices with which their clients can with relative impunity wipe out legions of men with exactly those qualities. Given that the bookish type is more often the target of bullies than most others, it has a kind of irony. Our fighting forces are now dependent on these bookish types for the tools of their trade. More than Pac Man Wars, it’s the Revenge of the Nerds.

March 3, 1991. The casualties on our side were low, and the cease-fire seems to be holding. We got off light this time. The other side did not. I suppose it’s good that the US now knows that war does not have to be like Vietnam. I just hope we never forget that it can be.

Notes

1. See for example, Peter Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1968. David Dearborn tells me that a more apt analogy may be to so-called "piling behavior," in which tribes with resources in excess of those needed to survive heap up large quantities of stuff to impress themselves, their enemies, or their gods.
2. So-called "just war" theory exists to help us to recognize mindless brutality and to restrain ourselves from making war more mindlessly brutal than it has to be. Justice can only happen when the fighting is over, because true justice demands reconciliation.
3. Commitment as in the poorly arranged marriage analogy of "Obscenity and Peace," at this website. Because of the globalization of our economies, all the world’s cultures are in a way married to one another, for better or for worse, till death do us part.
4. Or the millions of non-combat deaths caused by totalitarian governments as part of their normal business - as noted by R. J. Rummel in an editorial "War Isn’t This Century’s Biggest Killer," in the Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1986. I keep a copy of it outside my office door at the lab.

Teach Your Children

How to Think about Dangerous, Complicated Things

In the sixties and seventies there was a general shift away from dedicated instruction in the natural sciences and deductive reasoning in the US public schools. This shift produced a social climate in which personal introspection was performed in the absence of coherent thought. Now vast numbers of the voting public become hysterical when life withholds any guarantee of immortality. The learned leaders of our country have heard their cries. Ergo, it is the job of the reasoning few to generate this impossible guarantee using guidance from a technically naive bureaucracy or face the wrath of a dying mob. — Scott Carman, 1991

Denial of Danger

Rems, rads, grays, and sieverts. We learned about them at the Radiation Worker's Safety Briefing, which was required for those of us who were going to attend a nuclear "device assembly" at the Nevada Test Site. We also learned, during a break, about the nuclear reactor accident at Three Mile Island.

Apparently the amount of radioactive material that escaped the containment vessel was so tiny that a spokesperson for Consolidated Edison stated that the long-term cancer risk from the average radiation dose received in the surrounding community was smaller than that due to the aflatoxins an average child ingests while eating peanut butter. This caused the spokesperson to make it into the trade-lore of how not to engage in "risk communication." He or she was beaten nearly to death by the homemakers in the audience, who were furious at having their cuisine compared to a nuclear meltdown.

But the spokesperson had a point. We can only compare one danger to another danger, because there is no absolute standard for safety, because life itself is dangerous - sooner or later, no matter what we do, we all die. So, to evaluate an unfamiliar danger, we must compare it to a familiar danger, one to which we expose ourselves every day.[1]

This is difficult because we tend to ignore our daily dangers. Who would think that you were exposing your child to tiny amounts of a potent, natural liver-carcinogen from trace quantities of a mold that grows on peanuts? But don't toss that peanut butter - you're more likely to shorten your child's lifespan by driving your child in a car. Now, you could also keep your child away from cars, but in our society driving is often a necessity - even though you're more likely to die in an automobile accident than on some battlefields.

On the other hand, ignoring dangers that we can do nothing about helps us to go about our business in spite of them. We even say that those of us who can't ignore the usual dangers of daily life have phobias. Still, there was a time, before anesthesia and antibiotics, when we all knew life was dangerous, and we appealed to God to grant us safety as a blessing. Now we look to our government to grant us safety as a right.

Protecting our right to safety is taken to extremes by our courts, which have abandoned the concepts of contributory negligence and comparative causation. For example, suppose you climbed the shelves of your local grocery store, and fell, injuring your spine. Suppose further that you were 90% responsible for your own injury, that the store was 9% responsible, and that the manufacturer of the canned soup that fell on you was 1% responsible. You could still sue the soup manufacturer for the full amount of your monetary damages (hospital bills, lost salary, etc.) and win, because of all parties to the action, only the soup-maker had enough money. That is to say, we insist that we be protected from the financial consequences of our own stupidity by robbing whoever has the deepest pockets (which is like killing the goose that laid the golden egg, because the deepest pockets usually belong to the companies that provide our jobs).

And in order to aid this robbery we suppress evidence. Consider the case of a man who was injured at work when he fell off a chair. Since his workmen's compensation didn't begin to cover expenses, he sued the chair manufacturer. The manufacturer's lawyer hired an engineer to prepare a video in which the chair was measured to pass all applicable OSHA safety standards. The judge, however, ruled the evidence, and indeed, the standards themselves inadmissible in court. This left the engineer able to state opinions substantiated only by his reputation. It also left the injured worker's lawyer plenty of room to play, since the engineer was in the manufacturer's pay, and anybody's word can seem doubtful if you can't check the facts.

Now the judge excluded the engineer's measurements because (1) such evidence is thought too technical for most jurors to understand, and (2) if, God forbid, an engineer or a scientist had been impaneled, he or she would have formed a strong opinion, which neither attorney could manipulate. Such an opinionated expert could possibly sway the other jurors - the "one-man jury" effect. But the technology at issue here is a chair. The performance of the chair relative to the standards was measured by pulling on it with hand-held spring scales until it tipped over. If that level of technology is too sophisticated for the average person to understand, then civilization is about to collapse because it is too complicated. Or more precisely, because the average person is no longer thought to be prepared, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with complexity. In other words, the judge thought it better for the jury do deal with digestible lies, rather than the complicated truth.[2]

Working backward through our examples, then, it may not be stretching things too far to say that we as a society sometimes lie, steal, and kill, in order to protect our illusion of safety from the consequences of our own actions, or from complicated or uncomfortable truths. Besides making money for trial lawyers, such transformation of reality from the awful truth into a consensus comfortable to the greatest number is itself dangerous. After all, if an entire populace seeks safety in suppressing the truth, can we expect better of its press or government?

Danger for Profit

Of course, a little danger, presented the right way, can be titillating. Just ask any journalist what makes good copy. Especially if it has to do with a powerful technology like nuclear weapons.

Because the press finds that places like nuclear weapons labs tend to "stonewall" them, they sometimes print speculation as if it were fact in order to flush the actual story from reluctant sources. This often works, but when the actual details make dull reading, they wind up on the back page, if not on the editing room floor.

That's why lab officials fear encounters with the press more than they do encounters with hostile intelligence services. After all, you win if a spy comes away with a false impression, because a spy is after the truth. But you lose if a journalist comes away with a false impression, because a journalist is after a story.[3] Besides, you only have to keep a spy from reading your mind, whereas, with a journalist, you practically have to read theirs, before you can answer their questions.

Typically, a journalist may be working on several stories at once, and asking questions relating to all of them. Unless the journalist tells me what is on his or her mind, regarding any particular question, I may misjudge the context. This creates a problem because language is by its nature ambiguous, and thus has meaning only in context. Or, as I have said elsewhere, there is no truth that can be so clearly spoken that it cannot be willfully misunderstood. Since journalists prefer to do interviews, rather than to be interviewed themselves, their use of material from interviews can be strongly influenced by the way they want their story to read, which is in turn influenced by what their editors think will sell.

In other words, General Sherman was wrong in comparing journalists with spies - journalists can be more difficult. All this was summed up in one word by my father-in-law. When my wife was a little girl, she asked him if what was in the news was really true. At first he was silent. He was a German who had grown up in Russia under the Tsar, and who had witnessed the Revolution of 1917. After a while, he said, "Sometimes."

Courage to Think

We the people delude ourselves regarding danger, either by denial or morbid fascination, and are aided in both by our press. We need more than an arsenal of factual knowledge to break out of this delusion. We need what I call the moral value of science education.

This moral value is twofold. First, science is a confrontation of the self, individual and collective, with those aspects of reality that can be measured - the observable facts. The willingness to face such facts, whether they are palatable or not, is on a level with the morality of golf. It is "playing the ball where it lies," which is fairly exhalted compared to the examples in the first part of this essay. And behind this willingness lies another moral value, courage. The courage to endure making the effort required for understanding, and the possible embarrassment, disappointment, or worse that may await if the facts turn out to be other than one supposed. I call it the courage to think.

The courage to think is becoming increasingly important because we continue to invent and use ever more powerful technologies to meet the dangers of the present, which in turn helps create the dangers of the future. Consider antibiotics, for example. They protected us from dying in large numbers from infectious diseases, allowing us the illusion of safety as we became more sexually promiscuous. This created, to twist a line from Guys and Dolls, the oldest established permanent floating culture medium in the world. It was an ecological niche that, sooner or later, some organism was bound to exploit. In other words, AIDS wasn't brought to us by gay men - the most careless and unlucky of them simply wound up being the first to give their lives to show the rest of us what was waiting for us all.

Nowadays everyone knows someone who is alive because of antibiotics. The idea of giving them up, and going back to a more innocent age when everyone knew someone who died young of infectious disease, is idiotic. But it takes the courage to think to use them wisely. Otherwise we make it easier for drug resistant bacteria to evolve, by our doing everything from abusing antibiotics in agriculture to forgetting to take all of our medicine when we start feeling better. (Which is how drug resistant TB developed when we began treating the disease on an out-patient basis.)

So much for the comfortable and familiar technologies. How about some serious genetic engineering to prevent or cure AIDS or cancer? How about eradicating heart disease, or slowing the aging process? All this sounds good, but the technologies that could make these advances possible could perhaps also cause some very devastating accidents, or could perhaps be used for some very destructive biological warfare. All this means that each good we desire from technology will make another demand on our courage to think.

Well, no guts, no glory. That's what they teach athletes in our public schools. But what they teach in our science classes must be the intellectual equivalent of unsalted cream of rice.

At least that was the impression I had when I gave a guest lecture on black holes to a classroom of eighth graders. I tried to follow the rules: I brought pictures illustrating the key concepts, I used the students themselves in concept demonstrations, I used body movement (I had the students turn around and point their fingers in all directions to illustrate spherical symmetry), and I used absolutely no equations. But I totally lost them when I did the one thing for which I could find no substitute - I drew a graph. Not even a real graph, just a schematic, with space on the horizontal axis and time on the vertical, just to show how space and time interchange for you if you fall into the black hole, preventing you from getting out.

Now maybe I'm too demanding, but graphs are very simple, yet powerful tools for communicating ideas. Even President Reagan used one once. Graphs appeal to our visual sense, which is normally our strongest. Teaching science as a set of disconnected facts, without teaching how to use basic tools of thought like graphs, teaches very little. This is because science, like history, is more than a collection of facts. It is a set of tools of thought, and as I have tried to argue above, a set of attitudes toward truth and complexity.

The attitudes and tools are of course meaningless without the facts, but the facts themselves are also meaningless without the attitudes and tools. Or as some have put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The problem is that by teaching the collection of facts without the tools and attitudes to deal with them, that sufficiently advanced technology is our own. Thus, before we try to empower the people to make complex choices - to "enlarge the realm of the political" by "eliminating the cult of the expert" as some liberals put it - we need to use science education to enlarge the realm of the comprehensible.

Thought and Language

As you might imagine, I'd like to see a bit more emphasis on teaching science and math in our public schools. I'd also like to see successful completion of freshman calculus made a requirement for graduation from all four-year colleges. Simply put, I believe that unless you can master calculus, you can in no way claim that you have had a well-rounded education, which is what a Bachelor's degree is all about.

Now I know that most people won't ever use calculus in their daily lives. I didn't use it for the five years I worked at one of the nation's leading industrial laboratories. Nevertheless, calculus underlies statistics, which is behind "fault trees," which is the analytical tool we use to deal rationally with "low-probability, high consequence" events like reactor accidents, and to make "cost-benefit analyses." Calculus lies behind the tools and attitudes more of us need to deal with the daily dangers of our complex culture.[4]

Moreover, the ideas behind calculus - the idea of a continuous function or process, the notion of how a function or process behaves as certain limits are approached, the resolution of a complex process into simpler parts, the idea of infinity, the idea of logical proof, etc. - underlie much of what has become known as the modern world view. Learning calculus therefore is part of preserving and appreciating the valuable legacy left to all of us by all those dead white men. Neglecting it is like throwing away part of an inheritance.

Another reason to learn calculus is that it is a very precise language. So precise, that if you follow its grammatical rules, you will always speak the truth within its limited scope. Such a brush with both precision and truth can give the average college student a better appreciation of the limits of human knowledge. Calculus as a language is also richer than the algebra many of us sweat through in high school - rich enough to make some coherent sense, so that one can begin to glimpse the entire structure of mathematics as a whole. Which is no small thing, because mathematics underlies all of our science and technology, which themselves underlie our present culture.

Of course, an emphasis on mathematical language in no way substitutes for a knowledge of natural language. I'm thinking here of bi-lingual education, which I'd like to stand on its head. I think it criminal to teach classes in anything but English to immigrants to America under the age of twelve. Sure English as a foreign language is a must, but face it, children under the age of twelve can learn to speak any language much more easily than anybody else. Why cheat them of the opportunity to have more than one native language? Especially if one of those languages is the one spoken by those who have all the money and power in their new country!

On the other hand, it might help cure our ludicrous parochialism if all our little native-English speakers had to learn the foreign language most predominant in their community in order to get past sixth grade. Such a requirement would help us understand each other in our "multicultural" society, it would certainly help all the older folks who are going to have a tough time with English for the rest of their lives, and it would provide employees who could really help our businesses compete in the global economy, because they could speak its languages.

And yes, I meant the word parochialism. People in most cultures tend to think their way is the only way to understand the world. But the same events can mean different things to people who are native speakers of different languages. Relatively few Americans appreciate this, especially the ones who make claims for a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian Scripture (which was written in Hebrew and Greek) based on their reading of English.

I also meant ludicrous - like the time President Kennedy said, "Ich bin ein Berliner," which translates to "I am a jelly doughnut." To have said, "I am a Berliner," he needed to leave out the ein. Fortunately, the Berliners all knew what he meant.

In any event, to get anything at all taught in public schools, we need to do one very big thing. We need to reprofessionalize teachers.[5] This means requiring that teachers learn content as well as methodology - what to teach as well as how - by earning graduate degrees in standard academic subjects. It means letting teachers choose the textbooks and develop the curricula. It means measuring their performance by testing their students. It means raising the status, expectations, freedoms, responsibilities, and rewards of public schoolteachers to those of college professors. Until then, all the demands placed on teachers by parents, educationists, and government are just one big ball-and-chain fastened on to teachers by a society that isn't serious about education.

Notes

1. Greg Simonson informs me that Dixie Lee Ray expressed a similar thought many years ago.
2. My friend Charles Perry informs me that our tort (civil suit) system is actually much worse that I describe here. See for example, Peter W. Huber's Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom, Harper-Collins, New York, 1991.
3. Moreover, even the most innocuous and factual statement on the part of a lab manager or employee can be met with vehement accusations from parts of Congress and the public. Since such accusations make good copy, journalists may be reluctant to print the qualifying statements on the part of the lab employee that might mitigate such firestorms. Given this, most of us simply prefer to keep our heads down.
4. For example, I met a political science professor who thought that nuclear testing was done purely for political reasons (a case of a man casting his cosmology into a mold that fit his chosen discipline). That the errors inherent in modeling differential equations by finite difference equations introduce errors into nuclear weapons design codes, which must be investigated by testing never occurred to him, because he never had calculus. While nuclear testing has been politicized by our society, testing has always had a scientific and engineering purpose -- now, however, there are good geopolitical reasons to cease testing.
5. Perhaps most people would say we need to get a handle on violence in our schools first. However, educators who think to disarm schools full of gun-toting kids with psychobabble rather than metal detectors are muddle-headed rather than professional, in my book. I might suggest William Golding's Lord of the Flies as part of their continuing education. Its conclusion is a lesson in the civilizing effect on children of the constructive use of power.

The Leviathan, Inc.

From many signs it would seem the time has come to explore the space which separates (and not only in the Nazi Concentration Camps) the victims from the persecutors.... Only a schematic rhetoric can claim that that space is empty: it never is, it is studded with obscene or pathetic figures (sometimes they possess both qualities simultaneously) whom it is indispensable to know if we want to know the human species, if we want to know how to defend our souls when a similar test should once more loom before us, or even if we only want to understand what takes place in a big industrial factory. — Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1988

The Big Bang

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, we sought technical answers for what had happened. When those proved incomplete, we sought answers in organizational structure, and information flows - "the system." Then we contracted with Morton Thiokol, the original manufacturer of the faulty boosters, to try again.

As IEEE Spectrum (February 1987) reports it, two Morton Thiokol engineers, Roger Boisjoly and Arnold Thompson, told their management that the rubber O-rings sealing the solid fuel rocket booster joints would lose their resiliency at low temperatures, and might fail to provide an adequate seal against hot gases from the burning fuel. A jet of hot gases from the joints could cause an accident. Therefore, they thought the launch should be scrubbed that day because the weather was too cold.

We know now that Morton Thiokol management, Joe C. Kilmister - vice president for the shuttle booster project, Robert K. Lund - vice president of engineering, Jerald E. Mason - vice president of Wasatch operations, and Calvin G. Wiggins - vice president and general manager of Thiokol's space division, thought that the engineers' case on O-ring behavior and margin of safety was inconclusive. Under pressure from NASA, they gave the go-ahead.

As the Spectrum article put it, "Not one engineer or technician, however, supported a decision to launch." It wasn't just a stiff O-ring that killed the seven astronauts. It was a management decision.

The hell of it is that by today's standards, it was an appropriate decision. According to American Managerial Ethics as practiced, the only thing Bob, Joe, Jerry, and Cal did wrong was to guess wrong about the future. Guessing wrong is the ultimate sin in business, and they got the ultimate penalty for it - they are now elsewhere. But they were good managers, exhibiting decisiveness under time pressure and in the face of insufficient information. Almost any other group of executives in America would have made the same decision under the same circumstances. It isn't fair to single out these men or their company. It is fair to use the Challenger tragedy to illustrate what I call, "managerial arrogance."

Managerial arrogance is the belief that management is what most textbooks imply that it is - the art of getting people to do what you want, so that you can get things under control. It's become the principal tenet of an American Executive Subculture who do not admit that sometimes situations do the controlling, and managers can want the wrong things.[1] Combined with the belief that a manager must be a superior type of human being compared to those who do the actual work, it can have deadly consequences.

Now managerial arrogance is not universal, but I think it is the cultural or "tribal" norm among American executives. It occurs because managing well is so difficult: running a complex organization of even more complex human beings makes tremendous demands of one's physical, mental, moral, and even spiritual stamina. Thus, there are many managers I admire. Unfortunately, I know many others who avoid some of the stress that is legitimately part of their job by being or becoming arrogant.

In the instance of Thiokol, given that an entire team of managers exhibited managerial arrogance, I'll bet that it was expected of them, and was rewarded on other occasions when things worked out better. That is, managerial arrogance invades corporate cultures from the top down, by design or neglect. The person at the top sets the tone for the whole organization by judicious or mistaken promotions, demotions, firings, granting raises and perquisites (perks), and approving or denying funding for projects. People see who gets ahead, who gets pushed aside, and who gets pushed out. They learn to conform to expectations from above, stated or unstated, and they rationalize to themselves why they do it.

So while I don't blame Calvin S. Locke, Morton Thiokol's CEO, for the Challenger accident, I note that the CEO resigns when a Japanese corporation makes a similarly huge blunder. It is considered the honorable thing to do.

Send in the Clones

People must conform to corporate expectations - make themselves like the boss - in order to get ahead. They know that you wouldn't promote someone you couldn't trust. And whom can you trust with real power better than someone who reminds you of yourself? I call this the "clone syndrome." It's the aspect of managerial arrogance that makes us into "human resources" rather than people.

The clone syndrome is the root of institutional racism and sexism. In performance appraisal meetings it shows up in phrases like, " I have a hard time picturing her in that role," or "he just doesn't seem ready for that kind of challenge yet." It frustrates affirmative action, because arrogant managers see it as a numbers game - make the quota and you've done your job. They miss the point that the goal of affirmative action is to find capable people and give them a chance, and that quotas are a "poor person's" substitute for it. And a big part of such giving someone a chance is the informal way managers mentor and socialize the employees they pick out to be up and coming.

Of course, the mentoring and socialization has a dark side. If you get promoted, you must exhibit the correct behaviors and attitudes at all times.[2] You will be a clone, or else. Irreverent workers may be tolerated, but irreverent supervisors don't last long. That's why the women and minorities who've made it to the top haven't made much difference yet. They've usually been weeded so carefully, that they've bought in to the status quo, at least until there are enough of them in place to support each other.

Constantly having to display the correct attitudes is also bad for American competitiveness: it keeps information about reality from flowing up the management chain, and it's demotivating. A management out of touch with reality becomes a management out of control - where inter organizational politics dominate all other considerations. Things like good business sense, quality, or even common sense, cease to matter.

As for demotivation, isn't it strange that American auto workers are more satisfied, more innovative, and more productive when they build cars for Japanese managers, than when they build them for Americans? Unlike American managers, the Japanese know enough to treat American workers (those well below the "glass ceiling") as if they were fellow human beings.

Perhaps Japanese managers have absorbed the Taoist idea (which the current Chinese leadership has not) that, "One who excels at working through other people places himself below them,"[3] which is similar to the pronouncement of Jesus that one who would lead must be the servant of all. Meanwhile, the dichotomy between management and labor is scrupulously maintained by American managers, against everyone's interest, including their companies'. It is yet another version of the "us" versus "them" game.[4] Of course, it's hard for a manager to think of someone who can't afford his lifestyle be one of "us" - inflated executive salaries and benefits are part of this picture.

Leader of the Pack

I had been a systems engineering supervisor for nearly two years at AT&T Bell Laboratories, a company that was at that time one of the best places to work in America. What I was experiencing is common in large corporations, and I name the company only because I experienced it there rather than somewhere else. As we supervisors, managers, and engineers sized each other up by talking sports before the meeting, I was reminded of dogs sniffing to see who shows the most confidence by holding his tail the highest. This meeting was to discuss which AT&T subsidiary would make the T-1MUX. (It doesn't matter what a T-1MUX is - the company still doesn't make one.) It was supposed to be a technical meeting, but we were really there to howl until we all sounded the same note - to drum up the general will to action. But instead of one general will, there were many wills of competing packs, and I was a typical reason for it.

I had been "taken out behind the woodshed," by my management some months before. They made it clear that I would give them exactly what they wanted, even when unstated ("I haven't been very good about telling you what I want, but it's your job to know" - an ethic that would later become the root of "plausible deniability," as the Iran Contra gang put it). My management had locked its teeth over the scruff of my neck and shaken me. I made the only gesture they would tolerate - I slinked out of the room with my tail between my legs.

What they wanted was style more than substance, and unquestioning advocacy of their initiatives to the point of ad lib rationalization of everything they did or desired. The T-1MUX had become one of those initiatives. So, I championed my organization's version against all other organization's versions, as a matter of professional survival. Since the other supervisors in the meeting were undergoing a similar process of socialization to the company norms, the idea of reaching consensus at our level was laughable. We wasted six months in a series of meetings while the market window slammed shut. Productivity and profit were foremost on our lips but last in our hearts. Resolution was achieved only when the problem went up to where our lines of management met in one person, who seemed to delay making a decision until the appropriate winds blew from his superiors.

By the time of the T-1MUX fiasco, I was getting good vibes from my management ("You really turned things around, you've proven yourself as a supervisor"). I think this was due to my more pliant attitude, and my zealous displays of superficial activity, which included making several thousand dollars worth of three-color viewgraphs and flashing them when I made presentations. I even emulated my superiors by forcing my employees to take the rap for my shortcomings (because I could not allow myself to be perceived as less than excellent), and my superiors loved it. That is to say, I performed submissive gestures carefully choreographed to my superiors' dominance gestures. They had taught me the "right stuff," because the one most skilled at these gestures becomes top dog.[5] Like school bullies, they had socialized me to act as if I accepted the inevitability of their concept of managerial manhood. That way they could feel better about having accepted it themselves.

In reaction to this dog-pack mentality, we have union labor. Unions have become packs, too, which seek to gain as much as possible from management (them) with as little demand as possible on the workers (us). This us-them conflict sometimes takes the form of strikes, one of which was held during the construction of my lab. I was responsible for getting it built in time for a tour by the top dog heir apparent. When the opportunity arose for me to use some of his advance people to advance the project, I did so, again as a matter of professional survival.

At first, strike-breaking went down pretty hard - my father had been a physician at a UMWA hospital and paid by union dues. So I watched my scabs work. They didn't particularly exert themselves, they just worked steadily. And they did three times as much work in a day as the union folks, and with fewer people. That day I decided that unions have a responsibility to provide high quality labor, just as management has a responsibility to reward that labor with good wages, benefits, and working conditions.

And then there were my professional employees. It was one thing to judge their performance according to my understanding of long term corporate needs and goals. Then I would think about their professional development, their job satisfaction, the match of their capabilities to the work that needed to be done, whether they should be reassigned, whom I might bring in to fill their place, etc. It was quite another to evaluate them solely in terms of their utility to my professional survival. If they weren't pulling my way (my superiors' way) hard enough, they had to pay the price. Rather than regard them as "my people," I looked upon them as my "human resources," who were more expendable than I. They became interchangeable parts whom I could deploy as needed, regardless of their experience or training, and then punish with poor performance reviews if they failed to adapt - which moved the burden of personnel management from me to them, and which my superiors rationalized as the means to achieve a more versatile workforce.

Of course, I covered up such disregard of my employees, because my superiors made it clear that it was my job to make them look good. Among other things, I would inform my superiors of upcoming retirements of my employees, timed so that they could stop by and feign a heart-to-heart farewell chat, while legitimately being able to claim that their calendars were too full to permit them to attend the retirement luncheons.

In other words, I collaborated. Driven by fear for my professional survival, I had stepped into what Primo Levi called the "gray zone" between persecutors and victims.[6] Myself oppressed, I in turn oppressed those less powerful than I to maintain my position, and so became temporarily like my superiors. The alternative of resistance, of principled self-sacrifice, seemed useless - I had seen a few principled ex-supervisors, embittered pariahs whom everyone regarded to have been in some way incompetent, or at least lacking in political cleverness. They had made no change whatever in the organization. So, I gave my management what they wanted without question, right or wrong. After all, since no one got fired (or even had a pay cut) on my watch, what or whom had I really betrayed? Only the truth. Only you, if you have ever worked for a wage.

And so besides the decline in productivity, quality, labor relations, and leadership (after all, how can people trained to follow so energetically learn to lead with any real vision), arrogant managers can effect a decline in morality. It is almost blasphemous to compare my moral slide with those of the captives in Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz,[7] but his account of what good men do to survive under bad circumstances (and of the shame often associated with survivorship) has an aura of familiarity to me.

The Dogs of War

Since we were all struggling for professional survival, we were at war with one another and with our employees — rather like the War of All Against All described by Hobbes in The Leviathan, but with a twist. Higher management, playing the role of the Leviathan, did not prevent the fighting - they instigated, structured, and controlled it for use in their own struggles. For me it was the way of death.

I floated my resume. I applied only to organizations in which physical reality and common sense were held in high enough regard to empower those at the lower levels to push back against the internal politics of the higher, which left out large companies. My choice was further constrained by my desire to use my training in theoretical physics and my experience as a systems engineer. Small companies were out, because they don't employ such people. I had largely burned my bridge to academia (which has its own troubles) by writing internal memoranda rather than publishing in scientific journals while I was in industry. That left government laboratories.

So I was angry when I took my job in the nuclear weapons program. I did it to take care of myself - to pursue my career in a more peaceful environment than I had found in the private sector. If to keep my private-sector job I had sold my peace of mind, I joined a nuclear weapons lab and got it back. Others have written elsewhere about the ethics of decisions like mine.[8] Here I will say that I want those who compare my weapons work to collaborating with the Nazis to consider that I came closer to it in non-defense private industry. I think they often use such comparisons as smokescreens to avoid seeing the more apt comparisons in the society nearer to themselves.

I will also say that nuclear weapons do not make war. They merely convert it from something that happens on a battlefield to something that happens in your bedroom. The source of war is in ourselves, and much of modern corporate America with its arrogant executive/managerial sub-culture expresses it in the way we do business. We make war on each other instead of doing what business sets out to do - to make money in a way more pleasant than the available alternatives.

On the positive side, I can add that peacemaking involves empowerment. Perhaps a more peaceful definition of management might be the following: Management is the art of enabling your people to get rewarded for doing the right things. Each word in that statement is subject to debate, and is so by design, like the wording of the ten commandments. Who are your people - just your employees, or are there other stakeholders? What are the right things - making profit, or is there more that can be done? What types of rewards are you able to obtain, and how well does that match up with what your people want? What is enabling - training, identifying opportunities for your people to present their work, stimulating some of your employees to find jobs better suited to them (sometimes you have to be both tough and kind)? Call it mindfulness in management, or management as a human enterprise. Call it leadership as a service to the led. And call managerial arrogance a form of incompetence.

Of course, there is another way to read this essay. Scooper couldn't take it in the Real World. He needs to grow up before he tries to swim with the big fish again. On the other hand, management needs to empower rather than bully, because America needs empowered and motivated people to compete in the global economy, and because technology continues to raise the price of filling our society with war.

Finally, there is the question of whether I would again submit to coercion on the job. I pray that neither you nor I would be so tempted. But if it should happen, I am now much more aware of what is to be gained from self-sacrifice (and lost by evading it), and therefore the more dangerous to any who would demand it.

Notes

1. This attitude may or may not co-exist with the abuse of incrementalism, in which managers who don't know what they want strive for small and sometimes meaningless change and call it progress. They tend to dodge the icebergs without setting an overall course for the ship of their enterprise. In other words, an arrogant manager may not necessarily be a strong leader.
2. See Conduct Expected: The Unwritten Rules for a Successful Business Career by William T. Lareau, New Century Publishers, Piscataway, NJ, 1985, for a lucid description of this phenomenon.
3. Paraphrased from Lao Tzu, Te-Tao Ching, translated by Robert G. Henricks, Ballantine Books, New York, 1989.
4. Pseudospeciation, discussed elsewhere at this site as a precursor to group violence,. See also Anthony Stevens, The Roots of War: A Jungian Perspective, Paragon House, New York, 1989.
5. This doesn't mean that managing well is easy. It requires lots of hard work and raw talent. It's just that at the higher levels of management, everyone works hard and has talent. The differences that determine who makes it to the very top and who doesnÕt are subtle, and skill at the appropriate dominance/submission behaviors is an important one of them.
6. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, Vintage Books, 1989. In the chapter, "The Gray Zone," Levi says in so many words that the image of the Nazi Concentration Camp is in the Jungian "shadow" of any organization where status, power, and the ability to coerce behavior (to whatever extent) exist. This includes almost all human organizations, from governments to churches, from prisons to schools, and perhaps even parts of the peace movement. More generally, if the "gray zone" is taken to be the region between Good and Evil, we are all in it to varying degrees, which obligates each of us to know where he or she stands before pointing a finger at someone else.
7. Translated by Stuart Woolf, Collier Books, New York, 1961. In order to survive, the prisoners had to engage in what would be considered at least petty crimes in ordinary society. The kapo, the prisoner in charge of a group of other prisoners, is the salient image for the discussion here. For more on "incivility" in organizations see M. Scott Peck's, A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered, Bantam Books, New York, 1993.
8. See Obscenity and Peace, at this site.