Next year, we will experience the rise of incivility. We want to be winners, but it seems that everybody cannot win. Social media provides the echo chamber justifying our race to the bottom. Intellect hurts many heads, promoting emotion, name-calling, and irrational violence. Consider the recent Lincoln Project about Trump having a Limburger Cheese smell.
Self-interested envy makes it difficult to stand in another's shoes. The only one that you can trust is yourself! However, civilization is built upon trust and compromise. Sovereignty is a word defining the "Make America Great" cult: America first and America only! Our country used to be afraid of the Russians and Communism. Now, it seems that many would prefer that America become a dictatorship. They want to be free of any responsibility to the rest of the world.
The American Dream has become a nightmare. It is not like 1960 when newspapers and magazines advertised how you could make a lot of money in electronics. Perhaps "good greed" aided the middle-class affluence that grew dramatically during those years. There was a collective will evidenced by 90 percent of the males in my high school planning on becoming electronic engineers. My high school taught 6 full periods of physics and 6 full periods of electronics. Now, the Book Sale refused to take any of my 438 books because they were “technical” even though they had been sorted and located into Banker’s Boxes with LCCN, ISDN, date, and subject identification. They know that America doesn’t like science and math anymore. I had to feed the books to the worms.
Perhaps artificial intelligence will become a needed and appreciated copilot when the complexity (information size) exceeds human capability. But we must remember that the magic genie who grants us our every wish never accomplishes that.
In the news, there are questions concerning what warrants attention. You might find the national debt, GNP, unemployment, war, global warming, sustainability, life in a dictatorship, the death of facts, critical thinking, and “Character that is Destiny”.
But we feel the economy now. To help us understand, economists present measurements. I have no comment. It is up to you to tell “The Rest of the Story” as Paul Harvey used to say on his radio broadcasts.
My Scientific View
The first step following a choice of variables is to analyze their strength and their interactions. You don't want to compute results coming from things that don't matter! You don't want interacting variables. They cast their shadows on others, adding complexity. You want a signal that is much stronger than the surrounding noise, so you can clearly see it. You would like to be able to adjust the variables, measure them and their proxies, so you can experiment with them and quantitatively analyze them. You want a symmetrical perspective so that your decision depends on the facts, not on how you look at things, not on your being born to a new creation (consumer novelty and permissiveness), not on dying because time is up.
My Religious Upbringing
With Hermeneutics you read with a principle in mind. But words derive their meaning from culture. The meaning of words is called Exegesis. What do we mean when we talk about income, fair share, insurrection, and gender?
There was a time when my wife and I studied the Bible in ancient Greek. Stories fit between Exegesis and Hermeneutics. To make them sensible, writers use assumptions about details that are not precisely factual.
Some stories are beautiful, like The Nativity Story, like when the crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to travel to the moon, read from the Book of Genesis during a 1968 Christmas Eve TV broadcast. Others are ugly, like those about “us versus them” instead of “we”. Others are confusing.
The exemplar of Faith
Abraham exhibited what is widely considered to be the pinnacle of faith when only he heard God's command to murder his son Isaac and he took action to accomplish it. What if the police had been present at the site of the sacrificial stone? The story does not tell how Isaac felt about it or whether the incident influenced his trust in his father.
Modern society would think that Abraham was insane. We would argue that true faith requires doubt. There are many versions of his story involving Abraham and God’s intentions. They show how up can be portrayed as down. They are an excuse and a rationalization of the ridiculous. It is a consequence of uncertainty about the complete scenario. It is what our modern politics has become.
The Meaning of Slavery
Was Hagar a servant or a slave? I have two Bibles, one given to me by my grandmother in 1953 that raised me, the other by my wife’s mother in 1969. They describe Hagar differently.
Abraham was the patriarchal father of nations whom God made a covenant with. Hagar bore a male child, Ishmael, for Abraham and Sarah. Then pregnant 90-year-old Sarah gave 100-year-old Abraham an authentic son, an inheritor. Circumstances led to a division in the family. It became the Muslims. This is the story. It leads to the current Middle-Eastern war.
The Meaning of America
Is it important? We don’t know how to measure it. We have to look inside ourselves to find it. Yet it will be the most important thing in 2024, perhaps the most important thing since the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
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