Places Where Logic is Officially Dead

First, there is good news. There are still plenty of spots, from every nook and cranny, some “nookier” and “crannier” than others, where Logic still thrives in pockets of hopes, or temporarily taken out of life support. I apologize for the newly minted made-up-words but feel free to use them.  Editors of Urban Dictionary are always looking for new ones. Whoever thought of “Selfie” and “antifa”!

So, let’s hold off on Last Rites for the total demise of Logic but keep them on stand by while we examine places where folks had already pulled the plug. In some spots Logic gasped for its last few molecules of common sense just moments before everything went dark.

There was actually a time in history when something similar had occurred when darkness enveloped the whole world, when knowledge or the pursuers of knowledge went into hiding. It was aptly called The Dark Ages – specifically the period 500-1500 A.D.

It is very difficult to imagine Dark Ages Redux in the age of information technology and social media.  But it could come if we’re not careful, in places least suspected by unsuspecting folks.

The Marketplace

In the Dark Ages and before it, the marketplace was exactly just that – a place where people sold and where people bought. By word origin, “mercari” was Latin for to buy (hence, the words merchandise and merchants). In Roman times, it was either a covered or open place where buyers and sellers convened. The Greeks, the erstwhile world power whose reign preceded the Romans, first came up with the idea of a marketplace out in the open where people could freely come and go to buy and sell. The Greeks called it agora; unfortunately, today psychiatrists use the word to describe a mental distress, thus folks who have fear of open spaces suffer from agoraphobia.

Today, we exhibit no fear of open or covered markets, including those in the cloud. We may be taken advantage of, taken to the cleaners, fleeced, or baited and switched, but we feel no pain because Logic is no longer around to give us signals or warning signs in the market place. In ancient times people went to the market to fill their needs. Today’s marketplace goes above and beyond that. After filling your basic needs, it creates and defines for us additional needs we haven’t thought of yet. Look at your smart phone today. How much of it, or in it, do you really need? But every two years or so we keep falling for the latest and greatest features, 90% of it we already have with the last model.  I read that some if not most of what we consider today our basic needs did not exist two or three generations ago.  Granted that today’s conditions call for items we absolutely must have, the marketplace ever so slightly keeps tweaking them so that what used to be a basic need had turned into a much needed item that happens to be pricey (or luxurious). Don’t scratch your head or roll your eyes. Since when did a pair of working pants become designer jeans? Since when did one terribly soiled, oil and dirt stained pair of denims cost $400 at a high end department store? Nothing is more basic than food but marketing turned them into Gourmet, or labeled it Select or Reserve and we fall for it.  Why? Merchandisers and marketers and clever researchers realized that the marketplace is Logic’s open graveyard. We can’t cover everything here but you get the picture.

The Opinion Makers

We need opinions and ideas to be expressed and discussed.  Those are indicators of a healthy democracy. We have opinions as a vehicle for conversation and they are part of the social scene. Business decisions get done when the CEO or decision makers had heard all the opinions that needed to be heard before committing to any course of action. We expressed them at the polls, at our preference for this product or that product, this book for another, this movie for another, etc.

We as consumers want to be entertained and we are willing to pay for it. Those whose business it is to provide the entertainment must aim to extract maximum return for their efforts because their livelihood depends on as many customers as possible. Consumers are not a monolithic group when it comes to their political affiliations, their religious beliefs, their social affinity, and their moral beacons. However, there are many common grounds where these consumers get together.  They leave all their differences at the theater doors, or right before they enter concert halls and sports arenas. 

Entertainers must know that. In fact, it is required of them to know and understand their customers. These customers represent the country, and if the country is split right about the middle when it comes to politics, then the logical thing for entertainers to do is make sure their opinions do not offend half of their customers. There are countless instances and examples in human interactions where it is prudent, even mostly advisable, to keep those opinions to oneself, certainly not out in the public forum, if you are an entertainer and your goal is to get as much of the public as you can. They can capably play many roles but political commentating is said to be one role too many. By the way, keeping their opinions to themselves does not diminish the value of their vote come election time. One movie idol’s vote is valued as one, just as one ticket stub admits one paying customer.  They should leave opinion making in the open public to those whose job it is to disburse those nuggets – the politicians and political pundits.

But in the la-la-land of Hollywood, the rarefied air of highly paid moguls and superstars, Logic had perished a long time ago.  It had been extinct there for some time now and it seems an impossible task to resurrect it because the barnacles of oblivion are well dug in. So, Logic will forever remain dead in Hollywood.  Unfortunately, Logic’s death is not only contagious, its specter, its vapor-like phantasm is well on its way to the sports and stage arena. Same people whose business it is to entertain as wide an audience as they can get just can’t help themselves from emulating their Hollywood brothers and sisters.

The Destroyers of Statues

When people, alive and well and healthy (because they’re mostly young) start calling for the destruction of inanimate objects that represent dead people, we’ll have to wonder what motivates them. We know we have a problem when objects that are the daily landing zones for pigeons’ unsanitary habits pose a threat to the welfare and well-being of such vibrant and active protesters.

Safe Spaces

That has to be one profound irony - the death of Logic in safe spaces, brought upon by micro aggression by a multitude of people upon naïve but otherwise bright students. The aggressors had to be imaginary. How does one project aggression in very minute dosage as to be labeled micro aggression? What real world is it where young college students have to be coddled because of hurt feelings?  What is going on? Trigger warnings have nothing to do with guns but they could be so much more dangerous; in fact, they are supposed to cause more mental ailments on students at college campuses.  Whose fault is it when we send snowflakes to fight through, to survive and succeed in the cauldron of learning we call a university? We have a problem when four-corner-strategy is taught instead of business tactics and economics.  I did not invent those words and phrases; they are lexicon already well embedded in social media.

What, what Matters

We are at a point in history where equality is a daily mantra, so why does one particular this or that matter more than others?  Let’s do the numbers.  Numbers are the last refuge where Logic may have a chance for survival. I know numbers can be manipulated but deception has less cover to hide in them where news and punditry can be thick in artificial facsimile of the truth.  For example, we know what the protest du jour is lately.  Let’s examine how common is police killing of unarmed black men, with regards to the rest of the population. If some extraterrestrial reads only the media account, killing of unarmed black men in the U.S. had reached epidemic proportions. Not only that but they are all innocent unarmed black men.

Last year Washington Post reported 16 unarmed black men out of a population of 20 million were killed by police.  The year before that, the number was 36 (from the same 20 million). Between 2006 and 2016, a 10-year period, 352 people were struck and killed by lightning. The nation is 20% black, or 7 % of the population, so extrapolating from that, about 24 black people would be represented in the total number of lightning fatalities in the last 10 years. From that, using lightning fatalities statistics, we know police shootings in general are rare and the perception of an epidemic is blatantly incorrect and particularly so of black unarmed men.  Yet, based on news coverage, it looks awfully bad.

Logic must be brought back to the media news desk.  But alas, at Logic’s death was born the slogan of the year in 2016.  Even if we use three news media statistics and two from the government (FBI and BJS –Bureau of Justice Statistics) the number of unarmed black fatalities tracks with the population. The news organizations are focusing on one segment of it that matters more than others.

Gun Control (there is room for one more)

Logic dies another death after each mass shooting. Guns, like all inanimate objects such as cars, knives, blunt instruments, poisons, etc. are another of those that need to be destroyed, so claim the same voices each and every time. It is always about the removal from society of these objects that will solve all problems. Yet, these are objects that do not think for themselves, cannot act on their own, let alone hurt anyone, until they’re picked up by somebody, who can think, willfully decide, who is responsible for his or her action.  The gun is no more a tool than a screw driver or a car but each is capable to hurt or kill when used improperly.

If the beef of the argument against guns is the number of people killed then shouldn’t we go after, with same fervor, other agents of death, some even deadlier than guns? During the entire 10-year Vietnam War 50,000 Americans were killed. During the same 10-year period close to half a million people (men, women and children) were killed in traffic fatalities in the U.S., about 25 % of those caused by drunk drivers or were under the influence. There was no outrage or campaign to ban cars or alcohol then and now, yet these caused a thousand-fold the number of deaths caused by shootings in the country.

Logic is dead in these places and it dies every day we choose not to use it, ignore it, unencumbered by the ability to think or think properly.

When Logic is no Longer Employed

A man had a dream. It was a nightmare really. He was in the unemployment line and it seemed to run infinitely long ahead of him. He wondered how he could be so unemployable when he had all the credentials and experience for almost any job there was. He was the epitome of a highly educated man. Then, to his horror, when he looked behind him, alas, Logic was next to him – also unemployed!

There was a time when logic was required in almost any curriculum.  Philosophy was taught in every college.  Regardless of one’s major, a semester or two, at least, of logic was a requirement for graduation.  I remember the university I went to where every college major, from liberal arts to pre-med and nursing to, yes, engineering, was required to finish Philosophy 101 and 102, Logic and Ethics, respectively. I had an interesting experience because the same professor who taught Logic was the same one who taught Ethics. So, when I took Phi. 102 the following semester, during a class discussion, I reminded him that he was contradicting what he taught us in Phi. 101 with the position he was defending presently. He had a logical answer. He said, “I was teaching you Logic then but now I am teaching you Ethics”. My take on it was that Logic is the rigid structure to every monument of thought while Ethics provide the skin stone, the facial expression, and the interpretative gesture of the statue.

Sadly, we find that in today’s world, Logic is an outcast, seemingly isolated from almost any exchanges of ideas, if ever there were exchanges of any sort at all.  Surely, it is an ostracized citizen from political correctness, a victim of safe spacing and critical thinking.  In politics, Logic is an Idea non-grata. Social media is hostile environment for Logic and it will suffocate in it because the latter can suck all the oxygen from any argument.

How did this all happen?  When did it all begin to happen?  Ethics is important; more so is ethical thinking when applied to the many facets of practical life.  The problem arose in the introduction of situation ethics. I don’t know when that began but the 60’s is where I would go first.  It was then when everything was right, justified, even better, depending on the situation.  Situation ethics made everything okay.

   

Which of the following answers (below) was closer to being logical?

When asked, just about a year ago, what the single greatest existential threat to the world today, a sitting President, a Secretary of State, a former Vice President answered, “Climate Change”.

When Willie Sutton, an incorrigible bank robber was asked why he robbed banks, his reply was, “That’s where the money is”.

The journeyman bank robber, notably with much lesser level of education, often caught and prosecuted, came up with a much more logical answer, if not impeccable insight. (Note: Sutton’s answer may have been embellished by an over eager reporter, we don’t know, but it is still more logical).

The three highly educated statesmen played their best “logical” card for their base-audience, fully well aware it was not a logical answer, and each one knew that there are a number far more critically recognized threats, i.e. nuclear war, plague, famine, even over-population, future industrial accidents (Bhopal, India or Chernobyl or Fukushima come to mind) if they re-occur to a much higher scale and natural disasters that had played pivotal roles in our history. Super volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts in the past had cause dmass extinctions of entire species. Then, there are threats from the unknown, or from ones we have not even considered.

Logic, the appetite for it, has been lost in the way enthusiasm for math and science had waned among the youth, particularly here in the U.S. PEW Research has some staggering numbers.  In all categories, America's 15 year-olds lag behind dozens of other countries: No. 23 in Science, No. 23 in Reading and No. 38 in Math. Slovenia, Latvia and Malta are several rungs above for each category. As a point of reference, Singapore tops all categories while the Dominican Republic is at the bottom on two of them. From among 80 countries, the U.S. is right about equidistant between Singapore and The Dominican Republic in Math.

So, why is the U.S. still at the top in technology and industrial development? Experts argue but a good many say the U.S. still offers the most attractive environment for the top graduates from around the world who, ironically, get their post graduate education here.  We have the best schools populated in part by some of the best students from everywhere else.  The other irony is that the foreign graduates would rather stay because it is still the best place to enhance and apply their intellectual gifts. The U.S. itself is its own best asset in attracting the best, thus keeping research and development to flourish here.

But I digressed.

Logic had its roots in Geometry and mathematics. Geometry is unforgiving when it comes to finding the truth, the proof, of any argument. Geometry, however, hardly provides any wiggle room when it comes to proving a proposition because axioms – the statements of facts that are true within the context of a particular logic system – define where and how the arguments proceed.

Example 1 – Rod A that has length ‘a’ and Rod B that has length ‘b’ are axioms. They both had been measured. When connected to each other, end for end, we can say that the connected Rod AB is longer than either A or B and we can say that if ‘a’ is longer than ‘b’, then a-b is a positive number and b-a is a negative number. This is childish you say, but this is just to get you to a frame of mind and to remind you that logic has to work and will only work that way. When you next tune in to hear your network political pundits, watch out for the pitfalls created by logical fallacies or fallacious logic.

Example 2 – All mothers are women (axiom). (a) But you cannot say, “All women are mothers”; (b) although Agrippina is a woman, she is not necessarily a mother even if we saw her drop a girl at school one morning; (c) the reason we still can’t say she is a mother is from a number of circumstances that will explain why we saw her dropped off the girl in school: the girl was a neighbor’s child, the girl is her niece, etc. But here is why Logic is interesting. Even if Agrippina is not the mother of that particular child, Agrippina could still be a mother whose children we have not seen or we’re not aware of. There is nothing legalese here but to be aware that even if we know certain axioms we may not be able to make certain conclusions, conclusively, that is.

Example 3 – Many years ago when the kids were still at school, our younger son wanted to submit a project for the junior high school science fair. One early afternoon on a Sunday, he and I, armed with a 6-foot stick, a level and a tape measure went to measure the height of the local 3-storey bank building nearby. We positioned the stick upright on the concrete parking lot next to the building, using the level to make sure it was perpendicularly upright. He measured the length of the shadow cast by the stick. Then he measured the length of the shadow cast by the building which obviously was a lot easier to do than scale the side of the building, plus it was a Sunday for car traffic to be a hindrance. By simple ratio and proportion, he calculated the height of the building. Why this example? Logic, from its geometric roots, is useful to make a correlation between axioms, or determine a conclusion even when not all the axioms are available. In this case, the known axioms were the height of the stick, the length of its shadow and that of the building. Three knowns and one unknown was an easy equation to write.

I highlighted correlation above because it is a method to relate the axioms together. But let us not conclude that correlation is the same as causation. And that is where the pitfalls begin. The shadows of the stick and building were correlated but the stick did not cause the building to cast the shadow, let alone cast the length that it did. Strictly speaking the shadows were caused by the absence of light blocked by the stick and building, independently of each other; that happened to have a correlation.

This is how superstitions begin and why we still have them in the 21^st century. Don’t disagree too quickly. Players of any sport around the world are the most superstitious. Many of them have particular routines that border on obsessive behaviors before every game, others won’t wash their caps when on a winning streak, kids stroking an inanimate ceramic frog on the dugout during little league playoffs, and on and on.  They often believe that certain routines and objects that correlated with winning streaks were also agents of causation.  Or, in the case of coin tosses, the logical meaning of probability is tossed out the window (pun intended). When confronted with 13 consecutive tosses of “tails”, a person may wager heavily on “heads” for the next toss because, surely, it will be “heads” the next time. Well, don’t bet on it. The odds are always the same, 50-50, each and every time a coin is tossed. The coin does not have a memory. Consecutive coin tosses were known to go from 20-30.  In fact, if we let 1 billion people toss coins around the world today a million times each, the odds of one coming up with 30 is highly probable. But we would still be inclined to bet the opposite when faced even with just a 10-in-a-row streak. Why, because superstition far exceeds Logic.

Now, you are aware each time you read something on Facebook, or hear political pundits, that often Logic is not on duty, or worse, it is out of a job.

I leave you with this “oldie but goldie” of a logical gem:

A logician was lost in the jungle and must find his way back. He came upon a fork on the road – one road will lead him to the good village while the other to a tribe of cannibals. At the fork two natives stood who can provide information. One will always tell the truth, the other will always lie but they will only answer to a yes or no question and the logician can only ask one question to only one of them. The other bad news is that the logician does not know which native is the liar or the truth teller.

He did ask a question and got an answer. Safely, he made it to the good village based on the answer but what was his question?

Zero to Infinity in 13.7 billion Years

Somewhere on a farmland, just outside a small city, in Cotabato, Philippines, a leathery brown-skinned farmer just finished off his chore and was entering his small nipa hut shared with his wife and two young boys. Observing the two pubescent lads hunched over something on the table where they usually do their homework, the farmer went closer to see what the two were intently focused on. It was an old car magazine they probably picked up from the trash that rich people discard near the school they go to.

“Look father”, the older boy said, “this red car will run zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds. I converted it for you. It will reach speed of 97 kilometers per hour in just 3.8 seconds. Let me count, one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three, and, before I can say four, the car had traveled 6 kilometers!” The farmer is proud of how his boys have become adept at their school work.

The younger boy chimed in, “And this car costs 50 million pesos!” That is roughly close to US $100,000. It did not escape the farmer’s observation that his youngest son was also good in arithmetic for figuring out the peso equivalent of the car’s cost.

The farmer just smiled, barely understanding what his two sons were telling him, but he had an idea about what they meant. He thought to himself. “Today, I plowed a whole hectare in one day with my four year old carabao that cost my family 30,000 pesos a year ago. That car was 50 million pesos?” Carabao is a Philippine water buffalo. The farmer did not know how profoundly deep his thoughts were.

Comparative numbers, relative representations, such as the title above are meaningless until we add a background behind them to provide context. When the magazine reviewer was glossing over the $100,000 dollar sports car doing 0 to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds, the context he was speaking from was about as far away from the farmer as the distance between Detroit and Cotabato, the economic chasm as wide as a hundred times the Grand Canyon. To compare what the speeding sports car can do in less than four seconds to what the $600 carabao covered in a day, shall we say, “it is neither here nor there”.  There is no relatable context at all.

Zero to Infinity in 13.7 billion years. Let’s begin with the zero.

In the Year 2000 author Charles Seife published a book titled, ZERO, subtitled it, “The Biography of a Dangerous Idea”. He began with Chapter 0, “Null and Void”. Then he started with Chapter 1, “Nothing Doing”.  In Chapter 0, he talked about the USS Yorktown, a billion-dollar missile cruiser that in 1997, just simply “shuddered” to a stop off the coast of Virginia and was dead in the water as abruptly as a light switch turning off a light. The ship received new software to update its computers that controlled the engine. The engineers were instructed to remove a zero from the code when installing the new software. They forgot to do it. That little zero caused the malfunction that stopped the mighty ship on its tracks that supposedly no torpedo or mine can do.

Zero, which means nothing, nada, zilch, in many cultures, was exactly that for millennia both in pre-historic to recorded history. For all that time, zero did not exist, yet people went about their daily lives unhindered by either technical or practical sense. There was no reason to deal with nothing because folks did not buy “nothing” meat or paid anything with “nothing” of value. In some cases zero was even feared, much a part of superstition. The ancient folks began counting one, two and anything over was simply many. They got more sophisticated later to count with their fingers – where usually each had ten of them. But, how about when the numbers exceeded ten? Well, they counted up to nine (9) then used a place holder for the first tenth number. The symbols or shape of the place holder changed over time but they settled on a spherical shape – the zero. The place holder was important. If they were to count beyond ten then they labeled the first place holder as 10 (the first zero, the first 10). Then they started all over again by writing 11, as one after the first ten. After 19, they had to use another place holder, a second one was written as 20, thence followed by 21, then 30-40 after 29, 40-50, and so on and on. Thus the decimal system was born.

Zero went from absolutely nothing, nada, zilch to something largely significant than any of the other digits, when it was not even considered a number per se, at first anyway. It had become so powerful indeed. A zero after 1000 made the number worth ten times more. On the other hand, if zeros are added after a decimal point is a different story.  It   made a number spectacularly minute, miniscule, approaching nothingness, regardless of any digits added past the last one.  .000000034 is tiny and still tiny even if you add numbers after the last digit, i.e. .00000003456789.  However, you add another zero before the last zero to the left of it (but right of the decimal point) and the number becomes exponentially lesser in value.

Now, how about infinity? Like zero, it also means nothing. It has no meaning for much of the things we do ordinarily. Like zero, people got by, transacted and traded without either one a factor, let alone be part of any calculation. Like zero, it has no meaning in our check book.  Well, let me back up. Zero balance means we have in our account nothing, nada, zilch. We cannot issue another check without committing larceny. But we do wish our check book has infinite balance in it. Although that too will not mean much either. You see if you went out to buy an infinitely large yacht for an infinitely large amount of money you’d go home and find that you still had an infinite balance in your account.  That’s great, but it is a fantasy, of course. Why? Infinity, like zero, is not a real number. Tell your accountant, the car dealership, or your bank that you have an infinite balance in your check book. You will immediately be certified because it would be insane to even try to reconcile a checkbook that has an infinite balance.

Back to From Zero to…

Here is the story we’re told, if you remember your last visit to the local Planetarium. The volunteer guide explained. From an infinitely small primordial area somewhere, a very long time ago, approximately 13.7 billion years ago, an infinitely small, dimensionless particle suddenly burst out of existence with an infinite temperature and kinetic energy and brightness that we now come to know as The Big Bang. That was how the universe began. Everything you see today around you – the smallest virus, an atom of oxygen, this earth, its moon, all the planets and all the moons orbiting them, the stars and all the galaxies – were all at once in a compact area so small it was immeasurable. At last count, educated estimates really, there are billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars that populate the observable universe. You ask yourself, “What does that mean?”  Well, it has no meaning really, does it? That primordial dot of an infinitely small area where this all began - has no meaning either, does it? Is that heresy? Does it nullify the Creation? Actually, it supports it. The Big Bang means all of what we see today came from nothing.  There was nothing and the next moment there was something. “Let there be light” was God turning on the switch and here we are.

Did a bar of chocolate shoplifted by a teenager at the local 5 & 10 store on a dare from his friends have a meaning? That chocolate bar in the context of the store’s inventory was a “nothing”, like a zero. The police was called, the boy apprehended, a report was written, a record kept. The nothing chocolate, almost a zero, created a very profound black mark accompanied by an even more infinitely tragic effect on the boy’s life. Zero to infinity in a young boy’s life.

It was no more than a few hours of one night when an up and coming junior executive on a business trip acted on a nothing notion that was to mean nothing at all the following day. He was to go home, return to his wife and beautiful young daughter, the night of indiscretion forgotten, even before the effects of the hungover went completely away. The few hours of a night, in the context of his entire life at that point in time, was .001%. But what happened that night haunted him for the rest of his life. From what then was a tranquil, untroubled life to one of infinite misery for the rest of his married life?

The car that can go from zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds took very little time of a rich man’s life to enjoy.  After all, he had a business to run, private jets to fly, vacations to enjoy - indeed a very busy life to conduct.  The farmer worked his carabao six days a week to plow, to transport anything from sacks of rice to pulling a sled to help a neighbor move. He did these chores from sunrise to sunset for the rest of his farming life. Were his efforts less meaningful when all he would accomplish was feed and take care of his family of four, while the man from halfway around the world was burdened with the welfare of his family, 15,000 employees and several dozen more investors?  

This takes us back to a paragraph, somewhere in the beginning, “it is neither here nor there”, doesn’t it? Well, it’s just like comparing zero to 60 in 3.8 to doing a hectare from dawn till dusk, zero to infinity in 13.7 billion years.

Gehirn, Geist & Verstand

English, not being my first language, has always intrigued me from the day I started to learn it. Naturally, like most folks who picked it up as a second or third or fourth language, I used to go through a number of awkward moments fumbling for the right equivalent of one word for another. As an example for this musing, I chose gehirn, geist and verstand above – three German words – because they exemplify many instances where one word in one language may not always have a direct equivalent in another. Added to the complication of language are phrases and combinations of words and idioms whose meanings confound and confuse every non-native speaker.  And, of course, the manner in how they’re spoken (pronounced) and the way they’re accented or emphasized are like nuanced features to the architecture of the proverbial Tower of Babel.

Well, geist is supposed to mean mind while verstand is about understanding. However, geist can refer to spirit or ghost.  Hence, poltergeist, which loosely means a noisy spirit or one which causes rattling noises, where polter means create disturbances.  Then, as in most languages, there is a different word for brain. In German gehirn is the word for brain when referring to the anatomy and hirn if it was alluding to cooking (for which there are countless recipes to prove that). So, a German-speaking cannibal can make a clear distinction between where he formulates his culinary creations (from what is inside his head- gehirn) and to what is on his dinner plate (hirn). Anthony Hopkins who played Lecter in “Hannibal”, had to deal with it differently altogether as he was explaining the dish he was preparing while chatting with FBI agent Starling (Jodie Foster) as Ray Liotta’s character Fred Krendler, his mind still apparently intact, was listening and smiling but oblivious to his own physiological predicament. If you have not seen the movie, well … if you are particularly squeamish and the macabre is not your thing, then don’t watch it.

That was quite a very convoluted way to get to the subject of the difference between the brain and the mind.

“A million thoughts went through my mind. What little mind I have”

 ---- Fuzzy Zoeller

 

Encased in our cranium is a three pound mass of tissue that is the central processing unit of the human body. It is a grayish beehive populated by a hundred billion neurons. If it were a marketplace filled with a hundred billion people, imagine each individual talking at a speed of five to fifty words per second to neighboring individuals by the thousands, each of those answering back with as many words per second, to and from among billions of others. A trillion exchanges occur every second, night or day.  That marketplace is the human brain. 

While much of what the brain does is for the proper functioning of the human body, doing it with such autonomy for the most part and doing it very well, there is a discarnate part of it that is hard to define, incorporeal, nonphysical but quite the essence that makes us human – our mind. Once we get past the physical attributes, the material possessions, family background, education, etc., there is the one entity that defies physical description; yet it is ultimately what defines each of us as discrete individuals. Identical twins and infrequently occurring identical-multiple-birth siblings become discrete individuals the moment they form their own minds. How does something that cannot be physically described be so powerful? Not only that it is how and why we become self-aware, it is also how or why we are able to create all advances in technology, the sciences, the arts, and how we are able to deliberate independently of other people’s ideas and opinions. In a nutshell, it is the mind that created civilization as we know it today.

Put simply, the human mind is a most powerful thing.

It separates us from all other organisms because it alone makes us feel compassion, love, anger, hate, remorse, sympathy and so many other layers of emotions denied to other living things. So, from the quote above, that little mind we have will let through as many visitors as it is willing to let in, keep some, ignore others and often forget many. As a result of all that, the mind will form its own biases, fears, affiliations, deep love and affection for other individuals, repulsion for others, profound beliefs and opinions and on and on.

Again, to put it simply, the human mind is a complicated thing.

The brain had been studied, dissected, sliced to the thinnest wafers, peered at with the most powerful microscopes, scanned, probed, etc. to the point where there is very little scientists and researchers do not know about its physiology, down to the network of neurons and synapses. It’s been said that Einstein’s brain was not extraordinarily different from other normal brains. It weighed no more or less than average and it did not have more folds or deeper fissures than usual. Its topography was no different either. Brain disorders and physical anomalies in the physiology of the brain aside, it appears that average normal brains are meant to be the same identical computer hardware for every user. I am not a physiologist or brain doctor but I cling to this analogy that given the same desk top or lap top or the latest and the greatest smart phones, it all comes down to how the user uses any of these devices. In college, our class got our first slide rules as we transitioned into the second year of engineering. Granted we bought different brands, all the slide rules had exactly the same functions and worked the same way: the K+E (more expensive U.S. made) and the economy Hemmi (Made in Japan, with bamboo slides). The slide rules did not determine who got A’s or C’s. The same thing happened when later generations of engineering students were presented with the first electronic calculators. The expensive Texas Instruments did not have any latent advantage over the Casio, Sharp or Canon. Individual users determined that.

The same can be true with the human brain.  I could be on thin ice here, again, because I do not have the academic credentials past common sense to make these assumptions. But I’ll have to say this. The capacity of the human brain, regardless of ethnicity or gender, had to be the same. Where it gets difficult in any kind of objective analyses is factoring in the environment, the cultural, sociological and societal influences that encourages or curtails the mental development of individuals. Long before the feminist movement was even a glimmer, Lise Meitner (born in 1878) was a Swedish-Austrian physicist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission of uranium long before the Manhattan Project. Mileva Maric (Serbian, born 1875) lived in the shadow of Albert Einstein with whom she was married and had three children (only two sons made it to adulthood). She was supposed to be the more capable mathematician than Albert E. and she was the only female student in the physics class in Zurich Polytechnic School (where she and Albert met). Marie Curie (Polish, born 1867) was the first and only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice and the only person to have won it in two different science categories. Female chess grandmasters are a recent phenomenon, but only because of the culturally but inadvertently-imposed limitation on their participation in the past. In earlier era only boys were encouraged and nurtured to play the game.  There are many similar examples that prove ethnicity and gender had nothing to do with brain capacities. Therefore, it can be said that there is a universal distribution of genius from all ethnic and gender groups. I know it is hard to prove or disprove because of the so many factors cited earlier.  In addition to all of those we will have to factor in nutrition, the stresses or simple effects of socio-economic scale differences. Lack of opportunity for higher education in general is a natural barrier in many places and particularly limiting for girls and young women.

After all of that where so much is known about the brain, the mind is still veiled with much mystery. It is akin to having much of the features of a computer hardware written down but very little by way of a comprehensive understanding of the software, let alone an easy to read manual. I am not discounting the advances in psychology and psychiatry but can we clearly conclude that both are able to provide clear definitions of the sciences they represent? While physical and physiological injuries to the brain can be addressed precisely, mental disorders are less tractable: multiple personality dissociative disorders, PTSD that varies from person to person, amnesia, profound differences in traumatic reactions to similar experiences, etc. The phenomenon of savant syndrome is particularly puzzling if not mysteriously intriguing. There is more under addiction, phobias, manic behaviors, etc.

So, is it too farfetched to believe that the mind is the software that gets written up as the user gets along in his or her development? It is as if we, as individuals, get the same hardware with all its potential and capacity but we get to write the software, tweaking it, improving it, changing it as time goes by, growing up until a period of time in adulthood when the software is at last set. Like any software, the individual mind will have had established parameters for personal values, ideals, goals, aspirations, bases for emotions and profound sets of beliefs. Then to be human, it will have gathered up its own biases, prejudices, and other negative attributes from years of external and cultural influences, etc.

This takes us back to where we started – the three German words. God gave us the Gehirn, the physical brain, allowed us to have verstand, and Geist – the God like qualities of the spirit, the discarnate feature associated with the mind so someday perhaps, if there is a transformation at all, we may at last know if there is a meaning to all of these. We may even stumble upon a far deeper understanding of why we are here and then to know where exactly we are heading. If the mind ceases after the gehirn has stopped operating, it would seem like a waste. And there lies the mystery of the mind. If we are able to even ponder these things, then maybe the universe is far more astounding than we can ever imagine it to be and, wishfully, longingly, we may know that God may yet have a surprise for each of us.

The Inconvenient Sequel to Ecovangelism

Urban Dictionary defines “Ecovangelism”: A socio-political movement disposed to make extreme claims and advocate extreme measures regarding the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment.

First, let’s have a word on Urban Dictionary for those not familiar with it.   

“Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases that was founded in 1998 as a parody of Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com by then-college freshman Aaron Peckham”.

 “Crowdsourced” means anyone may suggest or nominate a word. Popular usage will ultimately determine its fate towards a permanent place in the Standard Dictionary.

There had since been millions of entries by 2009 and new submissions per day are registered.  This is all possible because online information, unlike those in hard copy book-bound dictionaries or Encyclopedia, can be collected and sorted almost without limit in “the cloud”.

Meanwhile, the word “televangelist” first came to global use in 1973.  Only 100 new words came out in that same year. Believe it or not, words and phrases which sound new, like fact-check, factoid, and yes, affluenza were words introduced then. As an aside, most who watched the news last year thought affluenza was a newly minted word. A Dallas legal team used it to defend/justify the behavior of a teenager – scion of a millionaire family - for drunk driving that killed four people.  But I digressed.

Televangelism is uniquely a U.S. original, perhaps brought about in the early years of broadcast media when radio and television were largely unregulated, in a country that was and still is anchored in Judeo-Christian philosophy. Televangelists proliferated globally until many of them fell out of grace (pun intended) after a series of scandals that were moral, social and financial in nature. There is just a handful now. It is the reputable ones that survived and do still enjoy a substantial support – free of any scandals or cases of fraud – and in return they continue to do a lot of public good in the world. {The true standard upon which televangelism should be modeled after is Rev. Billy Graham, who has now been succeeded by Franklin Graham}. A significant alteration at the turn of the new century was a subtle change to more positive messages against what used to be fire and brimstone, gloom and doom to those not heeding the ways of righteousness.

But, in case you have not noticed, the gloom and doom remains an active forecast but not from televangelism. It is no longer for those violating the tenets of piety. Instead, humanity and the world are both doomed due to man’s profligacy and reckless abuse of resources.  We are destroying the environment with our carelessness and irresponsible behavior. Fire and brimstone will be the literal heating up of the planet as human settlements and practices continue to spew carbon into the air.  The melting of the polar ice caps and rising sea level will be the end of humanity.  Suddenly, our sins are against the environment. The televangelists of yore, barely over a generation ago, were replaced by the new, louder voices from the wilderness – the ecovangelists. Both televangelists and ecovangelists prophesy despite the fact that predicting the future is a universal impossibility. The world had ended many times over from century to century if the countless doomsayers had their say. Today, sea levels will inundate many places on earth as polar ice caps melt.  This is despite the fact that there is not enough ice to melt from both poles to raise sea levels as to submerge even half of what Mr. Gore says will be under water.  It is not like melted ice will be concentrated in places ecovangelists choose to highlight. Water will spread out evenly – seeking the appropriate level. BUT, as depicted in many monster and disaster movies, Manhattan, New York becomes the epicenter for raging sea levels or a speeding glacier (an oxymoron in itself). If its earthquakes and fire it is San Francisco or LA.  If it is space alien invaders or Superman’s nemesis, it will have to be Washington, D.C., specifically, the White House.

Let us not forget that the “tip of the iceberg” says a lot about what the doomsayers may neglect to mention. If only 1/10^th of the iceberg is visible from the surface, and 9/10^th underwater, then only 1/10^th of every floating ice berg will contribute to the rise in sea level. 90% of all ice berg everywhere is  already accounted for in the current sea level.  Likewise, only the surface of the ice sheets, just 1/10^th of the entire ice shelf, in both the Arctic and Antarctic will contribute to additional sea level. Mountain ice and snow, if they all melt completely, will contribute to the rising sea level; but not the entire mountains made up of rocks and soil. Mr. Gore may need to re-do his math or review his accounting principles.

It is easy to label those whose views on climate change are different from the prevailing ideas put forward by those who claim that climate change is the world’s biggest existential threat. Climate change deniers are also called by many other names: ignorant, uneducated, ill-informed on the science of climate change, uncaring, heartless, selfish individuals, etc.

Arguing over the science of climate change does not present a simple straightforward platform.

There is not enough data because even if we go beyond the past century, it will not be enough from the context of earth’s history. Often, proponents of climate change go back or begin their perspective only from the time of the industrial revolution. Part of the reason is that that was the starting line for when carbon began to emerge as a polluting agent.

Climate change proponents, to use their labeling system, are historical deniers if they fail to acknowledge the far longer history of the planet – multiple-glaciation alternating with global warming over thousands and thousands of years.  We must consider where we are today in the history of the planet. The last ice age lowered the sea level around the world when much of the fresh water was frozen and concentrated in and around the poles. The islands of Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, Indonesia and many others were connected to the mainland by so called land bridges. That is how early humans and all other organisms reached and colonized those places. When sea level rose as polar ice caps melted the land bridges disappeared under oceans, separating these island-countries as we know them today. Please read the quote below:

“At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth's history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!). Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago”.

Imagine a stair case that is 11,000 years long.  The industrial revolution began in 1820, or maybe as late as 1840.  So, if we reckon the global warming story from that period, it will be as if we just stepped from an imaginary platform on the side and hopped onto that stair case less than 2-1/2 centuries ago, ignoring our story before that. That’s when we began using fossil fuels but already for over 10,000 years earlier the entire earth was emerging and warming up from the last active ice age. We are merely a part of the natural processes that encompass millions and millions of years where organisms adapted to the changing environment. Adaptation defines what we are and how we look today. We reached the top of the food chain when we began to lose much of our body and facial hair so we can take advantage of a warming climate. Organisms that did not adapt became extinct. Or, if we go back farther than that, the mighty dinosaurs died off when they could not adapt to the global cooling after an asteroid impact 67 million years ago. Relatively few dinosaur species actually died outright from that impact that covered merely 110 miles across. Global cooling created by all the impact dust that blocked much of the sunlight was what killed the big dinosaurs. There is undeniable scientific evidence to back it up. Mammals with their fur and live births and extended period of parental care, thus passing on knowledge for far longer time made for superior adaptation.  And we are here today because of global warming.

All of these arguments will be for naught if we do not suggest an alternative.

1.       If carbon build up is the concern then we should be developing the proliferation of the eater of carbon – trees and all plants. Money and resources for a global campaign to plant more trees will be far less than how much had been spent arguing against the use of fossil fuels and endorsement of alternative forms of energy. Trees for building materials and for food production are clearly the low lying fruit (pun intended) that will have far ranging benefits, including flood control, that will truly have relatively more immediate global reach, specially to third world countries. If only a fraction of time and energy spent on climate change campaigns were on planting trees, the planet can be a tad cooler.  Imagine if just a little more of the sun’s energy were absorbed by trees and plants around the world, while gobbling up carbon and exhaling oxygen in return.

2.       We can continue with alternative energy program that works, discard the white elephant projects, but nuclear energy should remain a viable option as well. In fact, it is more critical against limited supply of fossil fuels.  It is more consistent, if not even more reliable, and unhindered where wind power and sunlight can be interrupted by weather. We are aware of the issues dealing with the byproduct of fission reactors and potential accidents (quite low now due to modern safeguards). Make note of this: On top of existing reactors operating worldwide, China has 23 under construction, 33 planned; Russia has 11 and 14, respectively; India 4 and 20; Japan 2 and 12; S. Korea 6 and 6; USA 1 and 9, putting America under a clear energy disadvantage.  Fusion power – the energy source of the universe – should be a priority for alternative power source. The universe had been using it for 13.7 billion years. We should be funding its research more than we are spending on electric cars.  Speaking of electric cars, we should keep in mind that no matter how much we increase the use of electric cars in the U.S., its impact on carbon footprint reduction is negligible because 81 per cent of electricity (from which all electric cars get their charge) comes from oil, coal and natural gas – all fossil fuels.

 

3.       Efficiency in electrical usage by way of more efficiency in electric motors that run the machines, low wattage high output lamps; more energy-saving homes and offices and factories, etc. deserve more research funding and should be ongoing until more than 90% efficiency is achieved.

4.       Here’s a radical idea. Much of fossil fuel today is used by the commuting public – wasted on the road to and from work. While public transportation works in many places, there is a lot more wasted by individuals driving, often singly, their own vehicles. All kinds of scheme had been tried that worked for a while, like carpooling, but we know the best way is still to cut the distance between each commute. City planners and residential visionaries should get together to make the ideal condition: Place every worker’s residence close to where they work. Every morning in every city we observe this: vehicles jamming every artery towards each metropolis but make note there are vehicles too, perhaps not as heavily but still quite significant, leaving the city areas outward the suburbs. From a much higher view we see vehicles going to and fro, much of them commuting from homes to their places of work. An algorithm ought to be developed in work/residential placements, matching people to their work location(without sacrificing lifestyle: amenities and affordability and needs like school and day care, etc.) , with the aim of cutting commute time and distance.  Ideally, people’s residences are matched to their places of work; a matching program in place so as to make that a permanent fluid activity by and between human resources, city planners and home builders and residential managers. Like I said, this is a radical idea but it should be part of the conversation platform where more pipe dream suggestions had been brought up before.


This might be inconvenient to ecovangelists but they ought not be left to monopolize the conversation.

  

For All in Tents and Porpoises

A funny story – it was funny then, to me, anyway – that I keep recalling it every now and then, went like this:

There was a camp ground for boy scouts by the beach close to the sea where dolphins also come by each morning.  The camp director actually fed the dolphins at about the same time the boy scouts have their breakfast.  Each morning the camp director would announce breakfast to the boys and calling out to the dolphins with, “For All in Tents and porpoises…“, to come and get it.  Corny now, perhaps, but it was a clever pun I can’t shake off.  I understand it later became a title of a funny book. 

The origin of the pun is of course, the phrase, “For all intents and purposes”. I will for a minute try to make light of something that has become part of a national conversation that is taken so seriously, despite the fact that it borders on hilarity if not outrageously ridiculous.

What is the intent and purpose of ESPN pulling out a sports commentator from covering a football game because his name is Robert Lee, so as not to offend some segments of the listening audience or fans?  If there is a height to stupidity, this is the Mount Everest of the absurd and empty headedness that is usually associated with political correctness run amok.  If we go by the Malay word origin of “amok or amuk”, we just witnessed an uncontrolled social homicidal rage by these institutions, such as sports organizations like ESPN, that have no business getting involved in political discourses.  Unfortunately, sports these days are also a media vehicle and, as such, they are pulling the same band wagon filled with anything and everything that has to do with political correctness.  Robert Lee, the unfortunate sportscaster of Asian descent, is about as far from Robert E. Lee’s family tree as tamarind is from blueberry.

What is the intent and purpose of removing confederate statues from public parks and sites today?

There are voices now clamoring for removing the Mt. Rushmore Monuments of four presidents because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners.  I can hear Abraham Lincoln speaking to the other three granite faces that are on that mountain.  Abraham Lincoln once had one of the best comebacks to critics who called him “two faced”.  He said, “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?” I am imagining him telling the other three, “Well, if they succeed in blasting us out of this mountain, then I wish they’d make another one somewhere and then perhaps I will have my other face on it”.

When we visited the Gettysburg National Military Park a couple of years ago everyone who was there felt nothing but respect and solemn admiration for those who died there.  It was a war that by Providential Grace led to the unification of a country that was about to be divided. The price for unity was paid for by blood from both sides.

Let’s imagine now if all the Confederate statues were removed from that national park.  Many of the statues were far apart from each other to signify where soldiers and officers may have fallen.  I can hear it now as one Union statue yells to another, “Is it just me imagining this? Where are the other dead whom we fought with?  Did we win this war without anyone to oppose us?  What was the intent and purpose of the war?”  Yes, Gettysburg will be meaningless if the story is not told in full.  It loses much of its significance when half of its history is erased. But, what would be the intent and purpose of doing so? If we are still arguing about the civil war and slavery a century and a half later when much of the healing had gone on, wounds almost all covered with dry scabs, numb to the touch for much of the nation, what intent and purpose is served by statue removals, other than coercing collective amnesia.  The statues had been there a while, silent, vigil, unmoving and un-intrusive to the daily activities of people, generations of them walking by and often oblivious to the presence of these inanimate objects which, like all open air statues, suffer from the ignominy  brought upon them by discourteous pigeons.  Is it not enough that they suffer through that every day? It is not enough for these folks, mostly young, whose moral compass is likely guided by social media than a deep sense of history or respect for what this country had gone through.

What is tragic about all of these is that the obsession and the compulsion to act on statue removal and attempts at revision of history are from a narrow slice of the population that seems to suffer from self-induced insanity. It is as if they woke up one morning and they started hearing voices.  It has to be that because so much of what this country had gone through is well accounted for and many generations were fine with it.  What ill, what injury, what consternation did just occur to bring about this sudden tinge of self-righteousness?  Is it perhaps a failure of higher education, where professors, some of them, more so from the so called liberal colleges, are indoctrinating rather than teaching?

How tragic it is that Columbus is also on the historical chopping block. First of all, if old Christopher didn’t show up someone else would have.  If they prefer the New World was never opened to European explorers, are they prepared to criticize the progress achieved here today?  Their ability to express their rights to protest is guaranteed by a new nation that took all pains to make sure it is in its Constitution. That nation was born from that discovery by somebody who now, sadly, is likely to be associated with mattress sales or extra discounts at department stores. Yet, his name needs to be expunged, his statues, yes, countless inanimate objects scattered all over the country, removed. For what intent and purpose?

At some point, we are heading towards a downward spiral weighted down by political correctness. Political correctness has become a battering ram against an imaginary or imagined harm caused by the creation of events in the course of developing a civilization. We are not looking forward if our attention is towards what is already behind us.  Are we going to let these modern day Don Quixotes fight these windmills of their imagination, believing that a magic eraser will actually clear history in order to create a better Utopian narrative, free of sad, bad memories?

What would be the intent and purpose of that?

Noli Me Tangere

The Latin phrase - it is a complete sentence actually - literally means “Do Not Touch Me”.  It is the title of the first of two novels written by Jose Rizal – Philippine national hero – that helped to spark and sustain the revolution against the 300-year Spanish rule over the 7,000 island archipelago just off the mainland of Southeast Asia.  Tragically, Jose Rizal was tried and found guilty of treason against the Spanish-ruled government.  He was executed by firing squad on December 30, 1896.  If the execution was delayed for just a bit, his story would have taken a different turn. In less than a year and a half, the Spanish American War was declared on April, 1898 and on May 1, just days after, Commodore George Dewey sailed into and entered Manila Bay to engage the Spanish armed forces, or what’s left of it - to a quick capitulation. The Spanish American War was over that summer in July, 1898.  It was a very short war indeed, for which the new American democracy, then relatively still a political infant itself, just barely over a century old, was given the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines – the spoils of an uncontested war. 300 years under Spanish colonial rule versus a mere 50 years as a U.S. territory made for a glaring contrast.  Of lesser importance in the general scheme of things but quite personal to me is that a century after the pivotal event it gave me the ability to write this in English.

Noli Me Tangere

“In the catalogue of human ills there is to be found a cancer so malignant that the least touch inflames it and causes agonizing pains; afflicted with such a cancer, a social cancer, has your dear image appeared to me, when, for my own heart’s ease or to compare you with others, I have sought, in the centers of modern civilization, to call you to mind.  …

To this end, I shall endeavor to show your condition, faithfully and ruthlessly.  I shall lift a corner of the veil which shrouds the disease, sacrificing to the truth everything, even self-love – for, as your son, your defects and weaknesses are also mine.”

 --- Europe, 1886   Jose Rizal

I re-read the novel once more, perhaps for a third or fourth time since high school. It was originally written in Spanish, printed in Berlin, at Rizal’s personal expense, and distributed mainly in Manila in mid- 1860’s.  It had since been translated into other languages, including Tagalog, but as luck would have it from what I already described from three paragraphs above, I was able to read it in English. The story, obviously, has not changed, but my perspective had and I view it differently now.  What is hard to believe is that its relevance is, to me, even more valid if not terribly more pressing, not just for the Philippines but for every country that is in dire strait presently. It is more so for countries that had in their past a prolonged subjugation of their people by a foreign entity, for far too long.

Jose Rizal, if I were to surmise, used “Noli Me Tangere”, as a plea by a nation, by a people, begging not to be touched  because it was suffering from a cancer that was metastasizing, thus much too painful to the touch.  It was a social cancer, a political malady, a moral disease that was gnawing at the very cultural fabric of a people under stress and too sick to even realize it was gravely ill. Juxtapose that analogy around the world today and we see that in places like Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras and Cambodia, and every place where hidden beneath a frail façade, under a semblance of order, where a functioning government or society seems to function well with a calm exterior, there is a cancer from within.

As in the actual physiological form of cancer, the national maladies come in various virulent forms. Similarly, there is no vaccine for it and the task to fight it is not short of total excision. It is also very difficult to detect.

We see these warnings uttered over a century ago, albeit from an obscure writer from an obscure land.  The examples are as varied as the carriers of virulence come in many forms.  Just recently, America had been gripped by a condition that if we are not careful could metastasize into something horribly deadly.  If slavery was a cancer, the civil war was a raging battle to excise it and the country had begun to heal beginning at the turn of and through the mid-20^th century, that went into remission. For a while there, perhaps out of a hopeful longing, most of the nation see only the scabs of many wounds all over the country. Then perhaps the scabs had plateaued and only slightly noticeable.  Events of late, particularly in Charlottesville, VA, some sectors of our society succeeded in picking at the scabs.  The scales are beginning to unravel and it is seen to bleed.  The blood will divide the nation which will carry with it errant cancer cells that can spread once more. There does not seem to be any agreement in how to stop the bleeding, even as everyone seems to agree that re-opening the wounds will only cause pain, and there is no predicting what salve will work, let alone if there is any willingness from all sides to offer relief.  Again, if we are not too careful, the scabs will re-open wounds once more and we may find the cancer too painful to the touch.  Then, we will all be begging, “Noli Me Tangere”, as Jose Rizal once said.

The Spanish-American War had a handful of profound turning points for the Filipino people, not the least of which was the unshackling of three-hundred years of bondage, the dramatic improvement in education, the sudden surge in literacy, and exposure to modern knowledge. BUT, it was clear, as had also happened elsewhere, the people went from one colonizer to the next.  Granted, relatively speaking, the natives were now handled with softer gloves but they were virtually a colony once more, though legally a U.S. “territory”. Places like Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, even Hawaii, were protected territorial entities as well.  History books are vague about whether the Philippine Islands were a U.S. Colony until its independence on July 4, 1946. Let us set that aside because prior to all of those events, stormier ones preceded the history before 1898, three to four centuries earlier.

This is not a knock on the countries today that were involved in the colonization of half of the world then (between 1400-1500) but we must mention them by name as part of the historical record, adding quickly that today’s population are not the same ones then; in fact, we are addressing entirely different governments responsible for the colonies 3-4 centuries ago.  But we will be remiss not to identify, for lack of a better word, “the common denominator”.

The Philippines, from one side of the globe, had one thing in common with countries halfway from the other side.  The maladies they suffered, the subjugation of the native peoples, the superficial progress and their present day symptoms of trouble, can be traced to the colonization by Spain and Portugal of all of South America and the Caribbean and of course The Philippines. Then the French, the Belgian, the Dutch and British colonies made up the rest, covering the other parts of Asia and Africa.  Some countries fared better than others, post-colonial period, and historians and political scientists will agree or disagree with the how and why but the fact of the matter is the one nagging question: How come colonized countries had always suffered from stunted growth – economically and politically? If we run our fingers on the globe, starting from Mexico, southerly to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, all the way to Venezuela, Brazil and Chile, then from Algeria to Libya, Chad, Sudan to the Congo to South Africa, we see a pattern of free people that have a hard time governing themselves after their independence. If dictatorship or flawed elections, coups and violent turnover of government power were not the method, corruption was and still is the primer beneath the exterior paint that outwardly shows a people deeply reliant on a confused culture, a devotion to religion, but an unparalleled compliancy.

These colonized people were not properly prepared by a rushing exit of the colonizers.  Often the exits were forced by revolution combined with a weakened resolve by the colonizers either out of guilt or by its own internal upheavals at home.

BUT, we should set that all aside.  It is part of history. We learn from it and not repeat it. Looking back at the past does not move any nation one foot forward towards a better future. The social, economic and political cancer does not go away completely. Instead it only goes into remission. It stays hidden within the folds of human nature.  It calls for an even stronger resolve because cancer cells now can cross oceans and over connected lands.  A cancer cell hunts and destroys the good cells in order to perpetuate itself, to flourish and reproduce. If we allow ourselves to be willing hosts and be the welcoming recipients with our complacency, political correctness, unabashed but divisive political beliefs, and the unwillingness to recognize the symptoms, then we will split ourselves while the cancer keeps subdividing to make more malignant cells.  If we allow that, then soon we are only setting ourselves up to scream, “Noli me Tangere”.

{Post note: Noli Me Tangere is a downloadable PDF in various translations. I read the one translated by Leon Maria Guerrero who, as a Filipino himself, did a fine job of converting the original Spanish into words relatable to every Filipino citizen today. The other translations were all superbly done as well.}