Dave’s 13th Post
Reflections on our visits to Vietnam and China, March 31, 2011
About Vietnam
I’d like to start this blog with a couple of concluding paragraphs from my letter home after our visit to Vietnam in 1997.
We visited HMC during a unique time in its history and next year it will be vastly different. As you walk down the streets of HMC you see people cooking next to the curb while behind them a new Hyatt is being built. People live on the sidewalks out of necessity as if sidewalks are extensions of their homes. It appears to be a city in the midst of rapid cultural change. Last year Anna was able to rent a cyclo (a bicycle with a large seat) driver for $2 for the day. This year the same service would cost about $40. In addition, not all cyclo drivers this year can be trusted. Several passengers on our ship contracted for a $2 ride and were taken to some obscure place and told it would cost $20 to be returned to a recognizable place. Pickpockets and crime are endemic. Our ship’s staff, and even a shopkeeper we bought from, advised us not to use fanny packs because they are commonly cut or ripped off. We were advised to keep our valuables under our clothes. The first night of our stay in port 20 people reported thefts of cameras, purses, and other items. The world is coming to Vietnam and it’s not quite ready. The first McDonalds will open in HMC in 2 months. What we are witnessing as we go from Vancouver to Kobe to Shanghai to HMC is the dawning of a common global culture. Communism is dead here but bureaucracy has replaced it and Western companies are trying to get a foothold. Native cultures, like Vietnam, are disappearing and being modernized, Americanized, Westernized, capitalized, globalized, and secularized. HMC is probably a decade behind Shanghai in this process. Sociologists have a term for the change we see here in Vietnam called Anomie. It refers to rapid social change where old and new norms and values are in conflict which causes confusion and turmoil. You can see the turmoil and change in the traffic, the crime, and at the main post office where you have a choice of having your mail metered or to use the glue pot to paste on your stamps. In secularization, world religions are demythologized and homogenizing, and what kind of worldwide religious paradigm will evolve, if any, is anyone’s guess. In terms of commercialization and acculturation, we can see the future and it looks a lot like America and that’s not all good.
Our shipmates had mixed feelings about Vietnam. Many of the adults, including Jean and myself, were ready to leave or would have left earlier. Most of the kids loved the country, plan to come back, and some wanted to stay. I guess you have to see the country for yourself and make your own determination. I’m very glad we were there and grateful to have been there at the time that we were. We were able to see a culture on the verge of a radical transformation. As outsiders we could be more objective in our observations, particularly in light of all the class work we’ve done in preparation and the lectures we’ve heard. As we travel we become constantly more aware of how diverse world cultures are, how much we can all learn from each other, and how inevitable is the coming of a common world culture.
The change we have witnessed in fourteen years is astounding. In 1997 there were no tall buildings and now they are everywhere. Jean commented that two noticeable changes she sees are motorbikes have replaced pedal bikes and the women wear western clothes rather than their former Vietnamese traditional dress. I liked the appearance of coffee shops, in particular The Coffee Bean (same as at home), where I got the best lattes ever. Although Vietnam is not without its problems, things are booming here and I wonder if Vietnam and American are heading in opposite directions. They’re going up economically and we’re going down. It was a nice ride in America while it lasted.
Unfortunately we did not learn as much in Global Studies Class this year as we did in 1997. There is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the senior passengers about the fact that medical folks from the U of Virginia have been lecturing about infectious diseases during our trip from India to Vietnam to China. We got little to no information about Vietnam to maximize our visit. Fortunately we did have on board a Harvard Grad and current employee/scholar of the Kennedy School on Vietnam, Ben Wilkerson, who spoke in various classes. He was wonderful and I stumbled across one of his presentations by accident in a class on contemporary China that I sat in on. Here are some of his observations as I best recorded them:
• Vietnam is a country of just under 90 million and has about 3m communist party members, most over 65.
• Vietnam is a member of OSEAN, a union of Asian countries with a shared commitment to common values and fears. Ironically it was originally formed as an anticommunist union. Vietnam, a communist country, joined in 1995.
• Vietnam and China have a conflicted relationship and Vietnam joined OSEAN so as not to be overwhelmed by China. This brings back memories of our disaster in Vietnam from the end of World War II until our eventual defeat and in departure in 1973. If you remember, the argument for our involvement was to prevent the spread of communism as Vietnam joined forces with China to dominate the world. Remember the “domino theory”? Those of us who opposed that war have watched in amazement as Junior started two more self-destructive wars to further deplete our treasury and antagonize the rest of the world. We have replaced the communist bogeyman with the Islamic bogeyman and our military industrial sector has become the only industry in which we still lead the world…and few in America seem to notice this foolish, wasteful, and immoral behavior. There…I feel much better after venting.
• I’m not done after all. As I type, I realize the students onboard have not heard a word about the Vietnam War in the Global Studies class they are all required to take. This is truly amazing as it is such an important part of our recent history and our visit to Vietnam should be such a teachable moment. I heard that some of the students did visit the war museum in HMC and came away shocked and surprised. They claimed they knew nothing about the war. I guess the Harvard teacher’s observation is true. He said that “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” How many more needless wars will we fight before we are completely impoverished or rethink the current domination of our military industrial complex that President Eisenhower advised us to resist?
• China and Vietnam have a conflict over rocky and uninhabited islands that both claim and that may prove valuable in the future for oil and gas. Vietnam has been courting the U.S. to side with it but to date we have not got involved. Hopefully OSEAN may be able to resolve this issue in the future.
• Another potential conflict between the two countries is the issue of China building dams on the Mekong River that would greatly reduce the flow to Vietnam and be disastrous for it. Vietnam exports a lot of rice using this water and this might cause receiving countries to side with it on the issue.
• Wilkerson claimed that SE Asia has stagnated lately because of crony capitalism, poor education, and uncompetitive companies. He said China’s investment in South East Asia is primarily in extraction industries and the U.S. could build relevance here by making goods. Under Obama the U.S. is becoming more involved in Vietnam and Intel just opened its largest factory in the world in HMC.
• In the 10 years Wilkerson has been involved inVietnam, he has not encountered anti Americanism and says Vietnam is a “positive America supporter.” He claims the people here distinguish between our government and the American people. The two most popular dog names in North Vietnam are Nix (for Nixon) and Jon (for Johnson).
• Since the war here many Vietnamese have immigrated to the U.S. and Vietnam is currently in the top 10 in sending students to U.S. universities.
• Vietnam is highly internet wired and most of its population is online and was born after the war.
• Only 3 million of its 90m people belong to the Communist Party and 2/3s of those 3m are over 65. Apparently communism will eventually die a natural death of old age
• Higher education is in bad shape here and the young use the internet to self educate. Let’s hope that internet education also helps counter our dismal public school situation in the U.S.
We visited the Vietnam War museum in Hanoi and saw an impressively arranged collage of a crashed U.S. fighter on its nose with a lot of attached abandoned U.S. military hardware. The display was adorned with several plaques with inaccurate information. For instance, did you know that the North Vietnamese Peoples’ Armed Forces shot down and captured “33,068 American planes including 88 B-52s?” That’s what the display claims and it’s obviously false. One wonders when someone has the truth and moral high ground on its side why it would undermine its story with nonsense. On to China…
About Hong Kong and China
I’m now typing on the last day of March from dockside in Shanghai. It is Thursday and we leave tomorrow for Taiwan. Jean, John, Carol and I have decided to leave the ship next Wednesday, April 6th, and fly to Maui and our condo. After Taiwan, the ship spends eleven day traveling to Hawaii. I feel a little guilty jumping ship and abandoning the relatives I brought on board, but John’s kids arrive in Hawaii before our ship arrives there and our leaving the ship in Taiwan allows us to pick them up at the airport when they arrive. Also, because the Global Studies class has become so disappointing (not much if anything has been said about Vietnam or China before our arrival in our last two ports) there is not much reason to stay other than socializing with our siblings and spouses, which I will miss.
Hong Kong since 1998 has been reunited with China (the Brit’s 100 year lease expired) and is functioning as one country but using two systems. HK is 90% Chinese, has freedom of speech, uses 2 currencies, and 13% of the households have a car. The trams are less than 30 cents, the subway is great, and the majority claims to have no religion. The only other thing I learned there was that it is bad manners to place your chopsticks on the table. Use the holder.
This will be my last blog from the ship and I would like to conclude with a few observations about China. I’ve only been here two days so I don’t know much.
• The growth and change observable in Shanghai from our 1997 visit is remarkable. Like Vietnam, China seems to be a culture heading in an opposite economic direction than the U.S.
• Ours tour buses are met as we exit by what our guide calls “hello people.” They are the street vendors that sell stuff from postcards to Rolex watches.
• According to our guide, prominent people in China are called the “Big Potato” instead of our title “Big Cheese.” (Where else can you get such riveting information?)
• The number 6 in China is related to happiness and 666 = 3 x happiness. This is contrary to American Christians associating 666 with the Devil.
• The number 8 is associated with money and the number 4 is considered unlucky as it is pronounced as “death” in Mandarin. Accordingly, 8888 is the most expensive license plate in Shanghai and 4444 is the cheapest. I assume letters accompany the 4 numbers to make possible the sale of a lot of plates.
• A license plate in Shanghai can cost $5000 but it is a one-time cost.
• All land in China is owned by the government and Shanghai citizens get free residences or money toward rent.
• Young people “do not believe in God,” but as our guide claimed, “believe in the internet.” This lack of belief is contrasted with the 70% of the elderly who believe in God. This sounds a lot like America where disbelief has grown from 6% in 2001 to 15% today according to polling. I wonder what the next belief system will be anchored in? It seems to me consumerism is the real religion of our era.
• Shanghai men are in demand as husbands as they do housework and are evidently very trainable. Our guide claimed she has a boyfriend but figures she needs to conduct about 3 more years of training before marrying him.
• Shanghai men marry at about 30 and women at 33 and both work very hard. Young Shanghai couples we were told often do not want children because of the expense. These couples are referred to as DINKs, translated as “double income no kids.”
• Most newlyweds live with their parents because of the cost of housing.
• China is about the same size as the U.S. with two significant differences. It has no west coast and its northern and southern parts both extend further so it has a wider range of climates.
• China has been diverting its rivers for the past 2,500 years and has large projects in the works now that will greatly affect other Asian countries.
• It has turned much of its forested area into farmland in the past few decades which is a reason it now has such disastrous flooding. Farmland does not absorb as much water as forests.
• You probably know that China has taken over Tibet the last few decades, forcing the Dali Lama to flee and take up residence in India. An important reason for China’s takeover is the fact that major river systems start in Tibet and China wants control of the water for its growing population.
• For an answer to the question “Is Taiwan part of China?” It depends on who you ask. It’s a little complex, so if you’re interested, ask me when I’m back and I’ll tell you what I remember from the lecture I heard.
• Our knowledgeable guest speaker said that China has a patient wait and see attitude and he thought that during Obama’s second term that C & T would sign a peace treaty. I thought I’d end with some good news.
That’s about all I have to say about this voyage. If you want to know any more, you’ll have to travel yourself. Have a great trip.
Showing posts with label Dave Bender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dave Bender. Show all posts
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Dave's 12th Post
Describing India before arrival in Singapore, March 16, 2011
Where do I begin to describe India? It assaults the senses in every possible way. It simultaneously repels and attracts, amazes and disgusts, but most of all, its conflicting splendor and squalor makes one ask, “What is going on here?” It will take awhile to process what I’ve seen and experienced. You may have heard the saying that “we see things not as they are, but as we are.” Discoveries the past two decades in neuroscience are now proving the truth of this old axiom. Most of the information we take in is filtered through our existing belief systems and escapes the scrutiny of rational thought. We all are biologically designed to confirm our biases and reflexively reject opposing views. That is why change is so difficult and probably why addictions so hard to break. I think the best way to start is to caution myself and any readers still with me to beware of our limitations and ethnocentric tendencies. Ethnocentrism is the practice of judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own. I think I can safely say that after the overwhelming number of people one encounters on the street in India, the next most jarring sight for a Westerner is the trash and debris that is omnipresent. This was most evident during our trip to Varanasi, and in particular the section called Kashi, the oldest part of town. The riverbank scene in Kashi that you have probably all seen pictures of, is where Hindus come to bathe in the Ganges to end the rebirth cycle (Moksha) and to be cremated. You have likely seen a picture of a body being set adrift for its final trip down the river on a floating funeral raft (this is no longer permitted). Our trip guide, who had a PhD in anthropology, told us that for Hindus this is the holiest place on earth. From what I saw the past few days, it may also be the filthiest.
Kashi has miles of narrow streets, all littered with dog and cow dung, human and animal urine, and litter of every description. Because the streets are at best about eight foot wide and your head is on a swivel to take it all in, it is easy to step in feces (which I did). I also was the recipient of cow urine spray as an animal I was trying to pass had the urge to go just as I tried to slide by. Our guide had told us earlier that “You will hate India or you will love it. You can’t ignore it.” I got physical evidence of that.
The hazards of travel…I just received a good dose of cow spray here and was about to step in #2
After our return to the ship, I asked Laxmi Tewari, the professor I mentioned in my previous blog, to explain the apparent contradiction of how a place that is venerated as earth’s holiest place could also be so littered and filthy. His initial response was defensive, pointing out some of America’s cultural shortcomings. After I agreed with his America observations and persisted with my question, recognizing its ethnocentric foundation, he explained that historically in rural India human waste was seen as just part of a biodegradable process as were the leaves one used to clean with. This stuff all got naturally recycled but in our urban era of packaging and plastics it creates an unsightly and unsanitary problem. Evidently in India’s seemingly timeless history, change comes slowly. We then discussed how safe Kashi was. In spite of jostling crowds and the sea of humanity we waded through, there was little concern about theft or violence. After I got used to the constant press of people, I felt safe and unthreatened. I don’t think I would have felt the same in New York’s Times Square or a comparable crowded and unfamiliar American setting.
Because Jean has done such an excellent and comprehensive journaling of our India experiences, I will try to avoid duplicating her comments and describe things that caught my attention that she did not mention. Our two riverside visits in the Kashi area of Varanasi made an indelible and stunning impact. It was like going back a thousand or more years in time. Here are my observations and reflections in no particular order:
•Kashi, like Lourdes for Catholics and Mecca for Muslims, is a place of pilgrimage, but it has much more significance. It is a place to go to be released from the otherwise never ending cycle of rebirth.
•Thanks are given daily at the riverbank for Mother Ganges. There is morning bathing to remove sin and a Sun Salutation ceremony.
•Along the riverbank you see laundry men called Dhobi washing clothes. They are from the lowest class and also act as matchmakers because they know peoples’ secrets and where the “dirty laundry” is.
•The lowest of the lowest class act as undertakers and cremators and they construct sandalwood piers six feet high with incense to cover the obnoxious odor that would otherwise be released by burnt nails and hair. Not everyone can afford this service and use the $10 gas option as Jean explained.
•There is no crying at cremations because this is a joyous occasion for the deceased (remember Moksha?). A professional laugher may even be hired.
•Skulls are burned and then crushed so they cannot be later used for black magic purposes.
•Women are not allowed at cremations.
•According to our guide, Ganges water does not go bad. It is sold in shops much like Lourdes water in France. Also available are empty containers for filling.
•Directly across the river, which seems barren, Buddhist pilgrims collect “golden sand” as it is purported to be the site of Buddha’s first sermon. Deer Park, which we visited later, is also designated as the site of Buddha’s first sermon. Kind of reminds me of The True Cross of Jesus that has pieces on display in multiple revered places.
•In Hindu temples, prayer must be said daily, we were told, or “the energy” leaves the temple.
•As I mentioned, visiting Kashi was like time travel back to a primitive past. As a species, we are obviously still in the early stages of our evolution.
Here you see a body being burned on the river bank. Notice the pile of ash on the right. It is the residue from prior cremations. It is now illegal to put the ash in the sacred river.
Here are some random thoughts about India today:
•Street traffic is so congested I don’t understand how accidents are not continual happenings. Traffic moves like a school of fish. Every bike, bus, and car moves in unison as a single organism. I can’t imagine taking my teenage son or daughter out on the streets to teach them how to drive.
•When we were here in 1997 we saw no shopping malls. Now I’m told there are over 2,000.
•The parts of India we have seen have changed noticeably since our 1997 visit. The traffic is better, it seems cleaner, I see less begging, and we are told India has made great strides forward in the past decade.
•Professor Laxmi Tewari told me that the caste system is breaking down. I suspect the internet is a powerful agent of change and a great leveler.
•A fellow passenger had a cynical explanation for the piles of trash on India’s streets. If Indians believe in Moksha, which is release from rebirth and future reincarnations, you’re out of this place. You’re not coming back, so why care about the environment left behind. But that raises the issue of deciding if one who liters deserves to be released from the cycle of rebirth.
One shouldn’t visit India and leave unaware of the influence of Buddhism. For a thousand years, from the 3rd century BCE until the 7th century, Buddhism was the predominant religion in most of India. According to the author of a fascinating book I devoured the past two days (80 Questions to Understand India by Murad Ali Baig), Buddhism was subsumed by Hinduism under the influence of the priest class (Brahmins) because Buddhism’s dominance made the influence and importance of Hindu priests superfluous. By the 8th century, Buddha was co-opted by Hinduism and made a sub god under the greater God Vishnu. Jesus suffered the same fate later on when he was added to the pantheon of Hindu gods. But what goes around comes around as the saying goes. Christianity was to later steal from ancient Indian religion and mythology to add to its catalog of “divinely revealed” beliefs. But back to Buddhism; here are salient points about Buddhism that you may or may not know:
•The term Buddha was a title meaning enlightened or awakened one. The man’s name was Siddhartha Gautama.
•Buddha did not worship God or a supreme being nor intend to start a religion.
•Buddhism was not originally a religion because it did not concern itself with metaphysical or supernatural matters.
•It is more a philosophy than a religion, which is why some famous Christians today also consider themselves Buddhists.
•It introduced compassion to the religious world and preached that hatred can only be overcome with love.
•Its basic thrust was to overcome one’s personal shortcomings, not pray to nor appease some divine authority.
•Buddha preached and taught a system of self discipline not a belief system.
Buddha was on to something important back in the 5th century BCE, which is why there has been a surge of Buddhist interest in the U.S. the past few decades. But back in India, I think it’s time for Buddha 2.0, at least along the banks of the Ganges in Kashi.
Tomorrow we arrive in Singapore, so before India becomes just a memory, I want to wrap up with some final thoughts.
•Our guide to Varanasi made the point that Indians are not comfortable with solitude or being alone. They tend to live together in a communal way in their homes. The American wife of an Indian professor on board said that when she came to India she found it impossible to be left alone in a room. Her new relatives assumed she wanted companionship whenever she tried to get off by herself.
•Indians may have a communal sense that Americans lack as we honor the “rugged individual” and the one who stands out from the crowd. David Reisman’s book from the 1950s I believe, The Lonely Crowd (if my memory is correct) described this phenomenon. Indians do not want to be alone.
•One day when returning to the ship in a tuk tuk, the driver stopped to help a cyclist who had lost part of his load and was dripping grain on the street from a large sack on the back of his bike. It was a nice thing to do and I was impressed by his “Good Samaritan” action. I wondered as we watched how long a stranded motorist in American would have to wait for help. I think in India help would arrive sooner.
•Because I believe the basis of a good life is anchored in relationship and not things, do Indians actually live better than more affluent Americans?
•The Indian professor’s wife said Indians are becoming more like Americans. I wonder, is that a good thing? And as our middle class sinks toward poverty, will we become more communal minded and less materialist? I think that would be a good thing.
•If you keep your eyes and mind open, travel can make you think but answers to questions are not always obvious.
Where do I begin to describe India? It assaults the senses in every possible way. It simultaneously repels and attracts, amazes and disgusts, but most of all, its conflicting splendor and squalor makes one ask, “What is going on here?” It will take awhile to process what I’ve seen and experienced. You may have heard the saying that “we see things not as they are, but as we are.” Discoveries the past two decades in neuroscience are now proving the truth of this old axiom. Most of the information we take in is filtered through our existing belief systems and escapes the scrutiny of rational thought. We all are biologically designed to confirm our biases and reflexively reject opposing views. That is why change is so difficult and probably why addictions so hard to break. I think the best way to start is to caution myself and any readers still with me to beware of our limitations and ethnocentric tendencies. Ethnocentrism is the practice of judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own. I think I can safely say that after the overwhelming number of people one encounters on the street in India, the next most jarring sight for a Westerner is the trash and debris that is omnipresent. This was most evident during our trip to Varanasi, and in particular the section called Kashi, the oldest part of town. The riverbank scene in Kashi that you have probably all seen pictures of, is where Hindus come to bathe in the Ganges to end the rebirth cycle (Moksha) and to be cremated. You have likely seen a picture of a body being set adrift for its final trip down the river on a floating funeral raft (this is no longer permitted). Our trip guide, who had a PhD in anthropology, told us that for Hindus this is the holiest place on earth. From what I saw the past few days, it may also be the filthiest.
Kashi has miles of narrow streets, all littered with dog and cow dung, human and animal urine, and litter of every description. Because the streets are at best about eight foot wide and your head is on a swivel to take it all in, it is easy to step in feces (which I did). I also was the recipient of cow urine spray as an animal I was trying to pass had the urge to go just as I tried to slide by. Our guide had told us earlier that “You will hate India or you will love it. You can’t ignore it.” I got physical evidence of that.
After our return to the ship, I asked Laxmi Tewari, the professor I mentioned in my previous blog, to explain the apparent contradiction of how a place that is venerated as earth’s holiest place could also be so littered and filthy. His initial response was defensive, pointing out some of America’s cultural shortcomings. After I agreed with his America observations and persisted with my question, recognizing its ethnocentric foundation, he explained that historically in rural India human waste was seen as just part of a biodegradable process as were the leaves one used to clean with. This stuff all got naturally recycled but in our urban era of packaging and plastics it creates an unsightly and unsanitary problem. Evidently in India’s seemingly timeless history, change comes slowly. We then discussed how safe Kashi was. In spite of jostling crowds and the sea of humanity we waded through, there was little concern about theft or violence. After I got used to the constant press of people, I felt safe and unthreatened. I don’t think I would have felt the same in New York’s Times Square or a comparable crowded and unfamiliar American setting.
Because Jean has done such an excellent and comprehensive journaling of our India experiences, I will try to avoid duplicating her comments and describe things that caught my attention that she did not mention. Our two riverside visits in the Kashi area of Varanasi made an indelible and stunning impact. It was like going back a thousand or more years in time. Here are my observations and reflections in no particular order:
•Kashi, like Lourdes for Catholics and Mecca for Muslims, is a place of pilgrimage, but it has much more significance. It is a place to go to be released from the otherwise never ending cycle of rebirth.
•Thanks are given daily at the riverbank for Mother Ganges. There is morning bathing to remove sin and a Sun Salutation ceremony.
•Along the riverbank you see laundry men called Dhobi washing clothes. They are from the lowest class and also act as matchmakers because they know peoples’ secrets and where the “dirty laundry” is.
•The lowest of the lowest class act as undertakers and cremators and they construct sandalwood piers six feet high with incense to cover the obnoxious odor that would otherwise be released by burnt nails and hair. Not everyone can afford this service and use the $10 gas option as Jean explained.
•There is no crying at cremations because this is a joyous occasion for the deceased (remember Moksha?). A professional laugher may even be hired.
•Skulls are burned and then crushed so they cannot be later used for black magic purposes.
•Women are not allowed at cremations.
•According to our guide, Ganges water does not go bad. It is sold in shops much like Lourdes water in France. Also available are empty containers for filling.
•Directly across the river, which seems barren, Buddhist pilgrims collect “golden sand” as it is purported to be the site of Buddha’s first sermon. Deer Park, which we visited later, is also designated as the site of Buddha’s first sermon. Kind of reminds me of The True Cross of Jesus that has pieces on display in multiple revered places.
•In Hindu temples, prayer must be said daily, we were told, or “the energy” leaves the temple.
•As I mentioned, visiting Kashi was like time travel back to a primitive past. As a species, we are obviously still in the early stages of our evolution.
Here are some random thoughts about India today:
•Street traffic is so congested I don’t understand how accidents are not continual happenings. Traffic moves like a school of fish. Every bike, bus, and car moves in unison as a single organism. I can’t imagine taking my teenage son or daughter out on the streets to teach them how to drive.
•When we were here in 1997 we saw no shopping malls. Now I’m told there are over 2,000.
•The parts of India we have seen have changed noticeably since our 1997 visit. The traffic is better, it seems cleaner, I see less begging, and we are told India has made great strides forward in the past decade.
•Professor Laxmi Tewari told me that the caste system is breaking down. I suspect the internet is a powerful agent of change and a great leveler.
•A fellow passenger had a cynical explanation for the piles of trash on India’s streets. If Indians believe in Moksha, which is release from rebirth and future reincarnations, you’re out of this place. You’re not coming back, so why care about the environment left behind. But that raises the issue of deciding if one who liters deserves to be released from the cycle of rebirth.
One shouldn’t visit India and leave unaware of the influence of Buddhism. For a thousand years, from the 3rd century BCE until the 7th century, Buddhism was the predominant religion in most of India. According to the author of a fascinating book I devoured the past two days (80 Questions to Understand India by Murad Ali Baig), Buddhism was subsumed by Hinduism under the influence of the priest class (Brahmins) because Buddhism’s dominance made the influence and importance of Hindu priests superfluous. By the 8th century, Buddha was co-opted by Hinduism and made a sub god under the greater God Vishnu. Jesus suffered the same fate later on when he was added to the pantheon of Hindu gods. But what goes around comes around as the saying goes. Christianity was to later steal from ancient Indian religion and mythology to add to its catalog of “divinely revealed” beliefs. But back to Buddhism; here are salient points about Buddhism that you may or may not know:
•The term Buddha was a title meaning enlightened or awakened one. The man’s name was Siddhartha Gautama.
•Buddha did not worship God or a supreme being nor intend to start a religion.
•Buddhism was not originally a religion because it did not concern itself with metaphysical or supernatural matters.
•It is more a philosophy than a religion, which is why some famous Christians today also consider themselves Buddhists.
•It introduced compassion to the religious world and preached that hatred can only be overcome with love.
•Its basic thrust was to overcome one’s personal shortcomings, not pray to nor appease some divine authority.
•Buddha preached and taught a system of self discipline not a belief system.
Buddha was on to something important back in the 5th century BCE, which is why there has been a surge of Buddhist interest in the U.S. the past few decades. But back in India, I think it’s time for Buddha 2.0, at least along the banks of the Ganges in Kashi.
Tomorrow we arrive in Singapore, so before India becomes just a memory, I want to wrap up with some final thoughts.
•Our guide to Varanasi made the point that Indians are not comfortable with solitude or being alone. They tend to live together in a communal way in their homes. The American wife of an Indian professor on board said that when she came to India she found it impossible to be left alone in a room. Her new relatives assumed she wanted companionship whenever she tried to get off by herself.
•Indians may have a communal sense that Americans lack as we honor the “rugged individual” and the one who stands out from the crowd. David Reisman’s book from the 1950s I believe, The Lonely Crowd (if my memory is correct) described this phenomenon. Indians do not want to be alone.
•One day when returning to the ship in a tuk tuk, the driver stopped to help a cyclist who had lost part of his load and was dripping grain on the street from a large sack on the back of his bike. It was a nice thing to do and I was impressed by his “Good Samaritan” action. I wondered as we watched how long a stranded motorist in American would have to wait for help. I think in India help would arrive sooner.
•Because I believe the basis of a good life is anchored in relationship and not things, do Indians actually live better than more affluent Americans?
•The Indian professor’s wife said Indians are becoming more like Americans. I wonder, is that a good thing? And as our middle class sinks toward poverty, will we become more communal minded and less materialist? I think that would be a good thing.
•If you keep your eyes and mind open, travel can make you think but answers to questions are not always obvious.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Dave's 11th Post
March 5, 2011
We left Cape Town last night and are steaming around the Cape in good weather. The seas can be very rough here but they are relatively calm so far. I need to amend my last post in which I wrote that in 1976 the state of Pennsylvania posted the Declaration of Independence around the state for affirming signatures to celebrate the Bicentennial. On further reflection, I’m sure it was the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the constitution. That would be more consistent with peoples’ reluctance to sign than to ask them to support the more general ideas expressed in the Declaration. The Bill of Rights refers to things like search and seizure and freedom of speech. Authoritarian types (read conservatives) would be more likely to support Patriot Act like infringements on our liberties than would liberals.
Before South Africa recedes too far in our wake, I would like to add a postscript about Rhoda Kadalie. I’ve been reading her book since I last wrote and I’m astounded that she has not been harmed or even killed. She is not at all bashful about naming names and making statements like the following direct quotations that I excerpted from the book:
•Parliament…is a cesspool.
•The more government deviates from its social contract with its citizens, the more the political leaders sound like vacuous televangelists.
•We have a deadly cocktail of graft.
•The criminals know that the legislators have violated the highest law-making body in the land and should not preach to them.
•Today people have no respect for the law.
•The rule of law will never become endemic as long as our rulers deny its culture in their own lives.
One last damning criticism from Rhoda might help put things in perspective. In a March 18, 2004 observation from her newspaper column, she wrote that “most liberation heroes become rotten political leaders. The metamorphosis from freedom fighter to dictator, in most cases, seems to be effortless.” She lists a series of names from history, including Castro, Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot, and Jean-Bertrand Astride, among others, to make her case. She makes the interesting argument that because these guys break laws to oppose and overthrown oppressive regimes, when they assume power they do not themselves feel constrained to be law abiding. They have been conditioned to believe they are above the law. They become like their former oppressors, if not worse. Remember Lord Acton’s comment that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”? It must be even more difficult to assume the role of average citizen after being seen as the peoples’ savior. We were indeed fortunate in our history that George Washington refused to run for a third term. I remember reading that after one of his addresses, people so idolized him that they vied with one another to replace the horses that pulled his carriage.
Yesterday I spent a two and a half hour plane ride and conversation, returning from a safari, sitting next to an economics professor from the ship. I found conversation with her to be more interesting than the animal encounters. Maybe that was because she agreed with my biases and observations about America’s coming 2nd revolution. And this morning, I spent the better part of an hour before breakfast with a fellow senior passenger and wife of a faculty member, discussing SA and America’s futures. She is black, actually colored in SA parlance and social structure, and a former journalist for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and now reads mostly British papers. She currently works directing philanthropists on donating money. Of course I told her about CHARACTER COUNTS! We had a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. As I think I mentioned in an earlier blog, life isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey and the friends you make along the way.
One of the topics we discussed was the dumbing down of American papers regarding foreign affairs reporting in the past few decades. I mentioned that NYC had over two dozen papers at one time, most if not all with foreign correspondents. Now the NYT is one of the few American papers that has foreign correspondents and Murdock with his checkbook is lurking in the shadows. During the Vietnam War, too many reporters filed their dispatches from the bars of swank hotels rather than brave the front lines and the gritty reality of our disastrous blunder there. Now, we don’t even see news footage of our Afghanistan or Iraq wars, or thanks to Jr., coffins of American soldiers being off loaded in the US on the evening news. We are very effectively shielded from the disastrous consequences of the heavy footsteps of our military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1954. I find it astounding that the only manufacturing industry I believe we still lead the world in is military goods. We spend about a trillion dollars a year on our current military industrial complex, have a military presence in over a 100 countries, and the public remains mostly mute as Obama asks for an increase in our military budget and a decrease in social services spending. Have we lost our collective mind?
Yesterday, still two days away from India, we began to see trash floating alongside our ship. We are evidently approaching “civilization.” The past few days I spent a bit of time picking the brain of an Indian professor on board. He actually lives and teaches at Sonoma State in California but he looks and speaks like he just stepped off a plane from New Delhi. His name is Laxmi G. Tewari and his discipline is music. His latest book, which I didn’t get the title of, was published in November, 2010. He spoke in core class the other day and described the caste system that he claims is slowly breaking down in India. In my conversations with him, he said that India’s problems began with British occupation. India got independence in about 1948 and is still recovering from the class divisions that the Brit’s presence and policies further embedded. Laxmi teaches music and he said that music for centuries taught resistance that the British overlords did not pick up on. He claims the caste system is the biggest blot on India’s history. He is upbeat on India and advises going into the countryside and interacting (without cameras) to get a real understanding of India. He closed his presentation by projecting the crowd scene picture shown below. He asked us to pick out the untouchables and brahmins (the lowest and highest castes) from this bird’s-eye view. It was a powerful example of the foolishness and arrogance of the caste system or any elitist system. It was also a good reminder of our common humanity.
In our adult passenger session yesterday, religion professor Alan Perreiah did an overview of Hinduism. As he described god after god, their purposes and domains and the vehicles they ride on (I don’t recall which god’s vehicle is a mouse), there was a lot of snickering by several of my fellow passengers. One of the main gods (I’m told there are over 300,000,000) is Brahma, the god of creation. He rides a goose named Hansa. As he spoke, I remembered having to memorize the Catholic Catechism in grade school. We only had three gods with their different attributes to memorize. How do Indian kids cope? And I also wondered if devote Hindus would snicker at the beliefs of the adult Christians among us. One hallmark of Hinduism is purportedly tolerance, although I wonder how that squares with the religious violence India has experienced in recent years. I’ll have to ask Alan. I also want to ask Alan to clarify his observation ranking the comparison of how beliefs differ between Hindus and the students in his classes on ten different issues that both groups have ranked in order of priority. Perhaps in a latter blog…
This afternoon, Bill Cuff, a professor of sociology who specializes in social justice and service, spoke in the altruism class I’ve been attending. One of the issues he addressed was the traits that people posses who are drawn to service. We all filled out a questionnaire asking us to rank 24 pairs of personal traits or characteristics. In each pair, we were asked to choose which trait we most valued, not the one we believed we possessed. Later in the class we went over our rankings, and after tossing out nine control pairs, we were asked to score ourselves giving one point to each of the “correct” choices he presented. The highest possible score one could get was 15. He then told us that the test/questionnaire ranked courage and that the average American ranking is 9.8. Bill then went on to tell of the story of Marion (Van Binsbergin) Pritchard, currently an American, bur formerly a “righteous gentile” (one who hid or helped Jews in Europe during World War II). He had interviewed Marion, whom he described as gentle and unassuming and who hid a Jewish man and his two children under the floor of her kitchen in Amsterdam. One of her neighbors was a Nazi sympathizer who did periodic searches for hidden Jews. After searching her home, he left and her guests emerged from their hiding place. A tactic used by the Nazis was to return after an initial search hoping to catch Jews who had emerged from hiding. He returned and when she opened the door for him she shot and killed him. Her sympathetic neighbors helped her dispose of the body by burying it in a coffin with someone who had recently died. When Bill repeatedly asked why she took the risk to save these people, all she would say was “you just do what you know you should do.” Her picture now hangs in the “Hall of Rescuers” in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
At breakfast this morning, I sat with Bill and we had a spirited discussion, almost a debate, on the nature of human goodness. My position is more optimistic than Bill’s and I told him I would drop in his mailbox a section from my unpublished manuscript that made a case for the brighter side of human nature. I’ll fill you in on our next discussion…
We left Cape Town last night and are steaming around the Cape in good weather. The seas can be very rough here but they are relatively calm so far. I need to amend my last post in which I wrote that in 1976 the state of Pennsylvania posted the Declaration of Independence around the state for affirming signatures to celebrate the Bicentennial. On further reflection, I’m sure it was the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the constitution. That would be more consistent with peoples’ reluctance to sign than to ask them to support the more general ideas expressed in the Declaration. The Bill of Rights refers to things like search and seizure and freedom of speech. Authoritarian types (read conservatives) would be more likely to support Patriot Act like infringements on our liberties than would liberals.
Before South Africa recedes too far in our wake, I would like to add a postscript about Rhoda Kadalie. I’ve been reading her book since I last wrote and I’m astounded that she has not been harmed or even killed. She is not at all bashful about naming names and making statements like the following direct quotations that I excerpted from the book:
•Parliament…is a cesspool.
•The more government deviates from its social contract with its citizens, the more the political leaders sound like vacuous televangelists.
•We have a deadly cocktail of graft.
•The criminals know that the legislators have violated the highest law-making body in the land and should not preach to them.
•Today people have no respect for the law.
•The rule of law will never become endemic as long as our rulers deny its culture in their own lives.
One last damning criticism from Rhoda might help put things in perspective. In a March 18, 2004 observation from her newspaper column, she wrote that “most liberation heroes become rotten political leaders. The metamorphosis from freedom fighter to dictator, in most cases, seems to be effortless.” She lists a series of names from history, including Castro, Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot, and Jean-Bertrand Astride, among others, to make her case. She makes the interesting argument that because these guys break laws to oppose and overthrown oppressive regimes, when they assume power they do not themselves feel constrained to be law abiding. They have been conditioned to believe they are above the law. They become like their former oppressors, if not worse. Remember Lord Acton’s comment that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”? It must be even more difficult to assume the role of average citizen after being seen as the peoples’ savior. We were indeed fortunate in our history that George Washington refused to run for a third term. I remember reading that after one of his addresses, people so idolized him that they vied with one another to replace the horses that pulled his carriage.
Yesterday I spent a two and a half hour plane ride and conversation, returning from a safari, sitting next to an economics professor from the ship. I found conversation with her to be more interesting than the animal encounters. Maybe that was because she agreed with my biases and observations about America’s coming 2nd revolution. And this morning, I spent the better part of an hour before breakfast with a fellow senior passenger and wife of a faculty member, discussing SA and America’s futures. She is black, actually colored in SA parlance and social structure, and a former journalist for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and now reads mostly British papers. She currently works directing philanthropists on donating money. Of course I told her about CHARACTER COUNTS! We had a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. As I think I mentioned in an earlier blog, life isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey and the friends you make along the way.
One of the topics we discussed was the dumbing down of American papers regarding foreign affairs reporting in the past few decades. I mentioned that NYC had over two dozen papers at one time, most if not all with foreign correspondents. Now the NYT is one of the few American papers that has foreign correspondents and Murdock with his checkbook is lurking in the shadows. During the Vietnam War, too many reporters filed their dispatches from the bars of swank hotels rather than brave the front lines and the gritty reality of our disastrous blunder there. Now, we don’t even see news footage of our Afghanistan or Iraq wars, or thanks to Jr., coffins of American soldiers being off loaded in the US on the evening news. We are very effectively shielded from the disastrous consequences of the heavy footsteps of our military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1954. I find it astounding that the only manufacturing industry I believe we still lead the world in is military goods. We spend about a trillion dollars a year on our current military industrial complex, have a military presence in over a 100 countries, and the public remains mostly mute as Obama asks for an increase in our military budget and a decrease in social services spending. Have we lost our collective mind?
Yesterday, still two days away from India, we began to see trash floating alongside our ship. We are evidently approaching “civilization.” The past few days I spent a bit of time picking the brain of an Indian professor on board. He actually lives and teaches at Sonoma State in California but he looks and speaks like he just stepped off a plane from New Delhi. His name is Laxmi G. Tewari and his discipline is music. His latest book, which I didn’t get the title of, was published in November, 2010. He spoke in core class the other day and described the caste system that he claims is slowly breaking down in India. In my conversations with him, he said that India’s problems began with British occupation. India got independence in about 1948 and is still recovering from the class divisions that the Brit’s presence and policies further embedded. Laxmi teaches music and he said that music for centuries taught resistance that the British overlords did not pick up on. He claims the caste system is the biggest blot on India’s history. He is upbeat on India and advises going into the countryside and interacting (without cameras) to get a real understanding of India. He closed his presentation by projecting the crowd scene picture shown below. He asked us to pick out the untouchables and brahmins (the lowest and highest castes) from this bird’s-eye view. It was a powerful example of the foolishness and arrogance of the caste system or any elitist system. It was also a good reminder of our common humanity.
In our adult passenger session yesterday, religion professor Alan Perreiah did an overview of Hinduism. As he described god after god, their purposes and domains and the vehicles they ride on (I don’t recall which god’s vehicle is a mouse), there was a lot of snickering by several of my fellow passengers. One of the main gods (I’m told there are over 300,000,000) is Brahma, the god of creation. He rides a goose named Hansa. As he spoke, I remembered having to memorize the Catholic Catechism in grade school. We only had three gods with their different attributes to memorize. How do Indian kids cope? And I also wondered if devote Hindus would snicker at the beliefs of the adult Christians among us. One hallmark of Hinduism is purportedly tolerance, although I wonder how that squares with the religious violence India has experienced in recent years. I’ll have to ask Alan. I also want to ask Alan to clarify his observation ranking the comparison of how beliefs differ between Hindus and the students in his classes on ten different issues that both groups have ranked in order of priority. Perhaps in a latter blog…
This afternoon, Bill Cuff, a professor of sociology who specializes in social justice and service, spoke in the altruism class I’ve been attending. One of the issues he addressed was the traits that people posses who are drawn to service. We all filled out a questionnaire asking us to rank 24 pairs of personal traits or characteristics. In each pair, we were asked to choose which trait we most valued, not the one we believed we possessed. Later in the class we went over our rankings, and after tossing out nine control pairs, we were asked to score ourselves giving one point to each of the “correct” choices he presented. The highest possible score one could get was 15. He then told us that the test/questionnaire ranked courage and that the average American ranking is 9.8. Bill then went on to tell of the story of Marion (Van Binsbergin) Pritchard, currently an American, bur formerly a “righteous gentile” (one who hid or helped Jews in Europe during World War II). He had interviewed Marion, whom he described as gentle and unassuming and who hid a Jewish man and his two children under the floor of her kitchen in Amsterdam. One of her neighbors was a Nazi sympathizer who did periodic searches for hidden Jews. After searching her home, he left and her guests emerged from their hiding place. A tactic used by the Nazis was to return after an initial search hoping to catch Jews who had emerged from hiding. He returned and when she opened the door for him she shot and killed him. Her sympathetic neighbors helped her dispose of the body by burying it in a coffin with someone who had recently died. When Bill repeatedly asked why she took the risk to save these people, all she would say was “you just do what you know you should do.” Her picture now hangs in the “Hall of Rescuers” in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
At breakfast this morning, I sat with Bill and we had a spirited discussion, almost a debate, on the nature of human goodness. My position is more optimistic than Bill’s and I told him I would drop in his mailbox a section from my unpublished manuscript that made a case for the brighter side of human nature. I’ll fill you in on our next discussion…
Friday, February 18, 2011
Dave's 10th Post
February 16, 2011
At a comedy awards celebration a few years ago, the late great comedian, George Carlin, began his acceptance speech by commenting that his mother told him that whatever he did, “don’t become a comedian.” George said that, that was all the encouragement he ever needed. Jean and Linda told me at lunch today that two people, Becky and Judy Laughton, are actually reading and enjoying my blogs. One should be careful whom they discourage or encourage.
Today we are idling back and forth off shore from Cape Town. It is too windy to get into the bay to anchor so we are doing a drive-by until further notice. It sure looks good from a distance. We may not dock until tomorrow and perhaps not even then if the wind does not abate. I didn’t intend to write my next blog until after leaving SA, but because of all this extra time and the bit of encouragement I received, I feel it would be a sin of omission not to share my wisdom with others. I’m assuming that where there are two there might be more.
Yesterday afternoon during the hour we seniors sailors get together, Dean Dan Garvey spoke to us and the main topic was the research he has been doing for years on his pet subject, trying to understand how people justify their ethical behavior. He has been a college dean for decades and he became interested in this topic years ago after summoning students to his office after their misdeeds. He said their responses fell into two basic categories. They were either very remorseful and apologetic or they excused themselves with rationalizations and didn’t assume full responsibility for their bad behavior. This led him into the work of Lawrence Kohlberg at Carnegie Mellon on ethical behavior. Surprisingly, I was very familiar with Kohlberg and had published probably the first book on his work, Moral Reasoning, in the 1970s, the first decade of Greenhaven Press, the publishing company I founded. Two CM graduate students and Kohlberg’s assistants approached me at a teacher’s conference where I was exhibiting my Opposing Viewpoints Series books and asked if GP would be interested in publishing the findings. I jumped at the opportunity and took their untitled manuscript and polished it into the finished book that Greenhaven published. I don’t want to mislead. I added nothing substantive to the book. I just made it flow and readable. The research was all theirs and Kohlberg’s.
It’s been decades but as I remember Kohlberg’s work in the 1970s, it described the six following stages of moral development built on research in three societies. Memory tells me they were America, Mexico, and Taiwan. As I can recall, to the best of my ability, the six stages of moral maturity were:
1.Reward and Punishment - One behaves based on the promise of reward or fear of punishment. For example, a child would or would not get into the cookie jar based on perceived consequences.
2.Reciprocity - You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
3.Law & Order - It’s the law or accepted custom. I need to be a good citizen or I’ll be singled out or maybe arrested.
4.Community Consensus - I’m fuzzy here. It may be something like going along for the good of the community.
5.Acceptance of a Universal Principal - Acting on principals like “love your neighbor as yourself” or the basic principles stated in our Declaration of Independence on the equality of all.
6.Christ-like or Bodhisattva Altruism - Self sacrifice in the service of other.
Cut me some slack here. It’s been about 30 years since I was involved with this material. I didn’t even save a copy of the book. In fact I saved little of the work and books I created during my Greenhaven years. I do have a number of titles as bookshelf fillers on our condo living room bookshelf. They have pretty spines. An interesting tidbit from my involvement in Kohlberg’s findings is the observation that most Americans (and other societies’ citizens I suspect) fall into levels 2 to 4. Unfortunately our Declaration of Independence is anchored in level 5 and concepts like universal equality and brotherhood. Most Americans really don’t buy into or at least behave at the moral level that our basic document is anchored in. I remember during the national Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, the state of Pennsylvania posted replicas of the Declaration around the state for people to sign. People refused to sign them because they found the ideas too radical. I remember thinking at the time that our democracy is very tenuous if citizens don’t really believe what our civil scriptures proclaim.
Dean Garvey said Kohlberg’s work has progressed since my involvement but I’m not familiar with the advancements. I am familiar however with the more recent work of the University of Virginia moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt. I find his work in Moral Foundations Theory fascinating. See his book The Happiness Hypothesis or visit his website www.edge.org. He has a number of papers on the site including The New Science of Morality: An Edge Conference. Haidt posits that societies create their moral systems based on the following five foundations listed below. Liberals are anchored in primarily the first two and conservatives are more evenly rooted in all five. As I understand his work, we seem to come out of the womb with a basic moral grounding. Biology is therefore very important but culture can affect change in one’s moral stance. The five foundations are:
1.Harm/care: basic concerns for the suffering of others, including virtues of caring and compassion.
2.Fairness/reciprocity: concerns about unfair treatment, inequality, and more abstract notions of justice.
3.In-group/loyalty: concerns related to obligations of group membership, such as loyalty, self-sacrifice and vigilance against betrayal
4.Authority/respect: concerns related to social order and the obligations of hierarchical relationships.
5.Purity/sanctity: concerns about physical and spiritual contagion, including virtues of chastity, wholesomeness and control of desires.
If you would like to take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire to identify your moral position as either a liberal or a conservative, complete the questionnaire online. It doesn’t take long but unfortunately I don’t have the exact web address and I don’t have good internet access here on the ship to direct you. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.
That’s enough for today class. Besides, I have social obligations to my travel mates to tend to and wine to drink.
At a comedy awards celebration a few years ago, the late great comedian, George Carlin, began his acceptance speech by commenting that his mother told him that whatever he did, “don’t become a comedian.” George said that, that was all the encouragement he ever needed. Jean and Linda told me at lunch today that two people, Becky and Judy Laughton, are actually reading and enjoying my blogs. One should be careful whom they discourage or encourage.
Today we are idling back and forth off shore from Cape Town. It is too windy to get into the bay to anchor so we are doing a drive-by until further notice. It sure looks good from a distance. We may not dock until tomorrow and perhaps not even then if the wind does not abate. I didn’t intend to write my next blog until after leaving SA, but because of all this extra time and the bit of encouragement I received, I feel it would be a sin of omission not to share my wisdom with others. I’m assuming that where there are two there might be more.
Yesterday afternoon during the hour we seniors sailors get together, Dean Dan Garvey spoke to us and the main topic was the research he has been doing for years on his pet subject, trying to understand how people justify their ethical behavior. He has been a college dean for decades and he became interested in this topic years ago after summoning students to his office after their misdeeds. He said their responses fell into two basic categories. They were either very remorseful and apologetic or they excused themselves with rationalizations and didn’t assume full responsibility for their bad behavior. This led him into the work of Lawrence Kohlberg at Carnegie Mellon on ethical behavior. Surprisingly, I was very familiar with Kohlberg and had published probably the first book on his work, Moral Reasoning, in the 1970s, the first decade of Greenhaven Press, the publishing company I founded. Two CM graduate students and Kohlberg’s assistants approached me at a teacher’s conference where I was exhibiting my Opposing Viewpoints Series books and asked if GP would be interested in publishing the findings. I jumped at the opportunity and took their untitled manuscript and polished it into the finished book that Greenhaven published. I don’t want to mislead. I added nothing substantive to the book. I just made it flow and readable. The research was all theirs and Kohlberg’s.
It’s been decades but as I remember Kohlberg’s work in the 1970s, it described the six following stages of moral development built on research in three societies. Memory tells me they were America, Mexico, and Taiwan. As I can recall, to the best of my ability, the six stages of moral maturity were:
1.Reward and Punishment - One behaves based on the promise of reward or fear of punishment. For example, a child would or would not get into the cookie jar based on perceived consequences.
2.Reciprocity - You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
3.Law & Order - It’s the law or accepted custom. I need to be a good citizen or I’ll be singled out or maybe arrested.
4.Community Consensus - I’m fuzzy here. It may be something like going along for the good of the community.
5.Acceptance of a Universal Principal - Acting on principals like “love your neighbor as yourself” or the basic principles stated in our Declaration of Independence on the equality of all.
6.Christ-like or Bodhisattva Altruism - Self sacrifice in the service of other.
Cut me some slack here. It’s been about 30 years since I was involved with this material. I didn’t even save a copy of the book. In fact I saved little of the work and books I created during my Greenhaven years. I do have a number of titles as bookshelf fillers on our condo living room bookshelf. They have pretty spines. An interesting tidbit from my involvement in Kohlberg’s findings is the observation that most Americans (and other societies’ citizens I suspect) fall into levels 2 to 4. Unfortunately our Declaration of Independence is anchored in level 5 and concepts like universal equality and brotherhood. Most Americans really don’t buy into or at least behave at the moral level that our basic document is anchored in. I remember during the national Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, the state of Pennsylvania posted replicas of the Declaration around the state for people to sign. People refused to sign them because they found the ideas too radical. I remember thinking at the time that our democracy is very tenuous if citizens don’t really believe what our civil scriptures proclaim.
Dean Garvey said Kohlberg’s work has progressed since my involvement but I’m not familiar with the advancements. I am familiar however with the more recent work of the University of Virginia moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt. I find his work in Moral Foundations Theory fascinating. See his book The Happiness Hypothesis or visit his website www.edge.org. He has a number of papers on the site including The New Science of Morality: An Edge Conference. Haidt posits that societies create their moral systems based on the following five foundations listed below. Liberals are anchored in primarily the first two and conservatives are more evenly rooted in all five. As I understand his work, we seem to come out of the womb with a basic moral grounding. Biology is therefore very important but culture can affect change in one’s moral stance. The five foundations are:
1.Harm/care: basic concerns for the suffering of others, including virtues of caring and compassion.
2.Fairness/reciprocity: concerns about unfair treatment, inequality, and more abstract notions of justice.
3.In-group/loyalty: concerns related to obligations of group membership, such as loyalty, self-sacrifice and vigilance against betrayal
4.Authority/respect: concerns related to social order and the obligations of hierarchical relationships.
5.Purity/sanctity: concerns about physical and spiritual contagion, including virtues of chastity, wholesomeness and control of desires.
If you would like to take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire to identify your moral position as either a liberal or a conservative, complete the questionnaire online. It doesn’t take long but unfortunately I don’t have the exact web address and I don’t have good internet access here on the ship to direct you. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.
That’s enough for today class. Besides, I have social obligations to my travel mates to tend to and wine to drink.
Dave’s 9th Post
February 16, 2011
In my last post I wrote about the African social justice activist Rhoda Kodalie, whom I believe is the most courageous, inspiring, and effective person I have ever met. I have since learned that she is a former Human Rights Commissioner and the founder and CEO of Impumelelo Innovation and Awards Trust. It is a NGO that identifies projects that alleviate poverty in SA and gives annual cash awards to further the projects’ work. Its web address is www.impumelelo.org.za.
Rhoda is the kind of person who fearlessly speaks truth to power and in SA there are powers that don’t take kindly to her kind of public opposition and identification. She said every day she takes a different route to work for safety reasons. As an activist, newspaper columnist, and author, her approach is to publicly identify political, social, and economic problems, and become so visible and vocal that anyone silencing her would face the wrath of her considerable public following. Her book, which is a critical look at SA, is appropriately titled In Your Face. What a lady! Tomorrow night, the eve before our arrival in Cape Town, she will be speaking about the problems facing SA. For those of you who find my blog a little negative, it may not be an enjoyable read.
Today in our Global Studies class, we received some more less than cheery news about the aids situation in both Africa in general and SA in particular. Here’s the grim story:
•By 2010, 100 million in Africa have had aids and 26 m have died.
•3m die yearly and graveyards can’t keep up
•In Zimbabwe, the average life expectancy is now 40 because of early aids caused deaths
•In Mali, it is 30
•Aids victims and their families are shunned and banned from villages because of misinformation about how aids is spread
•For 7 years, SA’s Minister of Health denied the reality of how aids is transmitted and suggested victims eat beets and honey to affect a cure
•Adult farm workers and their wives die and their children are left without parents
•Construction managers hire 4 people for a job that requires one because workers die before projects are completed
•Women are more likely than men to understand how aids is spread, but in Africa’s patriarchal societies, transmission continues as men have many sex partners.
•Because many men believe that having sex with a virgin will cure their aids, it is common for sugar daddies to entice young girls into bed with a payoff of clothes, electronics, and other goodies and aids is spread.
•The Catholic church continues to prohibit the condoms which exacerbates the situation
•Infected people avoid finding out they have the disease because it is a death sentence both literally and socially
•If villagers discover you have aids you are banned from the village
•It is spread by sexual contact and is thought to have originated in chimps but no one knows for sure.
Here are more facts about SA from the mouth of Rhoda:
•On paper, SA has one of the world’s best constitutions but in reality corruption prevents its proper implementation.
•SA has more women in the legislature proportionally than any country in the world but the women are characteristically rendered voiceless and ineffective by their chauvinistic and corrupt male colleagues. This is done by offering women legislative posts and ministry heads to buy their compliance.
•Men appoint all legislative leaders and women are beholden to men.
•SA has the worst statistics in the world regarding violence against women.
•Rape is rampant, rarely are rapists prosecuted, and victims are often additionally raped and beaten by the police on the way to or at the police station after reporting a rape.
•Jacob Zuma, the current president, has at least 3 wives and a new girlfriend.
•Rhoda said that “at the moment there isn’t a place for good in our government.”
Rhoda said she would like to become a minister in the government so she could bring about some of the changes she speaks and writes about. I asked her, “Why not run for president?” She said she is not political but in later remarks she seemed to me to waffle some. Hopefully she will change her mind. And hopefully my next report from somewhere in the Indian Ocean east of Africa will be more upbeat.
In my last post I wrote about the African social justice activist Rhoda Kodalie, whom I believe is the most courageous, inspiring, and effective person I have ever met. I have since learned that she is a former Human Rights Commissioner and the founder and CEO of Impumelelo Innovation and Awards Trust. It is a NGO that identifies projects that alleviate poverty in SA and gives annual cash awards to further the projects’ work. Its web address is www.impumelelo.org.za.
Rhoda is the kind of person who fearlessly speaks truth to power and in SA there are powers that don’t take kindly to her kind of public opposition and identification. She said every day she takes a different route to work for safety reasons. As an activist, newspaper columnist, and author, her approach is to publicly identify political, social, and economic problems, and become so visible and vocal that anyone silencing her would face the wrath of her considerable public following. Her book, which is a critical look at SA, is appropriately titled In Your Face. What a lady! Tomorrow night, the eve before our arrival in Cape Town, she will be speaking about the problems facing SA. For those of you who find my blog a little negative, it may not be an enjoyable read.
Today in our Global Studies class, we received some more less than cheery news about the aids situation in both Africa in general and SA in particular. Here’s the grim story:
•By 2010, 100 million in Africa have had aids and 26 m have died.
•3m die yearly and graveyards can’t keep up
•In Zimbabwe, the average life expectancy is now 40 because of early aids caused deaths
•In Mali, it is 30
•Aids victims and their families are shunned and banned from villages because of misinformation about how aids is spread
•For 7 years, SA’s Minister of Health denied the reality of how aids is transmitted and suggested victims eat beets and honey to affect a cure
•Adult farm workers and their wives die and their children are left without parents
•Construction managers hire 4 people for a job that requires one because workers die before projects are completed
•Women are more likely than men to understand how aids is spread, but in Africa’s patriarchal societies, transmission continues as men have many sex partners.
•Because many men believe that having sex with a virgin will cure their aids, it is common for sugar daddies to entice young girls into bed with a payoff of clothes, electronics, and other goodies and aids is spread.
•The Catholic church continues to prohibit the condoms which exacerbates the situation
•Infected people avoid finding out they have the disease because it is a death sentence both literally and socially
•If villagers discover you have aids you are banned from the village
•It is spread by sexual contact and is thought to have originated in chimps but no one knows for sure.
Here are more facts about SA from the mouth of Rhoda:
•On paper, SA has one of the world’s best constitutions but in reality corruption prevents its proper implementation.
•SA has more women in the legislature proportionally than any country in the world but the women are characteristically rendered voiceless and ineffective by their chauvinistic and corrupt male colleagues. This is done by offering women legislative posts and ministry heads to buy their compliance.
•Men appoint all legislative leaders and women are beholden to men.
•SA has the worst statistics in the world regarding violence against women.
•Rape is rampant, rarely are rapists prosecuted, and victims are often additionally raped and beaten by the police on the way to or at the police station after reporting a rape.
•Jacob Zuma, the current president, has at least 3 wives and a new girlfriend.
•Rhoda said that “at the moment there isn’t a place for good in our government.”
Rhoda said she would like to become a minister in the government so she could bring about some of the changes she speaks and writes about. I asked her, “Why not run for president?” She said she is not political but in later remarks she seemed to me to waffle some. Hopefully she will change her mind. And hopefully my next report from somewhere in the Indian Ocean east of Africa will be more upbeat.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Dave's 8th Blog about Africa
Dave’s 8th Post
February 14, 2011
Today’s post is a response to lectures we’ve heard the last two days on Apartheid in South Africa. Some is editorial in tone, and includes comparisons to the U.S. and South Africa. Those of you who do not agree with my position on politics and social justice may want to move on to someone else’s blog.
Yesterday Rhoda Kodalie, an African social justice activist, described her work as head of a NGO, helping South Africans who have good ideas bring those ideas into existence in the form of companies and organizations that empower citizens. Two examples were a clinic staffed and operated for Africans by Africans and a multi car train that tours the country offering free medical, dental, and vision care with state of the art equipment. To date, this Harvard trained miracle worker’s NGO has created over 200 organizations that today work to better the lives of Africans. She is truly a remarkable individual.
Here is a very short history of Apartheid for those of you unfamiliar with the issue. I’m sure others will write more detailed information in their blogs.
• In 1910, laws were passed to curtail the rights of native Africans by the ruling white minority that instituted an oppressive policy of segregation called Apartheid.
• In 1960, blacks rebelled and 70 were killed at Sharpsville and Mandela was imprisoned.
• In 1961, SA became an independent country and in 1958 Africans were relegated to separate “homelands” by the white minority
• Mandela was released in 1989 by President DeKlerk and apartheid ended.
Although comparisons were made to American segregation and data was presented to show how American cities are racially segregated in similar patterns to African, Kodalie stated that “comparisons to the U.S. cheapens apartheid.” She said that blacks called apartheid “black hate” and they understandably wanted equality, political power, and recognition of their humanity. Whites, after the Reconciliation Committee hearings in the aftermath of apartheid, wanted forgiveness, no black revenge or backlash, to be released from the role of oppressors, and didn’t want to be held responsible. She was critical of the commission’s results and thought those in power should have been held more responsible. She said blacks told their stories but whites did not confess enough. She claimed the commission only partially did its work and was basically a compromise between elite groups to share wealth and harmony.
Kodalie said that in SA today,
• Whites are worried
• There is a brain drain of educated blacks and whites out of the country
• Disease is prevalent and aids is decimating the population as men have many sex partners.
• Living conditions have improved but SA is an underfunded welfare state
• Women are unequal. SA’s leader and others practice polygamy.
• Black foreign nationalists who have moved in are hated by native Africans.
Our last speaker today spoke about the movie Disgrace (also a book) which is mandatory watching and reading for students. He claims it raises the issue of “Whiteness” which is never discussed in Africa and is accepted as the norm. Everyone else is “the other” and less than the white norm and defacto model. I had never heard the term “whiteness” before and it offered a perspective I had not fully considered. It would be an interesting subject to explore and I’m sure the students will be doing so.
I had a heartfelt talk with a recovering Republican yesterday who in a hushed tone confessed that he had voted for Junior twice. Whispering so no one would overhear, his contrition was so obviously sincere that I told him as a devout liberal who had voted for the Great Communicator once because of Reagan’s stance of fiscal conservatism and promise to balance the budget, I understood. I tried to comfort him with the thought that whatever god he believed in would surely forgive him. He seemed to feel better after our talk and I’m glad I was able to provide an understanding ear. He was relieved to hear that I know a lot of good people who are Republicans and are probably also embarrassed and guilt ridden for their past votes. This brings me to my personal observation and a comparison that some conservative readers, if they are still reading, may not agree with.
We went on to discuss an article I had read in the NYT on 2/12/11 by Bob Herbert titled Weakened Democracy. Herbert claimed that “we are in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only”and that
While millions of Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levels of power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the people dance…what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them.
Herbert concludes his essay by stating that if there is going to be change in the U.S., “it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.” Having written my master’s thesis on the three great crisis’s in American history, the revolution, the civil war, and the great depression, I have to agree. We are now faced with the fourth great crisis in our history which I relate to Africa’s apartheid history and would label Economic Apartheid. How will our apartheid end? How will the majority of lower and middle class Americans take their country back from the increasingly entrenched and powerful political and financial elite? Will people take to the streets as they did in South Africa or will it be a peaceful revolution? The clock is ticking.
February 14, 2011
Today’s post is a response to lectures we’ve heard the last two days on Apartheid in South Africa. Some is editorial in tone, and includes comparisons to the U.S. and South Africa. Those of you who do not agree with my position on politics and social justice may want to move on to someone else’s blog.
Yesterday Rhoda Kodalie, an African social justice activist, described her work as head of a NGO, helping South Africans who have good ideas bring those ideas into existence in the form of companies and organizations that empower citizens. Two examples were a clinic staffed and operated for Africans by Africans and a multi car train that tours the country offering free medical, dental, and vision care with state of the art equipment. To date, this Harvard trained miracle worker’s NGO has created over 200 organizations that today work to better the lives of Africans. She is truly a remarkable individual.
Here is a very short history of Apartheid for those of you unfamiliar with the issue. I’m sure others will write more detailed information in their blogs.
• In 1910, laws were passed to curtail the rights of native Africans by the ruling white minority that instituted an oppressive policy of segregation called Apartheid.
• In 1960, blacks rebelled and 70 were killed at Sharpsville and Mandela was imprisoned.
• In 1961, SA became an independent country and in 1958 Africans were relegated to separate “homelands” by the white minority
• Mandela was released in 1989 by President DeKlerk and apartheid ended.
Although comparisons were made to American segregation and data was presented to show how American cities are racially segregated in similar patterns to African, Kodalie stated that “comparisons to the U.S. cheapens apartheid.” She said that blacks called apartheid “black hate” and they understandably wanted equality, political power, and recognition of their humanity. Whites, after the Reconciliation Committee hearings in the aftermath of apartheid, wanted forgiveness, no black revenge or backlash, to be released from the role of oppressors, and didn’t want to be held responsible. She was critical of the commission’s results and thought those in power should have been held more responsible. She said blacks told their stories but whites did not confess enough. She claimed the commission only partially did its work and was basically a compromise between elite groups to share wealth and harmony.
Kodalie said that in SA today,
• Whites are worried
• There is a brain drain of educated blacks and whites out of the country
• Disease is prevalent and aids is decimating the population as men have many sex partners.
• Living conditions have improved but SA is an underfunded welfare state
• Women are unequal. SA’s leader and others practice polygamy.
• Black foreign nationalists who have moved in are hated by native Africans.
Our last speaker today spoke about the movie Disgrace (also a book) which is mandatory watching and reading for students. He claims it raises the issue of “Whiteness” which is never discussed in Africa and is accepted as the norm. Everyone else is “the other” and less than the white norm and defacto model. I had never heard the term “whiteness” before and it offered a perspective I had not fully considered. It would be an interesting subject to explore and I’m sure the students will be doing so.
I had a heartfelt talk with a recovering Republican yesterday who in a hushed tone confessed that he had voted for Junior twice. Whispering so no one would overhear, his contrition was so obviously sincere that I told him as a devout liberal who had voted for the Great Communicator once because of Reagan’s stance of fiscal conservatism and promise to balance the budget, I understood. I tried to comfort him with the thought that whatever god he believed in would surely forgive him. He seemed to feel better after our talk and I’m glad I was able to provide an understanding ear. He was relieved to hear that I know a lot of good people who are Republicans and are probably also embarrassed and guilt ridden for their past votes. This brings me to my personal observation and a comparison that some conservative readers, if they are still reading, may not agree with.
We went on to discuss an article I had read in the NYT on 2/12/11 by Bob Herbert titled Weakened Democracy. Herbert claimed that “we are in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only”and that
While millions of Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levels of power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the people dance…what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them.
Herbert concludes his essay by stating that if there is going to be change in the U.S., “it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.” Having written my master’s thesis on the three great crisis’s in American history, the revolution, the civil war, and the great depression, I have to agree. We are now faced with the fourth great crisis in our history which I relate to Africa’s apartheid history and would label Economic Apartheid. How will our apartheid end? How will the majority of lower and middle class Americans take their country back from the increasingly entrenched and powerful political and financial elite? Will people take to the streets as they did in South Africa or will it be a peaceful revolution? The clock is ticking.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Dave’s 7th Post
February 11, 2011
This is my second attempt at a seventh post. Jean volunteered to send off the first attempt and lost it in cyber space. Somehow my Word document was replaced by hers. What a shame, my legion of readers (two that I’m aware of—thanks Kristen and Becky) will be denied the wisdom of my observations and the pleasure of Pulitzer quality prose and reporting. I’m not a man who beats his wife, but I may make an exception in this case. Of course, it would be for her benefit only.
I recognize that my 6th post was a little dense and had a negative tone, not the happy traveler talk that one expects to encounter. This post will go down a little easier for those who are still with me. Let’s start with some factoids and observations about Africa.
•We just left Ghana on the west coast of Africa yesterday and are headed for the country South Africa. Africa has 53 states (countries) which are primarily the legacy of colonialism which were created with no regard for tribal or ethnic boundaries.
•Africa has over 800 languages, 1,000 ethnic groups, and all celebrations and rites of passage (birth, marriage, & death) have public dancing and music. Musicians are well respected in Africa.
•Drumming is universal and “spirit filled.” You don’t stomp your feet. You pound your chest to drive it inside.
•Ancestral spirits are important and summoned by music. At death, the soul does not disappear. It’s not reincarnation so much, but rather emulation of the good qualities of those who passed.
•At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 in Kartum, Sudan, the British lost 28 while killing 11,000 attacking Africans. The Brits were using the new American invention, the Maxim machine gun. It wasn’t bravery that won the battle. It was technology.
•In thinking about the colonization of Africa, one can compare it to Europeans earlier conquest of the American Indian nations. Our colonial fore-fathers were a little better. They did not enslave the native population to my knowledge. Although Columbus did allow his men to hunt natives like rabbits for sport, which our textbooks fail to mention.
•We had a guest lecturer last week who does volunteer work in Africa helping villages putting in water wells. He claimed that because of child soldiering and other practices, there are more slaves in Africa today than during the international slave trade era.
The slave trade:
•Ghana was the embarkation point for 12 million slaves, 3m of which went to the US. Most went to Brazil and the Caribbean.
•Many on our ship, Benders included, visited Elimna Castle where slaves were held before being loaded on ships. Entering the castle they went through “The Door of No Return.” It chokes me up to just write about it.
•There were 300 slaves per ship, stacked on platforms with minimal food and water, and about 20% died on route
•They were chained but there were revolts and suicides
•Slaves with different languages were put on a ship to minimize plotting and revolt
•A recommended autobiography about an African who was seized and became a slave is titled Olaudah Equiano & the Igbo World.
Let’s move back to Ghana where we spent our first five days in Africa and where I am now an expert because of this experience.
•Ghana is English speaking, has 10 regions, is rich in resources, and has pervasive poverty.
•Trash is omnipresent and wrappers of various kinds are everywhere on and in the ground.
•Like every third world country I’ve visited, it does not have “the habit of maintenance” as the longshoreman and philosopher, Eric Hofer, would call it. Every structure is either unfinished or shabby in appearance. They have perfected the practice of building “instant old.”
•NEWS FLASH: THE CAPTIAN JUST ANNOUNCED WE ARE OVER THE PRIME MEREDIAN AND THE EQUATOR—0 latitude and 0 longitude. He said we might experience a slight bump (the bump part is a joke)
•60% of the world’s chocolate comes from Ghana and much of this is produced with slave labor. Children are abducted or sold into slavery from neighboring countries—see the movie The Bitter Truth. Hershey & M&M/Mars have 2/3 of the U.S. chocolate market. We have been encouraged to write to Hershey management to ask it to only use cocoa labeled slave free. Congressman E. Engel has proposed mandatory labeling in the U.S. Why do I assume he’s a Democrat?
•Ghana is rich in gold, cocoa, timber, and recently discovered oil.
•In 1957 Kwame Nkrumah (I’m guessing the George Washington of Ghana) declared independence for Ghana and was thrown in prison for his efforts.
•He was president of Ghana, which he renamed from its former name Gold Coast, from 1960 to 1966.
•I spoke to a political science professor on board today who predicted that democracy would not last in Ghana.
Jean’s blog described in excellent detail our overnight village stay. I would add that the village is very poor and partially dependent on money from SAS trips like ours that occur twice a year. Our visit is a win/win situation. In talking to the chief, who has royal blood and is a realtor on the side, I discovered they just started recycling plastic bottles three weeks ago but the village is littered with debris. Discarded material he told me is part of the culture and stuff is embedded in the ground from years past. The outskirts of the village looks like a dump in places. While Jean and I sat at the village store, customers would buy items and discard wrappers as they walked away. No trash barrels were in evidence although there was a communal dumpster. The village has homes from grass covered huts to unfinished concrete buildings. Below you will find in order, pictures of the chief, the village school, the library, and the principal’s office. The most revealing picture is the principal’s office. It is symbolic of the disarray and how difficult it will be for this culture to contend in the 21st century.
Jean mentioned the omnipresent religious signage and listed some of the more intriguing store titles. I’ve never experienced a more outwardly religious country. Most establishments have a religious identification sign. Jean recorded the names of the shops as I took pictures from our bus. Two of my favorites were Jesus Is the Answer Motor Care Shop and Immaculate Heart Clinic. I thought this second sign was a wonderful play on words and indicative of religion in Ghana, where as Jean mentioned in her blog, 70-80% are Christian. The river of religion seems very wide here but not deep. It is riddled with traditional native practices and superstitions which appeal to the heart, a symbol for emotion and feelings. And of course, every good Catholic is familiar with the title Immaculate Heart.
As Bugs Bunny used to say, “That’s all folks.” (for now)
This is my second attempt at a seventh post. Jean volunteered to send off the first attempt and lost it in cyber space. Somehow my Word document was replaced by hers. What a shame, my legion of readers (two that I’m aware of—thanks Kristen and Becky) will be denied the wisdom of my observations and the pleasure of Pulitzer quality prose and reporting. I’m not a man who beats his wife, but I may make an exception in this case. Of course, it would be for her benefit only.
I recognize that my 6th post was a little dense and had a negative tone, not the happy traveler talk that one expects to encounter. This post will go down a little easier for those who are still with me. Let’s start with some factoids and observations about Africa.
•We just left Ghana on the west coast of Africa yesterday and are headed for the country South Africa. Africa has 53 states (countries) which are primarily the legacy of colonialism which were created with no regard for tribal or ethnic boundaries.
•Africa has over 800 languages, 1,000 ethnic groups, and all celebrations and rites of passage (birth, marriage, & death) have public dancing and music. Musicians are well respected in Africa.
•Drumming is universal and “spirit filled.” You don’t stomp your feet. You pound your chest to drive it inside.
•Ancestral spirits are important and summoned by music. At death, the soul does not disappear. It’s not reincarnation so much, but rather emulation of the good qualities of those who passed.
•At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 in Kartum, Sudan, the British lost 28 while killing 11,000 attacking Africans. The Brits were using the new American invention, the Maxim machine gun. It wasn’t bravery that won the battle. It was technology.
•In thinking about the colonization of Africa, one can compare it to Europeans earlier conquest of the American Indian nations. Our colonial fore-fathers were a little better. They did not enslave the native population to my knowledge. Although Columbus did allow his men to hunt natives like rabbits for sport, which our textbooks fail to mention.
•We had a guest lecturer last week who does volunteer work in Africa helping villages putting in water wells. He claimed that because of child soldiering and other practices, there are more slaves in Africa today than during the international slave trade era.
The slave trade:
•Ghana was the embarkation point for 12 million slaves, 3m of which went to the US. Most went to Brazil and the Caribbean.
•Many on our ship, Benders included, visited Elimna Castle where slaves were held before being loaded on ships. Entering the castle they went through “The Door of No Return.” It chokes me up to just write about it.
•There were 300 slaves per ship, stacked on platforms with minimal food and water, and about 20% died on route
•They were chained but there were revolts and suicides
•Slaves with different languages were put on a ship to minimize plotting and revolt
•A recommended autobiography about an African who was seized and became a slave is titled Olaudah Equiano & the Igbo World.
Let’s move back to Ghana where we spent our first five days in Africa and where I am now an expert because of this experience.
•Ghana is English speaking, has 10 regions, is rich in resources, and has pervasive poverty.
•Trash is omnipresent and wrappers of various kinds are everywhere on and in the ground.
•Like every third world country I’ve visited, it does not have “the habit of maintenance” as the longshoreman and philosopher, Eric Hofer, would call it. Every structure is either unfinished or shabby in appearance. They have perfected the practice of building “instant old.”
•NEWS FLASH: THE CAPTIAN JUST ANNOUNCED WE ARE OVER THE PRIME MEREDIAN AND THE EQUATOR—0 latitude and 0 longitude. He said we might experience a slight bump (the bump part is a joke)
•60% of the world’s chocolate comes from Ghana and much of this is produced with slave labor. Children are abducted or sold into slavery from neighboring countries—see the movie The Bitter Truth. Hershey & M&M/Mars have 2/3 of the U.S. chocolate market. We have been encouraged to write to Hershey management to ask it to only use cocoa labeled slave free. Congressman E. Engel has proposed mandatory labeling in the U.S. Why do I assume he’s a Democrat?
•Ghana is rich in gold, cocoa, timber, and recently discovered oil.
•In 1957 Kwame Nkrumah (I’m guessing the George Washington of Ghana) declared independence for Ghana and was thrown in prison for his efforts.
•He was president of Ghana, which he renamed from its former name Gold Coast, from 1960 to 1966.
•I spoke to a political science professor on board today who predicted that democracy would not last in Ghana.
Jean’s blog described in excellent detail our overnight village stay. I would add that the village is very poor and partially dependent on money from SAS trips like ours that occur twice a year. Our visit is a win/win situation. In talking to the chief, who has royal blood and is a realtor on the side, I discovered they just started recycling plastic bottles three weeks ago but the village is littered with debris. Discarded material he told me is part of the culture and stuff is embedded in the ground from years past. The outskirts of the village looks like a dump in places. While Jean and I sat at the village store, customers would buy items and discard wrappers as they walked away. No trash barrels were in evidence although there was a communal dumpster. The village has homes from grass covered huts to unfinished concrete buildings. Below you will find in order, pictures of the chief, the village school, the library, and the principal’s office. The most revealing picture is the principal’s office. It is symbolic of the disarray and how difficult it will be for this culture to contend in the 21st century.
Jean mentioned the omnipresent religious signage and listed some of the more intriguing store titles. I’ve never experienced a more outwardly religious country. Most establishments have a religious identification sign. Jean recorded the names of the shops as I took pictures from our bus. Two of my favorites were Jesus Is the Answer Motor Care Shop and Immaculate Heart Clinic. I thought this second sign was a wonderful play on words and indicative of religion in Ghana, where as Jean mentioned in her blog, 70-80% are Christian. The river of religion seems very wide here but not deep. It is riddled with traditional native practices and superstitions which appeal to the heart, a symbol for emotion and feelings. And of course, every good Catholic is familiar with the title Immaculate Heart.
As Bugs Bunny used to say, “That’s all folks.” (for now)
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Dave's 6th Post
January 30, 2011 - From somewhere in Atlantic Headed for Africa
Today’s guest lecturer in our Global Studies class, henceforth referred to as GS, was an economist PhD from Michigan State. On our previous SAS voyage, the GS class was called the Core Class and I may have used that title in previous posts. The class began with our “Global Minute.” A geography/geology professor spends a minute during each class to brief us on our current location describing its physical history. I’ve heard some say it’s the best part of GS.
The subject of Professor Ellen Fitzpatrick’s lecture today was Neoliberalism, a belief system or ideology that she claimed has caused the deaths of millions and much suffering globally. Neoliberalism does not mean “new liberal.” In fact, it means quite the opposite. It is based on the concept that free markets and unrestrained capitalism let market forces work best for the benefit of all. In America, it really took hold under President Ronald Reagan and is represented today by The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, and particularly, The Weekly Standard (I added these publications and the definition of Neoliberalism above but I suspect the professor would agree). My conservative friends may want to skip the next couple paragraphs.
As petro dollars accumulated in international banks after the 1973 oil crisis, international banks had piles of money they needed to invest. They lent money to Latin American and other countries and when interest rates went up (remember stagflation), debtor nations were faced with unmanageable interest payments on their debt. The World Bank and IMF restructured loans in a program called Import Substitution and Industrialization or ISI. The US, the UK, and Germany basically led this effort and it resulted in (hang on) Structured Adjustment Policies (SAP) that accomplished the following:
-Reduced the following:
-Government regulations
-Tariffs
-Social programs
-Distributions to the poor
Increased the following:
-Wealth of the rich and the 1st world
-Poverty in the 3rd world (today referred to as "The South or Southern Tier")
-Economic inequity between the rich and poor nations and individuals
The result was that the banks in rich countries were repaid, the poor were further impoverished, indebted nations were saddled with unmanageable interest payments, and the crisis was averted. Money was effectively shifted even more efficiently to the top tier of nations.
An example of how this worked is the banana and coffee industries. Rather than help producer countries (poor or developing) add value to their products domestically, bananas and coffee beans were shipped out of producer countries to have value added elsewhere in processed and packaged goods, etc. Bananas and coffee were kept cheap in rich countries and the poor were kept poor and unemployed in countries like Dominica where we just visited and that has an unemployment rate of 40% I’m told. We called this policy Reaganomics and it was based on a “trickle down” theory of economics where jobs and wealth flowed down to the lower levels as the rich became more prosperous. According to Dr. Fitzpatrick, this theory of economics is regarded as a failure in Latin America. In my view, Reaganomics has to also be regarded as a failure in America where we have seen the income gap widen, real wages decline, and a more and more wealth gravitate to the top 1% since 1980. For example, in 2006 the top 1% earned 6% of national income compared to 1% in 1974.
(Conservatives: restart here)
Wednesday’s International Herald Tribune (1/26/11) had an interesting article titled “The Superrich Pull Even Further Ahead.” I saw a connection between it, an article I read in the NYT the day we boarded the ship on 1/11/11, and the theme of our voyage which is Globalization: Thinking Globally but Acting Locally. The NYT article by an author I like, Nicholas Wade (see his book The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures), was titled “Depth of the Kindness Hormone Appears to Know Some Bounds.” The article described recent research results on altruism. The results indicate that altruism is limited to our clan or in-group and does not extend to out-groups. Oxytocin, the hormone of love, it seems increases love of our own in-group members but not out-group members and may promote ethnocentrism, not universal brotherhood. The previous article, on the superrich, mentioned at the top of this paragraph, describes a new phenomenon of global income inequality as today’s rich form a new in-group of globe-trotting wealthy elite. Not only are the rich getting richer, it is becoming an international in-group that relates more with the rich in other countries than the less affluent fellow citizens in their own countries.
Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke, another author I like (see his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions), concluded the article on the superrich by observing that we are very social animals and we see things and construct our beliefs and values from the perspective of our in-group. He claims that economic inequality creates multiple societies and builds another level of separation between in-groups and out-groups within nations. He recognizes this new structuring of society as a paradox. As the world grows together with globalization, it is also becoming more stratified and growing apart as the rich in-group gets richer leaving out-groups behind. As we glided down the Amazon in our air conditioned ship, I wondered how lower stratified out-group members will fare long term in the Brazil of tomorrow. See the picture below of an obvious out-group family living on a riverboat. I took this and other pictures of families living along the riverbanks from our ship. (Click on picture to enlarge.)
And what happens in America where the top 1% gets progressively more and more of the economic pie as national out-groups are increasingly marginalized? What shape will the inevitable second American revolution take? The same Herald Tribune issue I mentioned earlier also had a fictitious article reporting on the 2020 annual World Economic Forum, a yearly summit meeting of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. At the meeting, the Chinese company Litchi (formerly Apple) served dim sum rather than hamburgers and President Bill Gates, representing the United States, tried to drum up investment capital after a decade of rioting and near debt default in America. Anyone care to make a prediction about our collective future?
Today’s guest lecturer in our Global Studies class, henceforth referred to as GS, was an economist PhD from Michigan State. On our previous SAS voyage, the GS class was called the Core Class and I may have used that title in previous posts. The class began with our “Global Minute.” A geography/geology professor spends a minute during each class to brief us on our current location describing its physical history. I’ve heard some say it’s the best part of GS.
The subject of Professor Ellen Fitzpatrick’s lecture today was Neoliberalism, a belief system or ideology that she claimed has caused the deaths of millions and much suffering globally. Neoliberalism does not mean “new liberal.” In fact, it means quite the opposite. It is based on the concept that free markets and unrestrained capitalism let market forces work best for the benefit of all. In America, it really took hold under President Ronald Reagan and is represented today by The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, and particularly, The Weekly Standard (I added these publications and the definition of Neoliberalism above but I suspect the professor would agree). My conservative friends may want to skip the next couple paragraphs.
As petro dollars accumulated in international banks after the 1973 oil crisis, international banks had piles of money they needed to invest. They lent money to Latin American and other countries and when interest rates went up (remember stagflation), debtor nations were faced with unmanageable interest payments on their debt. The World Bank and IMF restructured loans in a program called Import Substitution and Industrialization or ISI. The US, the UK, and Germany basically led this effort and it resulted in (hang on) Structured Adjustment Policies (SAP) that accomplished the following:
-Reduced the following:
-Government regulations
-Tariffs
-Social programs
-Distributions to the poor
Increased the following:
-Wealth of the rich and the 1st world
-Poverty in the 3rd world (today referred to as "The South or Southern Tier")
-Economic inequity between the rich and poor nations and individuals
The result was that the banks in rich countries were repaid, the poor were further impoverished, indebted nations were saddled with unmanageable interest payments, and the crisis was averted. Money was effectively shifted even more efficiently to the top tier of nations.
An example of how this worked is the banana and coffee industries. Rather than help producer countries (poor or developing) add value to their products domestically, bananas and coffee beans were shipped out of producer countries to have value added elsewhere in processed and packaged goods, etc. Bananas and coffee were kept cheap in rich countries and the poor were kept poor and unemployed in countries like Dominica where we just visited and that has an unemployment rate of 40% I’m told. We called this policy Reaganomics and it was based on a “trickle down” theory of economics where jobs and wealth flowed down to the lower levels as the rich became more prosperous. According to Dr. Fitzpatrick, this theory of economics is regarded as a failure in Latin America. In my view, Reaganomics has to also be regarded as a failure in America where we have seen the income gap widen, real wages decline, and a more and more wealth gravitate to the top 1% since 1980. For example, in 2006 the top 1% earned 6% of national income compared to 1% in 1974.
(Conservatives: restart here)
Wednesday’s International Herald Tribune (1/26/11) had an interesting article titled “The Superrich Pull Even Further Ahead.” I saw a connection between it, an article I read in the NYT the day we boarded the ship on 1/11/11, and the theme of our voyage which is Globalization: Thinking Globally but Acting Locally. The NYT article by an author I like, Nicholas Wade (see his book The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures), was titled “Depth of the Kindness Hormone Appears to Know Some Bounds.” The article described recent research results on altruism. The results indicate that altruism is limited to our clan or in-group and does not extend to out-groups. Oxytocin, the hormone of love, it seems increases love of our own in-group members but not out-group members and may promote ethnocentrism, not universal brotherhood. The previous article, on the superrich, mentioned at the top of this paragraph, describes a new phenomenon of global income inequality as today’s rich form a new in-group of globe-trotting wealthy elite. Not only are the rich getting richer, it is becoming an international in-group that relates more with the rich in other countries than the less affluent fellow citizens in their own countries.
Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke, another author I like (see his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions), concluded the article on the superrich by observing that we are very social animals and we see things and construct our beliefs and values from the perspective of our in-group. He claims that economic inequality creates multiple societies and builds another level of separation between in-groups and out-groups within nations. He recognizes this new structuring of society as a paradox. As the world grows together with globalization, it is also becoming more stratified and growing apart as the rich in-group gets richer leaving out-groups behind. As we glided down the Amazon in our air conditioned ship, I wondered how lower stratified out-group members will fare long term in the Brazil of tomorrow. See the picture below of an obvious out-group family living on a riverboat. I took this and other pictures of families living along the riverbanks from our ship. (Click on picture to enlarge.)
And what happens in America where the top 1% gets progressively more and more of the economic pie as national out-groups are increasingly marginalized? What shape will the inevitable second American revolution take? The same Herald Tribune issue I mentioned earlier also had a fictitious article reporting on the 2020 annual World Economic Forum, a yearly summit meeting of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. At the meeting, the Chinese company Litchi (formerly Apple) served dim sum rather than hamburgers and President Bill Gates, representing the United States, tried to drum up investment capital after a decade of rioting and near debt default in America. Anyone care to make a prediction about our collective future?
Friday, January 21, 2011
Dave's 5th Post
Wednesday, January 19th
Yesterday we met an amazing teacher, Jeffrey Kotller, a psychology professor at the State University of CA in Fullerton. He spoke at core class and showed pictures and videos of his work with lower caste girls in Nepal. It was very moving and I’m sure brought tears to the eyes of many, including me. Nepal is a landlocked inaccessible country between India and China. Ninety percent have no health care and most deaths are caused by HIV, malnutrition, and maternal mortality. That’s the good news.
Because girls are valued less than the family goat, many are sold or abducted into sex slavery and transported to Mumbai after the 3rd grade when the government no longer pays for their education which costs $50/year. Twelve thousand Nepali girls suffer this fate annually. Because the girls constantly disappear from villages, the life expectancy of women in Nepal is unknown. For men it’s 57. When the young girls, as young as 8, arrive at brothels in Mumbai, they are raped 15 times the first day. The men prefer the new girls because they believe sex with a virgin can cure their aids.
Professor Kotller is teaching a course on altruism and social justice on the ship but I could not get into it as it’s full. Too bad, it’s the only course I had planned to attend. For the past ten years he has been heading an organization called Empowering Nepali Girls, www.empoweringnepaligirls.org, to rescue girls. It operates out of his dining room in California and has no overhead and pays no salaries. He got involved in Nepal when he accompanied a physician who traveled there to discover why it had the world’s highest mortality rate. Jeff saved his first girl, Ngu, on this first visit. She is now attending college in America studying TV production. Jeff, who must be in his 50s, has amazingly written 82 books, is a Fulbright scholar, and is obviously a very caring and impressive guy. To date, ENG has rescued 145 girls. One of his recent books is Changing Peoples’ Lives While Transforming Your Own. You may be able to read a description of it or buy it on Barnes and Noble or Amazon’s websites.
Jeff describes social justice as being about addressing the suffering of others. In his talk he referred to the “reciprocal effects of giving” and how service to others can transform oneself. In other words, how it is better to give than receive. He closed his presentation by recommending a four step process to the students:
1. Increase your awareness
2. Write: articles, letter, etc.
3. Share your concern and information
4. Act: do something, even if it’s something small.
There is a small plaque on the cabin door a few doors from mine. It’s the only door plaque I’ve seen. It features the following quotation by German theologian Martin Buber: “All journeys have destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” I would rephrase Buber’s and my earlier axiom to read, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey and the friends we make and serve, and are served by, along the way.”
Every afternoon at 4:00 we senior passengers gather together in the faculty/senior passenger lounge for an hour meeting led by our marvelous lifelong learner coordinator, Barbara McGarvey. The first day she asked each of the 65 of us to comment on what we expected from our journey. When it came to my turn, I said I am open to being surprised. The Kotller lecture was a wonderful surprise. I wonder what additional surprises await.
Yesterday we met an amazing teacher, Jeffrey Kotller, a psychology professor at the State University of CA in Fullerton. He spoke at core class and showed pictures and videos of his work with lower caste girls in Nepal. It was very moving and I’m sure brought tears to the eyes of many, including me. Nepal is a landlocked inaccessible country between India and China. Ninety percent have no health care and most deaths are caused by HIV, malnutrition, and maternal mortality. That’s the good news.
Because girls are valued less than the family goat, many are sold or abducted into sex slavery and transported to Mumbai after the 3rd grade when the government no longer pays for their education which costs $50/year. Twelve thousand Nepali girls suffer this fate annually. Because the girls constantly disappear from villages, the life expectancy of women in Nepal is unknown. For men it’s 57. When the young girls, as young as 8, arrive at brothels in Mumbai, they are raped 15 times the first day. The men prefer the new girls because they believe sex with a virgin can cure their aids.
Professor Kotller is teaching a course on altruism and social justice on the ship but I could not get into it as it’s full. Too bad, it’s the only course I had planned to attend. For the past ten years he has been heading an organization called Empowering Nepali Girls, www.empoweringnepaligirls.org, to rescue girls. It operates out of his dining room in California and has no overhead and pays no salaries. He got involved in Nepal when he accompanied a physician who traveled there to discover why it had the world’s highest mortality rate. Jeff saved his first girl, Ngu, on this first visit. She is now attending college in America studying TV production. Jeff, who must be in his 50s, has amazingly written 82 books, is a Fulbright scholar, and is obviously a very caring and impressive guy. To date, ENG has rescued 145 girls. One of his recent books is Changing Peoples’ Lives While Transforming Your Own. You may be able to read a description of it or buy it on Barnes and Noble or Amazon’s websites.
Jeff describes social justice as being about addressing the suffering of others. In his talk he referred to the “reciprocal effects of giving” and how service to others can transform oneself. In other words, how it is better to give than receive. He closed his presentation by recommending a four step process to the students:
1. Increase your awareness
2. Write: articles, letter, etc.
3. Share your concern and information
4. Act: do something, even if it’s something small.
There is a small plaque on the cabin door a few doors from mine. It’s the only door plaque I’ve seen. It features the following quotation by German theologian Martin Buber: “All journeys have destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” I would rephrase Buber’s and my earlier axiom to read, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey and the friends we make and serve, and are served by, along the way.”
Every afternoon at 4:00 we senior passengers gather together in the faculty/senior passenger lounge for an hour meeting led by our marvelous lifelong learner coordinator, Barbara McGarvey. The first day she asked each of the 65 of us to comment on what we expected from our journey. When it came to my turn, I said I am open to being surprised. The Kotller lecture was a wonderful surprise. I wonder what additional surprises await.
Dave’s 4th Post
January 16th Sunday
We docked in Dominica last night and while having breakfast I noticed a coed walk by with a 3-ring binder that had the following inscription on the cover: “How’s your Aspen?” I assumed she’s from Colorado and not inquiring about others’ body parts. A religious studies professor stopped by our table for some reason (everyone is super friendly) for a short chat.
That got Fred and I talking about how we ate communion wafers as kids and how few of today’s kids know what a communion wafer is. That in turn got me thinking about a possible short story I would title “The Wafer Maker.” It would feature the saga of a family business that spanned generations making communion wafers. The central theme would be the declining fortunes of the company over time as fewer and fewer “took communion” and the family fell on hard times. I probably won’t do it so someone feel free to run with the idea.
January 17th, Monday
Yesterday we visited a Carib Indian community and I see that Carol O’Neill has written an excellent account of the visit on her blog. Let me give you a little background. The Carib, now totaling about 3,000, were the indigenous inhabitants on Dominica and surrounding islands when Columbus arrived in 1492. The English moved into the northern Caribbean and the French into the south. Over time, the two European powers took over more islands and land and the sandwiched natives got squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. The Caribs on Dominica, originally coastal dwellers and fishermen, got pushed up into the interior highlands where they live today.
Most Americans, myself included, were taught in school that Columbus was a heroic figure who braved sailing off the edge of the world when he headed west. Not true. Educated Europeans knew the world was round but evidently the good nuns who taught me at St. Mark’s grade school didn’t get the memo. I also was not told how badly Columbus and his colleagues treated the natives, hunting them like rabbits for sport. For a more accurate account of events in “the age of discovery,” read Lies My Teacher Told Me.
In my previous blog, I described how distorted each of our individual maps are. We are all burdened with the heavy baggage of “our own truths.” I recall when hitchhiking around Europe in the summer of 1960, after graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in American history, I had a memorable breakfast with a gentleman from India. We had both spent the night at a Dublin rooming house and over breakfast we discussed the Cold War that was in raging at the time.
I of course focused on the evils of the Soviet Union but my tablemate argued that the U.S. was not so well intentioned either. Being an expert on the American situation with a brand new degree to prove it, I thought this obviously well educated Indian was mistaken and I’ve never forgotten the encounter. I’ve learned since, after the atrocities and disaster of Vietnam, the ongoing disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fact that we currently have a military presence in over a 100 countries, including tens of thousands of troops in Germany and Japan, 65 years after World War II ended, that America’s lecturing megaphone perhaps should be muted a bit. It’s not that were so bad. It’s just that we’re not so different from previous great empires. It will be interesting on this journey to meet with folks from other countries, like I did with the Indian in the rooming house, to hear their views and opinions of America.
I stayed on the boat today to continue to recuperate from my cold/plus. Jean, who always wants to see everything, rented a cab for the afternoon with Joe and Carol O’Neill to see the island. I’m sure she’ll tell all about it on her blog. She left it to me to tell about the elementary school she stopped at where she was surprised to see CHARACTER COUNTS! very much in evidence. She took a number of pictures and chatted with students, a teacher, and the principal, whom she told about her husband’s involvement in CC.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been actively involved in CC for over a decade and helped bring the program to our school district, the Poway Unified School District, where it is thriving. CC promotes six character values that promote good behavior, Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship. It’s nonreligious and nonpartisan and practiced in thousands of schools across the country. A number of surveys indicate that where it is implemented it changes behaviors for the better. You can visit CC’s website at www.charactercounts.org.
You will notice in the pictures attached that all the students wear uniforms. The last picture is the principal who wants very much to have the pictures sent to her. She said no one ever sends the pictures after promising to do so. I’m going to make it a high priority to see that she gets the following pictures and others that Jean took.
We docked in Dominica last night and while having breakfast I noticed a coed walk by with a 3-ring binder that had the following inscription on the cover: “How’s your Aspen?” I assumed she’s from Colorado and not inquiring about others’ body parts. A religious studies professor stopped by our table for some reason (everyone is super friendly) for a short chat.
That got Fred and I talking about how we ate communion wafers as kids and how few of today’s kids know what a communion wafer is. That in turn got me thinking about a possible short story I would title “The Wafer Maker.” It would feature the saga of a family business that spanned generations making communion wafers. The central theme would be the declining fortunes of the company over time as fewer and fewer “took communion” and the family fell on hard times. I probably won’t do it so someone feel free to run with the idea.
January 17th, Monday
Yesterday we visited a Carib Indian community and I see that Carol O’Neill has written an excellent account of the visit on her blog. Let me give you a little background. The Carib, now totaling about 3,000, were the indigenous inhabitants on Dominica and surrounding islands when Columbus arrived in 1492. The English moved into the northern Caribbean and the French into the south. Over time, the two European powers took over more islands and land and the sandwiched natives got squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. The Caribs on Dominica, originally coastal dwellers and fishermen, got pushed up into the interior highlands where they live today.
Most Americans, myself included, were taught in school that Columbus was a heroic figure who braved sailing off the edge of the world when he headed west. Not true. Educated Europeans knew the world was round but evidently the good nuns who taught me at St. Mark’s grade school didn’t get the memo. I also was not told how badly Columbus and his colleagues treated the natives, hunting them like rabbits for sport. For a more accurate account of events in “the age of discovery,” read Lies My Teacher Told Me.
In my previous blog, I described how distorted each of our individual maps are. We are all burdened with the heavy baggage of “our own truths.” I recall when hitchhiking around Europe in the summer of 1960, after graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in American history, I had a memorable breakfast with a gentleman from India. We had both spent the night at a Dublin rooming house and over breakfast we discussed the Cold War that was in raging at the time.
I of course focused on the evils of the Soviet Union but my tablemate argued that the U.S. was not so well intentioned either. Being an expert on the American situation with a brand new degree to prove it, I thought this obviously well educated Indian was mistaken and I’ve never forgotten the encounter. I’ve learned since, after the atrocities and disaster of Vietnam, the ongoing disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fact that we currently have a military presence in over a 100 countries, including tens of thousands of troops in Germany and Japan, 65 years after World War II ended, that America’s lecturing megaphone perhaps should be muted a bit. It’s not that were so bad. It’s just that we’re not so different from previous great empires. It will be interesting on this journey to meet with folks from other countries, like I did with the Indian in the rooming house, to hear their views and opinions of America.
I stayed on the boat today to continue to recuperate from my cold/plus. Jean, who always wants to see everything, rented a cab for the afternoon with Joe and Carol O’Neill to see the island. I’m sure she’ll tell all about it on her blog. She left it to me to tell about the elementary school she stopped at where she was surprised to see CHARACTER COUNTS! very much in evidence. She took a number of pictures and chatted with students, a teacher, and the principal, whom she told about her husband’s involvement in CC.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been actively involved in CC for over a decade and helped bring the program to our school district, the Poway Unified School District, where it is thriving. CC promotes six character values that promote good behavior, Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship. It’s nonreligious and nonpartisan and practiced in thousands of schools across the country. A number of surveys indicate that where it is implemented it changes behaviors for the better. You can visit CC’s website at www.charactercounts.org.
You will notice in the pictures attached that all the students wear uniforms. The last picture is the principal who wants very much to have the pictures sent to her. She said no one ever sends the pictures after promising to do so. I’m going to make it a high priority to see that she gets the following pictures and others that Jean took.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
First news from MV Explorer
January 13th, Thursday
We are finally under way, headed for Dominica. After starting the trip in the final stages of a bad cold and walking pneumonia, our flight was cancelled and a one day transit to the ship became two days with little badly needed sleep and a lot of dragging heavy bags from one terminal and gate to another turning my legs to rubber and exhausting my arms. Enough said of the bad news. We made it to the ship! I’m up on my hind legs and I told Jean she can cancel the body bag she ordered for me. Right now she’s in the exercise room and she and her sisters Carol and Phyllis are riding bikes. I’m going to wait a few days until I fully recover to start exercising.
Our ship the MS Explorer is eight years old, beautiful, and a confusing maze of hallways, stairs, and dead ends. So far, I’m an expert at taking the wrong turn or heading in the wrong direction. We have a crew of 191 and a passenger complement of 784. Yesterday we were introduced to the faculty and were saddened to discover that some of the classes are full and that to sit in we should first ask the teacher for permission to attend. This is disappointing as we were able to flit about and sample classes at will on our previous SAS voyage. There is only one class that really interests me, Altruism and Social Justice. I hope I’m able to make the roster. On our previous SAS voyage I took primarily eastern religion classes. I wanted to discover what others believed. Now I want to know “why we believe.” I was disappointed to not find classes in the new field of neuroscience, the science of how our brains influence our beliefs and actions, most of which is below our level of awareness and outside the arena of rationality…more about that later.
January 14th, Friday
We just returned from our first Core Class, the comprehensive class everyone takes first thing in the morning after breakfast. It describes the next port in detail; its geography, climate, religion, etc. It also deals with world issues that pertain to our voyage and it features guest lecturers and a variety of experts. The lead professor first dealt with globalization, which is the theme of our voyage. He described globalization as “an array of forces effectively shrinking our world.” We learned that the term in vogue today in the academic community, to describe much of the world we will be visiting, is “Global South,” replacing former labels like “Third World” and “Developing Nations,”. We will be visiting the lower tier of the Global South.
Today’s guest lecturer was a cartographer, an expert on maps and mapping. We learned that all maps are, in his words, “lies distorting reality.” They simplify reality and don’t tell the whole truth. The worst are maps without scale and he had several examples to show us. Perhaps most important are the legends that accompany maps that tell you how the data in maps is represented. The map most of us are familiar with is the Mercator Projection that shows the US on top and greatly distorts the relative size and position of countries. Greenland for example is actuality one thirteenth the size of Africa although world maps we traditionally see do not represent this reality. It made me recall a lecture I heard given by a USSR expert back in the 1970s. He used a map that had the Soviet Union in the center and showed the US off to one side. It was a very visual example of how we all view the world through individual and distorting glasses. Today we were exposed to other kinds of maps including the Peters Projection that is favored by many professionals. It gives a more realistic representation of the physical world.
All maps are a representation of data and a key to reading them effectively is knowing what the legend represents. We were shown one map three times, each with a different legend. Each map represented the same data in different ways and each looked entirely different. We were told that a map is only a “proposition” and each represents a point of view. Cartographers use maps to present only selected data. While listening to the presentation, I’m thinking what a great metaphor maps can be in describing our individual life journeys. Each of our personal maps is a distortion of reality and may or may not be taking us in the direction we want to go. We are all navigating using slightly different legends, had different starting places, and are currently in different places. We all use guides to help us read our maps and as we travel we fire old guides and hire new. If we’re wise, we continually revise our legends and rethink our scales. Unfortunately, recent neuroscientific brain mapping discoveries are revealing that because we are basically emotional beings who use reason to rationalize our mistaken positions, few if any of us are aware of our true positions and we all have faulty legends. It’s hard to get to the proper destination when one is mistaken about her current location. But perhaps most important, even more than our location, personal legends, and our navigation skills, are our travel mates. Life’s not really about the destination anyway. It’s about the journey and the friends we make along the way. It’s impossible to travel life’s road well alone. As I revise my map and legend during the next 104 days, I’ll revel in the company of my wife and relatives. Life doesn’t get any better than this.
We are finally under way, headed for Dominica. After starting the trip in the final stages of a bad cold and walking pneumonia, our flight was cancelled and a one day transit to the ship became two days with little badly needed sleep and a lot of dragging heavy bags from one terminal and gate to another turning my legs to rubber and exhausting my arms. Enough said of the bad news. We made it to the ship! I’m up on my hind legs and I told Jean she can cancel the body bag she ordered for me. Right now she’s in the exercise room and she and her sisters Carol and Phyllis are riding bikes. I’m going to wait a few days until I fully recover to start exercising.
Our ship the MS Explorer is eight years old, beautiful, and a confusing maze of hallways, stairs, and dead ends. So far, I’m an expert at taking the wrong turn or heading in the wrong direction. We have a crew of 191 and a passenger complement of 784. Yesterday we were introduced to the faculty and were saddened to discover that some of the classes are full and that to sit in we should first ask the teacher for permission to attend. This is disappointing as we were able to flit about and sample classes at will on our previous SAS voyage. There is only one class that really interests me, Altruism and Social Justice. I hope I’m able to make the roster. On our previous SAS voyage I took primarily eastern religion classes. I wanted to discover what others believed. Now I want to know “why we believe.” I was disappointed to not find classes in the new field of neuroscience, the science of how our brains influence our beliefs and actions, most of which is below our level of awareness and outside the arena of rationality…more about that later.
January 14th, Friday
We just returned from our first Core Class, the comprehensive class everyone takes first thing in the morning after breakfast. It describes the next port in detail; its geography, climate, religion, etc. It also deals with world issues that pertain to our voyage and it features guest lecturers and a variety of experts. The lead professor first dealt with globalization, which is the theme of our voyage. He described globalization as “an array of forces effectively shrinking our world.” We learned that the term in vogue today in the academic community, to describe much of the world we will be visiting, is “Global South,” replacing former labels like “Third World” and “Developing Nations,”. We will be visiting the lower tier of the Global South.
Today’s guest lecturer was a cartographer, an expert on maps and mapping. We learned that all maps are, in his words, “lies distorting reality.” They simplify reality and don’t tell the whole truth. The worst are maps without scale and he had several examples to show us. Perhaps most important are the legends that accompany maps that tell you how the data in maps is represented. The map most of us are familiar with is the Mercator Projection that shows the US on top and greatly distorts the relative size and position of countries. Greenland for example is actuality one thirteenth the size of Africa although world maps we traditionally see do not represent this reality. It made me recall a lecture I heard given by a USSR expert back in the 1970s. He used a map that had the Soviet Union in the center and showed the US off to one side. It was a very visual example of how we all view the world through individual and distorting glasses. Today we were exposed to other kinds of maps including the Peters Projection that is favored by many professionals. It gives a more realistic representation of the physical world.
All maps are a representation of data and a key to reading them effectively is knowing what the legend represents. We were shown one map three times, each with a different legend. Each map represented the same data in different ways and each looked entirely different. We were told that a map is only a “proposition” and each represents a point of view. Cartographers use maps to present only selected data. While listening to the presentation, I’m thinking what a great metaphor maps can be in describing our individual life journeys. Each of our personal maps is a distortion of reality and may or may not be taking us in the direction we want to go. We are all navigating using slightly different legends, had different starting places, and are currently in different places. We all use guides to help us read our maps and as we travel we fire old guides and hire new. If we’re wise, we continually revise our legends and rethink our scales. Unfortunately, recent neuroscientific brain mapping discoveries are revealing that because we are basically emotional beings who use reason to rationalize our mistaken positions, few if any of us are aware of our true positions and we all have faulty legends. It’s hard to get to the proper destination when one is mistaken about her current location. But perhaps most important, even more than our location, personal legends, and our navigation skills, are our travel mates. Life’s not really about the destination anyway. It’s about the journey and the friends we make along the way. It’s impossible to travel life’s road well alone. As I revise my map and legend during the next 104 days, I’ll revel in the company of my wife and relatives. Life doesn’t get any better than this.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
The Eagle Has Landed
Our passports arrived at 11:15 today (Saturday, January 8), the last Fedex delivery before our flight at 8:25 a.m. on Monday. Perhaps there is a God. What a rascal She is. We sent our passports to the facilitating company, Pinnacle, in September.
It must have been my prayers. Perhaps it was switching from standing to a kneeling posture that was persuasive. She didn’t cure my cold but She sure tested my faith.
It must have been my prayers. Perhaps it was switching from standing to a kneeling posture that was persuasive. She didn’t cure my cold but She sure tested my faith.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Initial post
I'm checking in for my first blog post and have nothing to say while I'm feeling my way along in this new media. I'm sure this will soon become as natural as breathing and it will be a great instument for all of us on the Explorer to communicate with those less fortunate souls back in the Minnesota winter wasteland and other climes. More later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)