It didn’t take mankind very long to realize that machines were a boon that served to provide leisure and efficiency in a way that was amazing. From the wheel to the cotton gin it was clear that labor saving machines were a special gift to human culture. An arc of development from the earliest machines to robotics and AI is easy to trace but the effects of the developments are a bit harder to assess. Today, I can have my groceries delivered, my banking done and my car self-driven. I can shop and use the self-checkout while listening to music that I have pre-programmed for maximum entertainment. We live in a world that is careening toward the “contactlesss.” Soon, we will not have to talk to anyone or encounter them in real time. Steven Hawking warned us that, “the development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Hawking also warned us that, “we must learn to avoid the risks” that AI represents. The risks include our growing reliance on systems that have no ethics, emotion or creativity … on systems that render human contact unnecessary.

Automation is, of course, deeply tied to the profit motive. A drastic reduction in labor costs will always sweeten profits. The self check out murders wages. The Automat was invented in Berlin in 1895. Food was dispensed without the hassle of waiters, busboys and hostesses. Profits soared and so did food costs. Imagine putting 60 quarters into a machine to secure a $15.00 Reuben sandwich. When food was cheap, small change made the automat work, proving that forms of automation change with the times. The five cent apple is no more. While automatons reduce mistakes they are limited in times of great change. (no pun intended) Autopilot is useful on long haul flights over the oceans, it allows the pilot to rest and refresh… but I want a hand on the stick while landing in a fierce crosswind. Much of life is -precisely-landing in a fierce crosswind. In short, we need to learn how to avoid the risks that our disconnection presents. Automation works, until it doesn’t.

We don’t need to be Luddites but we do need to cherish connection in all of its forms. There has to be room for a full array of emotions that occur when we encounter our fellows in the course of our lives. There is meaning in the smiles, rants, info exchanges and barters that only occur when we meet each other. We should cherish the chats we have at the cash register, the talk in the doctors waiting room and the exchange of information when we ask for directions (sorry google maps). Our humanity occurs when contact happens. Our current interest in the spiritual and in joining clubs and churches is partially due to our insulation from others. Our efficiencies are killing us slowly and certainly so we must embrace the antidote of multiple relationships on many levels.

When I feel alone and out of sorts it pays to check my connections.

One of the most accessible definition of karma is, “what goes around comes around.” So much of life is jousting practice , the aggressive tilting with situations,setbacks and change and I like to think of knights taking their reps at the quintain. The quintain was essentially a wooden man on a swivel; one wooden arm sported a shield, the other a sandbag. A “true hit”on the shield allowed the galloping knight to ride clear of the sandbag that would swing from the other arm and knock the knight who missed his mark off his high horse. So many times have I been laid low by forgetting the fact that what goes around comes around. I often fail to see the sandbag closing in on me.

Youthful jousts often led to a mouthful of dirt.

As you age, your timing and vision improve to the point that many falls can be avoided. We have taken Leonardo da Vinci’s words to heart:” LEARN TO SEE Realize that everything connects to everything else.” We start to understand that the harsh word, the brainstorm and our prejudices, effect us more than the people and situations we rail against. A famous Zen koan reminds that anger is like picking up a hot coal to hurl at your enemy…the first person burned is you. That seems like wisdom to me and I am enjoying the mixture of advancing age and disengagement that allows for a more peaceful life, Haven’t been sandbagged in a while. This good result is because I reject most offered conflicts and when I do tilt, it is with better focus and intention. Put simply, I pick my fights.

Living with clear intention and a sense of another does help us stop our crashing to earth. I used to think that people who didn’t express their grievances and hatreds aggressively were just wimps and now I see them as a sort of karmic warrior…a person who understands that self control and good aim will keep them upright. Those who consciously do no hurt don’t get the credit they deserve in our culture but they have the satisfaction of avoiding a painful fall.

They also contribute to the blessings of life and I suspect they will inherit the earth.

Thanks to those who have sustained me with their good words and good thoughts. You know who you are.

I am not sandbagging.

The pandemic had more than its fair share of tragedies but it was not all doom and gloom. Pharmaceutical companies are enjoying a renaissance as they proliferate a vast number of medicaments for every conceivable ailment. These new medicines have come into being as a result of the accelerated research that covid demanded and the rise in the drug companies most important ally…fear. Every bump and squiggle we experience in our health might, in fact, be deadly. When we get together there is often a protracted “organ recital,” where the state of our health is moved to first position in every conversation, current affairs, family achievements and all other topics come second. We are rapidly becoming professional patients as we self diagnose and self medicate.

What bothers me is not the fact that many drugs and potions are being created, after all, many of them will prove a boon to many people. What bothers me is the current naming conventions and marketing strategies. In 1974 a hippie group called Pilot gave us a song called MAGIC that is now the theme song for a cure for skin disease. Drugs are give exotic names with a faint smell of the scientific: Sotyktu, Xidra, Vyvgart, Rybelsus, Biktarvi and a host of others. Honestly, I don’t know if these are drugs or the Egyptian pantheon of the fifth century BCE. Perhaps we would benefit from more easily recognizable naming. Preparation H could become AssEase, Lotrimin (athletes foot) could become StepPrep and Viagra could be renamed StickUp! These names – and others – would clarify many things and give a sense of fun. Why are Band-Aids not called Disaster Plasters? Beats me. This naming atrocity has been going on for many lifetimes… we all remember Unguentine and Sal Hepatica and it’s time for this ugliness to end.

There are dangers in our rage to medicate. Polish sci-fi writer, Stanislaw Lem offered this: “since no one any longer responds to things spontaneously, you take drugs to study, drugs to love, drugs to rise up in revolt, drugs to to forget the distinction between manipulated and natural feelings has ceased to exist.” Drugs certainly have their uses but we would do well to be careful. It is easy to become a professional patient.

Do we need to be a little tougher?

A fourteenth century Italian poet with the impressive name Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia claims the dubious distinction of inventing the exclamation mark. Some contend that the mark is a symbolic expression of the Latin expression of joy -io- rearranged and reimagined. As we experience the sharp rise in the sale of anxiety medications and the universal availability of mindfulness programs to reduce angst, it may be time to shelve this symbol.

Now I like excitement and the occasional hurrah as much as the next person but my attitude changed this morning as I read a post on our neighborhood’s web site. aI was informed as follows “Fluffy has been found !!!!! ” I am sure that Fluffy was much loved and I rejoice in Fluffy’s return but I resented the command to gush that the exclamation mark represented. I am equally upset when movies like Mamma Mia! or Oliver! require me to expect a particularly exciting movie experience. When I drive, warning signs sport the demanding mark. No Parking! seems too intense … a simple declarative would suffice. I wonder if the proliferation of exclamation says a lot about the state of our culture. We have become slaves to excitement and consumers of the mundane dressed in the raiment of false significance. Everything is larger than life except those things that really are larger. We tend to trivialize those things to keep ourselves unchallenged and comfortable. We need to calm down.

Mark Twain said it brilliantly: “One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.” The exclamation point is the punctuation equivalent of the selfie. Both scream, hey look at me. Tasteless.

I am still happy that Fluffy was found…huzzah!

U

This morning as I stumbled sleepily through my house thoughts ran wild while my body creeped along. I pulled two eggs out and opened the freezer to find vegan bacon lying next to the jumbo shrimp. I glanced at the tile floor and wondered if I had made a mistake not getting the luxury vinyl. I thought that option might be awfully pretty. In the deafening silence I decided that the tile was awfully pretty after all. This was no working holiday, so I moved on, even though I felt like an uninvited guest in the middle of a holy war.

My next thought took me back to the days when my kids were young and the watched a show that featured a segment called, “one of these things is not like the other.” I couldn’t remember if the feature was on Sesame Street, Nickelodeon or the Electric Company but I was suddenly aware that we now live in a world defined by the oxymoronic. From “honest politician” to “whole piece of cake” we have created a mash up world where mutually exclusive ideas are slammed together in a way that seems – but is not-meaningful. Life has become a symphony interrupted by rap or country music. The simple, declarative sentence in which subject and object agree and information is correctly delivered is no more. Meaning has died an ugly death.

What is a “virtual reality?” Something or someplace that is almost real? I am in the oxymoron known as a “small crowd” that decries our tendency to mash our language at the expense of making sense. No doubt this discomfort proves that I have become an old poop who loves the simplicity of fact bearing locutions. I do not know what an “original copy” is and I probably never will. Yet, I still wish other humans well. Maybe I agree with Edna St. Vincent Millay who quipped, “I hate people but I love gatherings.” I generally believe that all people should have an easy life.

Damn ! There it is again.

My brother-in-law has a personal bucket list that includes The Tournament of Roses parade and after a series of calls and planning sessions my wife and I signed on for a tour that included a stay at a beachfront hotel, tickets to the parade grandstands and access to the,”float barn” where the floats were actually constructed. Some interesting back stories emerged including the fact that our family members were perfectly willing to fly from Columbus Ohio – a distance of 1,957 miles – and they hadn’t a second thought about a plane change or the fact that the tour did not include the actual Rose Bowl game. The pageantry of the parade was more than enough.

My brother- in -law and I share a formative experience. We were both seminary students back in the day so it’s fair to assume that we both spent some time searching for Jesus but neither of us thought that this would be the day we would actually see him. When we attended the Catholic Seminaries of our choice there was a fervid post Vatican 2 initiative to establish the, “historical Jesus”… to prove beyond doubt that a man called Jesus actually existed was “crucified, died and was buried” as certain Creeds stipulate. Jesus was not a myth but a human who walked the earth.

As I sat in the bleachers on my complimentary cushion, I had no idea that Jesus was coming.

There was a stir a few hundred feet from us on Colorado Boulevard and there he was. He waved at us from a float and he seemed like a really nice guy as he sported a beaming smile and flowing white robes. Isaiah advises us to, “seek the Lord where he may be found”…. well we found him just in front of the Maserati dealership. I noted the time of day and it was late morning… presumably Jesus had breakfasted (loaves and fishes?) before revealing himself to us. I conjured a vision of Jesus at IHOP ordering the Rooty Tooty Fresh’n Fruity in preparation for a busy day of waving to the crowds.

OK, I loved the absurdity of it all and chalked it up to America’s tendency to trivialize the momentous and businesses ability to co-opt everything for profit. Never mind that the display was borderline blasphemous it gave me the biggest laugh of the day. Was hoping to see Buddha in a football uniform (obviously a lineman) or a marching band made up of lost Israelites but all we got was Jesus. After all Jesus is American and that was what the day was about.

I wanted to support the bucket list dream and I was rewarded with a vision of my own.

Have taken a long break from blogging because of a month long trip to Africa. After the trip I wrote a 20 page take on our experiences and received a great deal of feedback on the stories I shared with friends. My favorite comment was, “you gained a lot of knowledge.” This prompted some musings on the nature of knowledge.

I quickly recalled the caveat given by Alexander Pope: “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” As I thought about the nature of that statement it occurred to me that a whole lot of knowledge could be more dangerous than anything. Traditionally, we parse knowledge by type and so we talk about emotional, mechanical, technical, social intelligence in what becomes a weird taxonomic exercise. I decided that what makes knowledge dangerous is when it is used without principle or character. Many examples came to mind regarding famous persons who used the tools of knowledge without benefit of a reliable moral compass.

I thought about Joseph Goebbels, the father of mass influence messaging who dedicated his particular genius to the most execrable movement of modern times and Da Vinci who rounded out his studies of anatomy and art with the creation of futuristic weapons. Knowledge is indeed dangerous.

As we live through the chaos of the present it is clear that knowledge without principle rules the day. We are worried that our children are no longer capable of what we call, “critical thinking”…the ability to bring a skeptic energy to issues and exercise a tempered logic while we draw conclusions. I think this point is largely true but what worries me more is the fact that we have become incapable of empathy. Our inability to empathize is in proportion to our rage for certainty and our need for safety from that which is” other”. We have lost the suppleness of mind that allows us to truly consider the state of other people. We are tone deaf.

If you believe that we are evolving toward ever better states for mankind, empathy must be a driver. What seems to stop us is our own self-centeredness. No less a Philosopher than Plato himself considered the hierarchy of knowledge and concluded, “the highest form of knowledge is empathy for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.”

There’s the rub.

A friend of mine shared a bumper sticker with me that says it all: EGO EATS BRAINS. Our smugness and privilege often makes empathy impossible.

If we want to reclaim the best form of knowledge we better have the principle of willingness in full operation. Willing to listen, willing to put our egos on hold. Thinking is indeed critical.

”

During the American civil war, positions needed to be defended in spite of a lack of resources. Armies would often mount “Quaker Guns” to intimidate would-be attackers. A Quaker Gun was simply a log of a size that looked like a 20 pounder cannon …the log was painted black and slightly cored to effect a muzzle and mounted at various points. From a distance these fakes gave the perception of a strong defense . An attacker would think twice about mounting an attack against this fearsome artillery.

For many, life is warfare. There are tactical and strategic decisions to be made, positions to be defended and sieges to be endured.Those who are embattled often mount their own version of Quaker guns – guns that do no real harm (to the enemy) but tend to keep attackers at bay. They are in a siege situation. The constant low-intensity conflict creates a burning need to seize the high ground, dig moats and trenches and place gabions to slow the attackers …real or perceived.

I have seen these staged defenses in my own life and I find that three of them are prominent: perfectionism, asceticism and deflection stand out.

Perfectionism leaves no room for the enemy of doubt to breach the defense. A student with a perfect GPA is defended from anyone’s suggestion that they are not smart. Great wealth defends against spiritual poverty. Being mistake free crushes criticism.

Asceticism is also effective. Non-participation in life’s dirty business gives sure defense against criticism. Saying, “I don’t do that” to many of life’s pleasures will keep you healthy, wealthy and wise. It confers a superiority over others who are leading their messy lives.

Deflection is the most powerful ordnance in the battle. This can be seen in the, “you know what’s wrong with you?” and “I know you are but what am I” people who claim victimhood at every turn.

Our Quaker guns minimize our mistakes and create the illusion that our positions are strong.

It would be better to be happy, joyous and free but it is a great risk to leave our well defensed positions.

As I continue to make mistakes and slog along, I want to sue for peace. I remember old Will Shakespeare who encouraged us to see things differently. I want “the good things of life : pleasure, enjoyment dost thou think because thou art virtuous there will be no more cakes and ale?” I want the life that offers cakes, ale, cinnamon rolls , cookies, biscotti, muffins and pies. When you are fully involved in life, mistakes will be multiple and repeated. I need to learn how to embrace that.

Finally, it’s good to remember the old Italian proverb: “he who makes no mistakes, makes nothing.”

I admire the courage of those who have left the trenches and embraced life and its joys.

“Talent” is a word that is bandied about …one of those words that is so dense with meanings that it tends to describe nothing. Some see talents as gifts, while others cite nurture, milieu and genetics as possible sources. The idea of gift has value as a descriptor because we know that one cannot be taught to throw a 98 mph fastball, or schooled to have perfect pitch. You either can or cannot do certain things and if you can -without instruction- you have certainly been gifted. Talent is also understood in a three part context that proceeds from the gift, to skill development, to mastery. As hard to define as “talent” is, most of us think that most of us have some.

When we are confronted by a brilliant flash of talent many of our prejudices come into focus. One prejudice is hierarchical, nearly classist, and we are somewhat offended. For 500 years, some scholars can not accept the possibility that a relatively uneducated, provincial man could write the finest plays of English literature. We are convinced that it must have been Sir Francis Bacon, The Earl of Southhampton, Marlowe or someone with high qualification and elite status. It goes against nature for a nobody to become a big somebody. Certainly talent is distributed at random and it pays no attention to economic or social status. We now have talent searches on television, in recruiting and in many other aspects of our culture …because talent might be hiding anywhere.

Lately I have been on the hunt for talent among my friends and acquaintances and in the search, other prejudices are challenged. The gifts we call talent are not necessarily dramatic or earth shaking. Not everyone writes timeless music as a child, as Mozart did; many talents are more domestic, simpler and equally amazing.Talents like motherhood, partnership, kindness and optimism abound around us. Even in this less dramatic realm, some are truly gifted. Friends that have a talent for optimism and kindness are jewels as rare and meaningful as Hamlet or The Magic Flute.

When it comes to kindness and optimism, I have not been gifted. I must practice them daily and I often fail in the attempt. I am on the skill development path and that path can often be a slog. Somewhere in the far distance lies mastery. Einstein said, “mastery demands all of a person” and thus far, I have not pushed all of my chips to the center of the table. I have to remember the insight of Law Tzu: “mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.”

Love to those who are doing the work to master kindness and optimism. They are truly powerful.

Cicero asserted that, “life is nothing without friendship” and I think he’s right. A consideration of the idea of friendship-its subtleties and requirements – makes for an interesting couple of hours. Like LOVE, FREEDOM and SUCCESS, FRIENDSHIP has a unique tendency to defy precise description. In an attempt to define friendship some weird theories and half-truths emerge. We get odd concepts like tough love (more often tough than loving) and co-dependence. Theories of what a friend should do- and be – are as variable as the people doing the theorizing.

Cerrtainly, I have benefitted from the tough approach. There is an old Sicilian proverb that nails this type of friendship:” only your friends will tell you when your face is dirty.” Good friends have the courage to speak truth to you with confidence and I have been redirected to the right path many times by friends who spoke out. A particularly useful friend once told me something I’ll never forget. I had spent about an hour complaining about my life when he finally established eye contact and said, “you have a nice home, a pretty wife, healthy kids and a good job…you’re running out of reasons to be an asshole.” That was a sorely needed kick in the ass delivered from a place of real concern. Friends will do that.

Friends often share histories as much as they share souls. Good friends know almost all of your stories and in many cases helped you create them. Shared memories create the comfort that is necessary for honesty. Lifelong friends are in this group and despite years apart the shared narratives continually refresh your connection. Being with these people is always rejuvenating.

There are the fiends that I call moral friends… the people with whom you are always pleasant and appropriate . In short, you amuse each other. Sports scores , fashion ideas and shared hobbies are how people that pass the time pleasantly. These types of friends are essential to our sense of belonging and our position in the world.

What we do know about friends is limited but it certainly includes the capacity to be truthful, the desire to sustain and shared interests that might include long histories of togetherness. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye in her work entitled KINDNESS tells you how to spot potential friends:”kindness raises its head above the crowd of the world to say it is I you’ve been looking for ,and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.” We will cleave to a person that shows kindness with great energy.

Today, I am grateful for my friends, old and new. They are fully realized, three dimensional forces in my life . They are not mere caricatures . As Emerson said, ” a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. “

No doubt.