(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Anyone who thinks for a moment abut women's role in reproductive biology could never blithely recommend "adoption, not abortion," because women have to go through something unknown to fetuses or men, and that is pregnancy.
From the point of view of a fetus, pregnancy is no doubt a good deal. But consider it for a moment from the point of view of the pregnant person (if "woman" is too incendiary and feminist a term) and without reference to its potential issue. We are talking about a nine month bout of symptoms of varying severity, often including nausea, skin discolorations, extreme bloating and swelling, insomnia, narcolepsy, hair loss, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, indigestion and irreversible weight gain, and
culminating in a physiological crisis which is occasionally fatal and almost always excruciatingly painful. If men were equally at risk for the condition -- if they knew that their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have go for nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette or even aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains -- then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as
a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.
--Barbara Ehrenreich, 07 Feb 1985, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 89-90
There are far more than five or six Catholic theologians today who approve abortions under a range of circumstances, and there are many spiritual and good people who find "cogent," non-frivolous reasons to disagree with the hierarchy's absolutism on this issue. This makes their disagreement a "solidly probable" and thoroughly respectable Catholic viewpoint.
--Daniel C Maguire, 1983, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 101
Abortion is always tragic, but the tragedy of abortion is not always immoral.
--Daniel C Maguire, 1983, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 101
The Bible does not forbid abortion. Rather, the prohibition came from theological and biological views that were seriously deficient in a number of ways and that have been largely abandoned. . . .
--Daniel C Maguire, 1983, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 101
Feminist scholars have documented the long record of men's efforts to control the sexuality and reproductivity of women. Laws showcase our biases. Is there no sexist bias in the new Catholic Code of Canon Law? Is that code for life or against women's control of their reproductivity? After all, canon law excommunicates a person for aborting a fertilized egg, but not for killing a baby after birth. One senses here an agenda other than the simple concern for life.
--Daniel C
Maguire, 1983, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 101
A person cold push the nuclear button and blow the ozone lid off the earth or assassinate the president (but not the pope) without being excommunicated. But aborting a five-week-old pre-cerebrate, prepersonal fetus would excommunicate him or her. May we uncritically allow such an embarrassing position to posture as "prolife"? Does it not assume that women cannot be trusted to make honorable decisions, and that only male-made laws and male-controlled funding can make women responsible and
moral about their reproductivity?
--Daniel C Maguire, 1983, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 101
The moral dilemma of choosing whether to have an abortion faces only some women between their teens and their 40s. The self-styled "prolife" movement is made up mainly of men and postfertile women. Is there nothing suspicious about passionately locating one's orthodoxy in an area wehre one will never be personally challenged or inconvenienced?
--Daniel C Maguire, 1983, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 101-102
. . . prohibition represents a despairing effort to compel those whom one cannot convince; . . .
--Daniel C Maguire, 1983, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 103
Abortion made illegal would not stop abortions, It would just recreate a black market for illegal abortions.
--Carolyn Buhl, 23 Nov 1984, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 159
The women's movement suffers from three classic defense mechanisms associated with minority group status: self-rejection, identification with the dominant group, and displacement.
The demand for abortion at will is a symptom of group self-hatred and total rejection, not of sex role but of sex identity.
The womb is not the be-all and end-all of woman's existence. But it is the physical center of her sexual identity, which is an important aspect of her self-image and personality. To reject its function, or to regard it a handicap, a danger or a nuisance, is to reject a vital part of her own personhood. Every woman need not be a mother, but unless every woman can identify with the potential motherhood of all women, no equality is possible. American Negroes gained nothing by straightening their
kinky hair and aping the white middle class. Equality began to become a reality only when they insisted on acceptance of their different qualities -- "Black is Beautiful."
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 163
Women will gain their rights only when they demand recognition of the fact that they are people who become pregnant and give birth -- and not always at infallibly convenient times -- and that pregnant people have the same righs as others.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 163
To say that in order to be equal with men it must be possible for a pregnant woman to become unpregnant at will, is to say that being a woman precludes her from being a fully functioning person. It concedes the point to those who claim that women who want equality really want to be imitation men.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 163
If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social status, they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience. The politics of sexism are perpetuated by accommodating to expediential societal structures which decree that pregnancy is incompatible with other activities, and that children are the sole responsibility of their mother.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg
163
The demand for abortion is a sell-out to male values and capitulation to male lifestyles rather than a radical attempt to renegotiate the terms by which women and men can live in the world as people with equal rights and equal opportunities. Black "Uncle Toms" have their counterparts not only in women who cling to the chains of their kitchen sinks, but also in those who proclaim their own liberation while failing to recognize that they have merely adopted the standards of the oppressor, and
fashioned themselves in his image.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 163
Oppressed groups traditionally turn their frustrated vengeance on those even weaker than themselves. The unborn is the natural scapegoat for the repressed anger and hostility of women, which is denied in traditional male-female relationships, and ridiculed when it manifests in feminist protest.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 163-164
Even while proclaiming "her" rights over the fetus, much liberationist rhetoric identifies pregnancy with male chauvinist "ownership." the inference is that by implanting "his" seed, the man establishes some claim over a woman's body ("Keeping her barefoot and pregnant"). Abortion is almost consciously seen as "getting back at" the male. The truth may well be that the liberationist sees the fetus not as a part of her body but as a part of his.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted
in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 164
Of all the things which are done to women to fit them into a society dominated by men, abortion is the most violent invasion of their physical and psychic integrity. It is a deeper and more destructive assault that rape, the culminating act of womb-envy and woman-hatred by the jealous male who resents the creative power of women.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 164
Offered the quick expedient of abortion, instead of community support to allow her to experience pregnancy and birth and parenthood with dignity and without surrendering her rights as a person, woman is again the victim, and again a willing participant in her own destruction.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 1164-165
Today's women's movement remains rooted in 19th-centruy thinking, blindly accepting patriarchal systems as though they rested on some immutable natural law; processing women through abortion mills to manufacture instant imitation men who will fit into a society made by and for wombless people. Accepting the "necessity" of abortion is accepting that pregnant women and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society. It indicates a willingness to adjust to the status quo which is a
betrayal of the feminist cause, a loss of the revolutionary vision of a world fit for people to live in.
--Daphne de Jong, 14 Jan 1976, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 165
The tactics of "direct action" have escalated into a form of domestic terrorism. A small band of fanatics have set out to impose their political will through fear rather than persuasion. Those who cannot change the lwa by peaceful means justify violence. The most bizarre among them are even risking murder our of the conviction that they are stopping murder.
This terrorism has had no measurable effect on the number of abortions being performed. Women are rarely scared or harassed into maternity; we know that from years of illegal abortions.
--Ellen Goodman, 30 Nov 1984, and reprinted in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (1986), pg 196
(See below for Barry Glassner and Stephen D. Levitt for associated material)
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Better an ounce of tears than a pound of responsibility. The mass media chatters on about Americans' failure to accept responsibility, but it misses what is really lakcing, a sense of regret, of sadness for the way things are and for what one must do to survive.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 64
Action is not necessarily creative. Creativity requires bringing something new into the world not just rearranging the pieces.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 91
The Holocaust was done. It did not just happen. Most people, though, even in NaziGermany, and certaily today the world over, did not make the Holocaust. Yet it also happened to millions, the victims above all, and to all who live in its shadow. It happened in our world, we were born under the horizon of its history. If we do not come to terms with this aspect of evil, that it is something that happens to us, then we shall be forever secretly identifying with its persecutors intead of with its
victims.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 134
To live, to be human, is above all to be a victim: a victim of cicumstance, a victim of fate. A victim of life.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 134
Mr. Redeux's continued imprisonment is just, a recognition of the gravity of evil. Mr. Redeux is also a suffering human who deserves our compassion. More than this, he deserves -- as Socrates says about justice -- not be be made a less excellent (arete) human being than he already is. If justice is man's excellence, says Socrates, then it is hardly right that he use his excellence to make others less excellent, less human, less just [...]. The state is about to do just that, subjecting one man's vulnerable humanity to further insult and injury.
That is just what he did to his victims, you reply. Absolutely, which is why we should not do it to him. The problem of evil is at is core a problem of circles and cycles, what the East calls karma -- not just the evil that runs through generations of family members but the evil that runs through our institutions, making ourselves and our children less excellent human beings than we might be. The first and best thing we can do about evil is to break the cycle.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil
Means to Us, pg 139
What we call evil is the impulse to malevolent destruction. Deep down in the mind (or maybe not eve so deep down) there is no difference between teh desire to squash someone's hand and the desire to murder millions. Desires like this, primitive, destructive, malicious desires are by their very nature. The hand-stepper does not say, I don't really want to do a lot of evil, or hurt someone very much, just a little bit. . . . " He might say it to himself, but he does not feel it. What he feels
-- for just a moment -- is total, unremitting malicious destructiveness.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 142
Most can, and all should, contain the evil impulse within symbolic frames. Nasty jokes are one such frame. Not the presences of the malicious destructive impulse, but the capacity to contain it, marks the difference between humans, cultures, and good and evil.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 142
Our concepts are woven with our livs, and we cat them into the world. If we're lucky, if they do not have too many holes, we catch something, a historical experience usch as the Holocaust made meaningful only because we can connect it without our own holocausts. Some, like Christopher Lasch, argue this personalization must trivialize the historical Holocaust. My study reveals quite the opposite. Ony if one can invest the historical Holocaust with the terror and tragedy of one's life can it
become a meaningful moral category.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 146
Understanding is an act of terrible and terrifying intimacy.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 150
Individuals are as different as the groups to which they belong. Listening for another's reality is the best path to understanding.
--C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, pg 150
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It is a journalistic cliché that throwing rocks at tanks is a futile gesture. Wrong. To be sure, it is a symbolic gesture, but not a futile one. It takes a lot of courage to confront a 60 ton steel monster with rocks; the powerlessness of the rock thrower to stop the tank only underscores the powerlessness of the tank to do what it is there to do -- terrorize the people.
--Gabriel Ash, Why I won't vote for Kerry, 05 May 2004
Compared to rock throwing, casting a ballot in the presidential elections in November, 2004 requires far less personal courage and is far more futile. Yet the stone thrower confronted me with my choice of president. How do I answer?
To me, that young man in Nablus represents billions of disenfranchised people, people whose fate, and often their very life and death, is decided in Washington by the President of the United States, yet they have no say in choosing that president.
Some of the disenfranchised are American -- prison inmates, parolees and ex-felons, for example. There are also the hundred million Americans who gave up voting. But most of the disenfranchised aren't U.S. citizens. If the U.S. were minding its own business, there would be no reason to be concerned about the presidential preferences of non-citizens. But the U.S. government considers it has a God-given right to determine the fate of the residents of places like Nablus. From the Shia cities in southern Iraq to the indigenous villages of Bolivia, the U.S. assumes it can determine who shall live, who shall die, who shall be repressed and who shall govern, and especially, in what direction shall the money flow. The U.S. president is the unelected emperor of the planet.
Therefore, when I commit my own symbolic gesture of voting, what is my responsibility towards these people? When I exercise my privilege to vote, how do I take into consideration the interests and wishes of those without that privilege?
--Gabriel Ash, Why I won't vote for Kerry, 05 May 2004
As a member of the American consumer class, it is clear to me that John Kerry would be a better President, for me and for most everyone I know personally, than George Bush. Not that this is a challenge -- my doorknob would be a better President than George Bush.
But a John Kerry presidency will not reduce the hardship of life in Nablus. Israeli tanks will continue to roll there, underwritten by U.S. financial support and protected by U.S. diplomatic immunity. Nablus will continue to die a slow, suffocating death, according to the U.S. approved master plan of the Israeli ethnic cleansers. With Kerry in the White House, Iraqis will go on dying for the right to be free from foreign occupation. The war on South American peasants will continue, perhaps
even intensify, whether fought with "Free Trade" legislation, "war on drug" funds, or direct military intervention, etc., etc.
--Gabriel Ash, Why I won't vote for Kerry, 05 May 2004
I cannot stop the tanks. But on my next visit to Nablus, I don't want to have to lie about my vote. I don't want to have to explain that I didn't really support Kerry's de-facto endorsement of ethnic cleansing even though I voted for him. It sounds like a lame excuse and it is. I don't want to have to admit to my hosts that I voted for Kerry because I thought about retirement savings and health insurance and personal security and I forgot all about Nablus and about what they were going through. Therefore, on election day, I won't forget Nablus and I won't vote for Kerry.
I know many will consider this a betrayal. There is a deafening silence regarding Kerry among the progressive leadership, a shameful silence that stills that familiar argument: this is the time if there ever was one to vote strategically for the lesser evil; Bush is destroying America and stopping him must be the highest priority. This argument would be more convincing if it weren't dusted and deployed every four years.
--Gabriel Ash, Why I won't vote for Kerry, 05 May 2004
The next election is not taking the shape of a referendum on the American empire, but rather a contest in management skills. Kerry claims he would be a better steward of the empire. He would be better at pacifying Iraq, better at forcing U.S. solutions on the Middle East, better at getting the world to submit to U.S. will.
Perhaps he would. But ought we help him? What is our stake in improving the quality of management of the empire? Many of us do have a stake and that may be the problem.
--Gabriel Ash, Why I won't vote for Kerry, 05 May 2004
The "anything but Bush" argument today is self-interest masquerading as high-mindedness. When one says that anyone is better than Bush, what is left unsaid is that we, too, have a stake in the success of U.S. world domination. Bush's mismanagement is a threat to us because it threatens to bring down the empire, and with it the relatively sheltered lifestyle of those who manage to live well inside the beast.
--Gabriel Ash, Why I won't vote for Kerry, 05 May 2004
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
This is the real al-Qaeda. This is the al-Qaeda who have neglected, ignored and bulldozed over Islamic ideals, Quranic teachings and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed. In the wake of the tragic events of September 11th [2001], many Muslims rallied to al-Qaeda's side saying they supported the terrorist organization's attacks on civilians around the world. All of a sudden, Islamic scripture was rewritten to justify the killing of civilians when the Quran explicitly, consistently and persistently outlaws such actions. The Prophet Mohammed laid out the conduct during battlefield exchanges; so meticulous were his decrees that it was forbidden to destroy the environment or structures that sustained life. Women, children, the elderly and even clergy (whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian) were not to be harmed unless they took up arms, in which case, the precedent would be one of self-defense.
In the Riyadh bombings in recent days, 18 innocent civilians were killed and more than 125 wounded. Although there were some foreigners in the fatalities, the bulk of dead and injured were Arab citizens. Many of the dead were children. The Arab world is in shock and mourning.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), Thank you, al-Qaeda, for revealing yourself, 19 Nov 2003
I raised the issue of al-Qaeda's carnivorous cult of murder and their chilling crimes in Riyadh and Mecca with a few Arabs in phone and e-mail interviews. In the first day of the aftermath, there was all-round denial that this was al-Qaeda's work. Anyone else, but not al-Qaeda, was the response I got, as if al-Qaeda were holy warriors of Islam. A few argued with me about the legitimacy of killing people who had killed Muslims. I wondered how a four-year old girl could have killed Muslims. She
probably had a difficult enough time trying not to pee in her Pampers, let alone plan and coordinate attacks against Muslims.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), Thank you, al-Qaeda, for revealing yourself, 19 Nov 2003
Had Muslims around the world stopped to consider their position since al-Qaeda appeared on the scene, they would have noticed that the al-Qaeda murderers have been the single greatest threat to stability in the area and have indeed provided the fodder for the ravaging of Arab and Muslim countries.
Al-Qaeda have done more to harm the interests of Muslims than 1,400 years of Crusades, wars, racism, and imperialism.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), Thank you, al-Qaeda, for revealing yourself, 19 Nov 2003
While the Middle East still reels in shock [...], a news magazine in London reported receiving claims of responsibility in an e-mail from al-Qaeda. It was the usual al-Qaeda channel of communication. At press time, reports from security sources in Saudi Arabia reportedly revealed that one of the dozens of men detained for questioning in relation to the Riyadh bombing admitted that the bombing was the work of al-Qaeda but that it had targeted Americans and not Arabs. He claimed it was a logistical mistake.
The death of an innocent knows no logistical mistakes.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), Thank you, al-Qaeda, for revealing yourself, 19 Nov 2003
History is cold; it sheds no tears for innocent deaths. However, it does teach those who are willing to learn.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), Thank you, al-Qaeda, for revealing yourself, 19 Nov 2003
Murder in the name of Islam is actually murdering the good name of Islam. Abducting and slaying innocent men and women, flying airplanes into buildings, blowing up discotheques and trains are not the ways of Islam; they are the ways of cowards, pagans who do not worship the God of Abraham, but the God of death and destruction.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), 21 Jun 2004
There is a saying that goes something like this: The greatest enemies of a church are within.
In the case of the Islam, as an organized religion, its greatest enemies are so-called Muslims who believe they are fighting in the name of Islam to defend what they claim are Islamic interests in Islamic lands. In fact, they are so-called Muslims who plagiarize sections of the Quran, failing to embrace the comprehensive message of the entire holy book.
Six years ago, many Muslims were cheering the corrupt regime of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network they harbored and derived inspiration from. The Taliban were seen as the only true Islamic state on the planet. Funny thing is, the Taliban never lifted a finger to better the plight of the Afghan people. Not one school was built, not one road was repaved, not one building was reconstructed, not one hospital was refurbished. The Taliban destroyed television sets, videos, radios, computers -- any instrument that represented the West. However, they held onto their tanks, missile launchers, anti-aircraft systems, guns . . . well, you get the picture. Hypocrisy hardly begins to describe it.
This is a true Islamic state?
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), 21 Jun 2004
The Islamic nation that the Prophet Mohammed bequeathed the people of the world was one inspired by arts and science, culture and history. It was the early Muslims who propagated mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, irrigation, civic management, and architecture, to name a few.
It was the Muslims who took the forgotten Greek philosophies, translated them and gave them back to a comparatively backward Europe. The first medical college and hospital was established in Kufa some 1100 years ago.
Now compare that with the Taliban who excelled at beating women and restricting their role in society.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), 21 Jun 2004
Such malicious myths also prevailed during the Iraq-Iran war when supreme Shi'a cleric Ayatollah Khomeini promised Iranian fighters that all they had to do was cross the Iraq border and they would find themselves in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and therefore be guaranteed a place in heaven. The holy cities were more than 180 kilometers away. Iraqi officers I have spoken with tell of captured Iranian soldiers who carried keys on their belts, apparently, the keys to heaven personally blessed by the Ayatollah.
The Prophet Mohammed explained such ignorance more than 1,400 years ago when he explained to the new Muslim nation that people of little faith create stories and myths to convince themselves of the faith. Historians have called this religion of the field. The Prophet Mohammed called it bida'a or innovation.
Unfortunately, in the 21st Century, such myths have taken on dangerous proportions as every Khaled, Musab, and Osama now believe they are doing the work of God when they kidnap innocents and murder them. What is more unfortunate is that such actions have been encouraged by those so-called Muslims -- who in truth seek to overthrow Islam -- in a vacuum of socio-political discourse and condemnation.
--Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada), 21 Jun 2004
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Think of all those unknown and uncountable multitudes whose actions are indispensable to make your life liveable (those whose labour was used to bring your daily measure of cornflakes on to your plate; those who keep watch on the state of the motorway surface so you can develop the 70 mph speed without fearing gaping holes round the corner; those who, by obeying the rules of joint living, make it possible for you to walk the strets without fear of assault, or breathe the air without being
afraid of poisoning by toxic fumes). Think of all those huge multitudes who, equally unknown to you, nevertheless put constraints upon your freedom to select the life of your liking (those who wish to possess the same commodity you are after and hence allow the merchandising companies to keep the price high; those who find robots more profitable than living employees and hence trim your chances of finding a job which suits you; those who -- preoccupied as they are with their own ends -- bring
about that foul air, noise, clogged roads, smelly water you can do little to escape). Compare the sheer size of such multitudes with a list of people you have met, whom you can recognize by face, whose names you can remember. No doubt you will find out that among all those people who influence your life, the people you know or know of constitute a very small section of those whom you have never met and heard of. How small that section is you will never know.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking
Sociologically, pg 37
We and they, in-group and out-group, derive in each case our respective characeristics, as well as our distinctive emotional colouring, from our mutual antagonism. One can say that this antagonism defines both sides of the opposition. One can also say that each side derives its identity from the very fact that we see it as being engaged in antagonism with its opposite. From these observations, we can draw a truly amazing conclusion: an outgroup is precisely that imaginary opposition to itself
which the in-group needs for its self-identity, for its cohesiveness, for its inner solidarity and emotional security. The readiness to cooperate within the confines of the in-group needs, as it were, a prop in the form of a refusal to cooperate with an adversay. One can even say that the actual presence of a group which truly behaves like one would expect an out-group to behave is neither here nor there; were there no such group, it would have been invented -- for the sake of the coherence and
integration of the group which must postulate an enemy to draw and to guard its own boundaries and to secure loyalty and cooperation within. It is as if I needed the fear of a wilderness in order to feel securely at home somehwere. There must be an "out" for the "in" to be truly appreciated.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 41-42
Inclination to prejudice is not uniformly distributed. It has been observed time and again that some people are particularly prone to perceive the world in terms of sharp, irreconcilable oppositions, and to resent passionately anyone who is or seems to be different from themeselves. Such a disposition manifests itself in racist attitudes and actions -- or, more generally, in xenophobia, the hatred of everything "foreign". People who entertain high levels of prejudice are
normally also strin gently and compulsively on the side of uniformity. They are ill prepared to endure any deviation from strict rules of conduct and hence favour a strong power capable of keeping people in line. People characterized by this set of attitudes are said to possess an authoritarian personality. Why some people have such a personality while other can live happily surrounded by a wide variety of styles of life and remain tolerant to even formidable differences, has not been
convincingly explained. It may well be that what we describe as an expression of an authoritarian personalithy is just the outcome of a social situation in which its alleged holders have been cast. Better understood, on the other hand, are such variations in the range and intensity of prejudice as are related to the context in which the affected persons live and act.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 47-48
. . . the disposition to "buy" the idea of sharp boundaries between in-group and out-group and jealousy [sic] guard the first against the threat ostensibly carried by the second seems to be closely related to the feeling of insecurity, generated by a drastic change in the habitual and familiar life conditions. Such a change naturally makes life more difficult. As the situation beomes more uncertain and less predicatble, it tends to be experience as dangerous and thus frightening. What
people have learned as the effieient and effective way to go about their business of life suddenly become less reliable; people feel that they have lost control of the situation, which they previously believed they could handle. The change is therefore resented. The need to defend "the old ways" (that is, familiar and comfortable ways) is strongly felt, and the resulting aggression is directed against newcomers; those who were not present when the old ways were still securely entrenched
but are around now, when the old ways have come under attack or are fast losing their usefulness. The newcomers, in addition, are different anyway; they have their own style of life and so are a tangible embodiment of change. It seems easy to put two and two together; the newcomers are to blame for the change itself, for the fading of old security, the evalutation of old habits, the uncertainty of the present situation and the disasters the future may bring.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking
Sociologically, pg 48
The bitterness of the established -- outsiders antagonism, as well as the gravity of its likely consequences, are further exacerbated by the fact that the pugnacity of the established elicits a symmetrical response from the group cast in the position of the outsiders -- which, if anything, detracts from the probability of an armistice. An American anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested the name of schismogenesis for the chain of actions and reactions which follows: hostile
attitudes, so to speak, supply their own proof through evoking hostile behaviour. As each action calls for a still stronger reaction, both sides willy-nilly drift towards a deep and lasting schism. Whatever control or influence either side might initially have had over mutual relations is now lost "The logic of the situation" takes over.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 51
Symmetrical schismogenesis: . . . each side reacts to the signs of strength of the adversary. Whenever the adversary shows power and determination, a still stronger manifestation of power and resolve is thought. What both sides fear most of all is to be seen as weak or hesitating. [...]
Complementary schismogenesis: . . . develops from exactly opposite assumptions, yet it leads to identical results: namely, to the breakdown of the relationship. The schismogenetic sequence of actions is complementary when one side strengthens its resolve at the sign of weakness on the other side, while the other sides weakens its resistance when confronted by manifestations of growing strength on the opposite side. Typically, this is the tendncy of any interaction between a domineering and
submissive partner. Self-assurance and self-confidence of one partner feed on symptoms of timidity and submissiveness of the other. In turn, the latter's meekness grows together with the self-assertiveness and arrogance of the first. Cases of complementary schismogenesis are as varied in their content as they are numerous.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 51
For a nationalist or a party miltant, no enemy is as detestable and hateful as "one of us" who ran to the other side, or who is not outspoken enough in condemning it; a concilliatory attitude is berated with much more vigour than outright enmity. In all religions, the heretics are abhorred more than the straightforward infidels and persecuted with much more venom. "Breaking the ranks", "rocking the boat", "sitting astride the barricade" are the worst crimes of which leaders may accuse their
followers. These charges are levied against people who think (worse still, say; worst of all, show by their deeds) that the divide between their own nation, party, church or movement and their declared enemies is not absolute, and that mutual understanding and even agreement are conceivable; or that the honour of their own group is not spotless, and the group itself is not beyond reproach, not always in the right.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 58
A human relationship is moral in so far as it stems from the feeling or responsibility for the welfare and well-being of the other person. First, moral responsiblity is distingushed by being disinterested. It does not derive from fear of punishment nor from calculation of personal gain: not from the obligations contained in a contract I've signed and am legally bound to fulfil, or from my anticipation that the person in question may offer me something useful in exchange and thus make my
effort to earn his or her favours worth while. Neither is it conditional on what the other person is doing or what sort of person he or she is. The responsibilty is moral as long as it is totally selfless and unconditional: I am responsible for another person simply because he or she is a person, and hence commands my responsibility. Secondly, responsibility is moral in so far as I see it as mine and mine alone; it is not negotiable, it cannot be passed on to another human being. I cannot talk
myself out of this responsibility and no power on earth can absolve me from carrying it. Responsibility for the other -- for any other -- human being simply because this is a human being, and the specifically moral impulse to give help and succour that follows from it, need [sic] no argument, legitimation or proof.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 69
A community is a group in which factors which unite people are stronger and more important than anything which may divide it; the differences between members are minor or secondary by comparison with their essential -- one is tempted to say overwhelming -- similarity. Community is thought of as a natural unity.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 72
Communites and organizations alike assume freedom of their members; coming together is admittedly a voluntary act, at least in the sense that it can be revoked: one can go back on one's decision. Even if in some cases [...] joining the group was not originally the result of a free choice, members are still credited with the right to leave (though they may be pressed, as we have seen before, to refrain from exercising it). There is one case, however, when the organization explicitly denies
freedom to leave, and the people are kept under its jurisdiction by force: this is the case of total institutions [...]. Total institutions are enforced communities: there the totality of members' lives is subjected to scrupulous regulation, their needs are defined and catered for by the organization, their allowed and disallowed actions are regimented by organizational rules.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 86
Our dreams and cravings seem to be torn between two needs it is well nigh impossible to gratify at the same time, yet equally difficult to satisfy when pursued separately. These are the needs of belonging and of individuality. The first need prompts us to seek strong and secure ties with others. We express this need whenever we speak or think of togetherness or of community. The second need sways us towards privacy, a state in which we are immune to pressures and free from demands,
do whatever we think is worth doing, "are ourselves". Both needs are pressing and powerful; the pressure of each grows the less the given need is satisfied. On the other hand, the nearer one need comes to its satisfaction, the more painfully we feel the neglect of the other. We find out that community without privacey feels more like oppression than belonging. And that privacy without community feels more like loneliness than "being oneself".
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg
106
The difference in the degree of freedom is often spoken about as the difference in power. Power is, indeed, best understood as the ability to act -- both in the sense of choosing freely the ends of any action and of commanding the means which make such ends realistic. Power is an enabling capacity. The more power people have, the wider is their range of choice, the larger the amount of decisions they can see as realistic, the broader the scope of outcomes they may realisitcally pursue while being reasonably certain that they would get what they want. Being less powerful, or powerless, means it is necessary to moderate one's dreams, or to abandon attempts to reach one's aims due to the absence of necessary resources.
To have power is to be able to act more freely; but having no power, or less power than others have, means having one's own freedom of choice limited by the decisions made by others.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 113
. . . let us recall that some values are presented as worthy of esteem because of the tradition which stands behind them. They are, so we are told, time-honoured and time-tested. One ought to remain faithful to the past; to the group with which this past has been shared; to the common heritage of which we are jointly the guardians. History, we are told, binds its heirs; what history brought together, no human presumption should dare to set apart. Old virtues are venerable just because they are old . . .
Thus goes the argument. Often it reverses the truth: rather than values being revered because of their old age, those who seek popular acceptance of the values they preach (sometimes brand new, freshly invented values) bend over backwards to dig out genuine, or putative, historical evidence of their antiquity.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 119-120
The deference poeple feel for the past is enlisted in the service of the current contest of values; once it has been accepted that certain values were held by our ancestors, they are less vulnerable to contemporary criticism; other values have still to prove themselves, while those of the good old days have already passed the test of time, even if not with flying colours. The traditionalist legitimation becomes particularly attractive in times of rapid change which cannot but generate
uneasiness and anxiety. It helps if radical and unprecedented innovations are acclaimed as the restoration of old and tried ways; such representation may sometimes somewhat reduce uncertainty, caused by rapid social change, and seems to offer a relatively safe, less agonizing choice.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 120
Ownership is never a private quality; it is always a social affair. Ownership conveys a special relation between an object and its owner only becuse it conveys at the same time a special relation between the owner and other people. Owning a thing means denying others access to it.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 126
Rationality means being guided by the head rather than by the heart. Action is considered rational only in so far as it consists of the application of the most effective and least costly means to the task at hand.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 132
For their fellow human beings, people remain moral subjects as long as they are acknowledged as humans: that is, as beings eligible for the treatment reserved for fellow human beings alone, and proper for every human being (a treatment which assumes that the partners of interaction possess their own unique needs, that these needs are as valid and important as one's own and ougth to be paid similar attention and respect). One may even say that the concepts of a "moral object" and "human
being" have the same referent -- their respective scopes overlap. Whenever certain persons or categories of peole are denied the right to our moral responsibility, they are treated as "lesser humans", "flawed humans", "not fully human", or downright "non-human".
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 138
A nation is, from start to finish, an imagined community; it exists as an entity in so far as its members mentally and emotionally "identify themselves" with a collective body most of whose other members they will never confront face to face.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 171
Territory and language are insufficient as the factors of the "reality" of the nation for one more, and decisive, reason: one can, so to peak, move in and out of them. One can move home and acquire residence among a nation to which one does not belong. One can master the language of another nation. If the territory of residence (remember, this is not a territory with guarded borders) and participantion in a linguistic community (remember, one is not obliged to use a national language by the fact that no other languages are admitted by power-holders) were the only constituting features of the nation, the nation would be too "porous" and "underdefined" to claim the absolute, unconditonal and exclusive allegiance that all nationalisms demand.
Such a demand is most persuasive if the nation is conceived of as the fate rather than a choice, as "fact so firmly established in the past that no human power may change it now; a "reality" which can be tinkered with only at the tinkerer's peril. Nationalisms try on the whole to achieve just this. The myth of origin is their major instrument.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 172
Nationalism inspires a tendency to cultural crusades: efforts to change the alien ways, to convert them, to force them to submit to the cultural authority of the dominant nation. The purpose of cultural crusade is assimilation. [...] To be sure, all nationalism is always about assimilation, as the nation which the nationalism declares as having "natural unity" has first to be created by rallying an often indifferent and diversified population around the myth and symbols of national
distinctiveness.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 174
The strength of nationalism derives from the connecting role it plays in the promotion and perpetuation of the social order as defined by the authority of the sate. Nationalism "sequestrates" the diffuse heterophpobia [...] and mobilizes this sentiment in the service of loyalty and support for the sate and discipline towards state authority. It therefore makes the state authority more effective. At the same time it deploys the resource of state power in shaping the social reality in such a
way that new supplies of heterophobia, and hence new mobilizing opportunities, may be generated.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 177
. . . as sexual intercourse became increasingly separated from erotic love and from the stable, multi-sided relations of cohabitation to which they "naturally" belonged, it also became a focus of ever growing anxiety, increased urge of technical inventiveness and a psychic tension that occasionally spills into violence.
--Zygmunt Baumann, Thinking Sociologically, pg 180
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The concept [of ideology] has a long history that cannot be pursured here, but for the present purpose it is enough to say that an ideology is a set of definitions of reality legitimating specific vested interests in society.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 67-68
But even on the cognitive level [...] it is important to reiterate that the sociologist does no interpret "reality" but rather interprests various interpretatioins of "reality" (or "reality definitions"). "False consciousness" as a concept implies "correct consciousness," which in turn implies access to "reality" which the sociologist cannot supply.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 71
The sociologist, be it as a teacher or in some other communcaing role, can assist people in understanding other points of view and in obtaining a more comprehensive view of the social world. This widening of people's perspective, let it be stipulated, is civilizing, even humanizing. Thus it is appropriate that sociology has a place in liberal arts curricula. but, as the sociologist presents a spectrum of meaning and values, he cannot tell people whether the should or should not adopt these
meaning and values as their own. Or rather, the moment he does that, he ceases to be a scientist and becomes something else -- advocate, prophet, even "educator." In these roles, he moves within a different relevance structure, and he decieves his public if he pretends that this different relevance structure is the the same as the relevance structure of sociology.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 71-72
Again: sociology cannot offer moral guidance. Nevertheless, and paradocially, it has a curious relation to ethics; or at least to a particular kind of ethics. This is what Max Weber called the ethics of responsibilty (Verantwortungsethik) -- that is, an ethics that derived its criteria for action from a calculus of probable consequences rather than from absolute principles.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 75
If we take our minds back many millennia, back into the dawn of history, we may imagine the appearnce of the very first intellectual. After centuries during which people did nothing but rhythmicaly bang away with stone implements and keep the fires from going out, there was someone who interrupted these wholesome activities just long enough to have an idea, which he or she then proceeded to announce to the other members of the tribe. We can make a pretty good guess as to what that idea
was: "The tribe is in a state of crisis!" Things have been that way ever since.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 146
Intellecuals have a vested interest in proclaiming crises, because this attracts the public's interest and gives legitimacy to the intellectual's occupation, which is to have ideas -- an occupation that depends upon subsidization and the practical utility of which is often doubted by those called upon to provide the subsidization. This is only mentioned here because all proclamations of a state of crisis should be greeted with skepticism.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner,
Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 146
These discontents of modernity have, from the beginning, called forth resistance of various descriptions. Sometimes these have been violent and political, sometimes no more than the efforts of people to keep certain areas of their lives away from the transfoming force of modernity. Such resistance to modernity took place in Europe at its very beginning; they go on today all over the Third World, and there are comparable phenomena in Western advanced industrial societies too. Thus the recent
upsurge of a ferocious Islamic neotraditionalism in several countries, while like all historical phenomena of some magnitude it cannot be traced to one single cause, is at least also a manifestation of resistance to modernity.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 148-149
The rationalization of institutions and consciousness is compatible with social integration -- unless or until the rationalized systems run into "problems" -- that is, when for whatever resons the systems no longer work as thy are supposed to. When this happens, individuals are constrained to attend to the question of what these systems "mean". At this point the previously discussed relativized and relativizing consciousnss greatly hinder the quest for "meaningul answers." The effect,
then, is disintegrative. What follows is a "hollowing out" of societal values. The old values, while still being paid lip service, have lost their plausibility as motives and legitimizations of action. They are now "empty forms," and by the same token they lose their old "binding" power. This is precisely the process which some have called decadence -- a perfectly acceptable category within sociology, as long as it is understood in a descriptive rather than an evalutative sense.
--Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pg 155
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Biblical literalists are always first-rate candidates for atheism. For their God, of course, is actually the Bible. And although the Bible is holy and good, it is not God. Therefore, when faith in their god, the Bible, is in any way shaken, then, like the "intelligent young man named Jitterly," they may "reject the whole thing bitterly." In the meantime, their narrow and shallow interpretation of the Bible may also cause a lot of other folks to reject it as well.
--Robert Short, Something
To Believe In, 1978, quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 118
In a study of comparative mythology, we compare the images in one system with the images in another, and both become illuminated because one will accent and give clear expression to one aspect of the meaning, and another to another. They clarify each other.
When I started teaching comparative mythology, I was afraid I might destroy my student's relgious beliefs, but what I found was just the opposite. Religious traditions, which didn't mean very much to them, but which were the ones their parents had given them, suddenly became illuminated in a new way when we compared them with other traditons, where similar images had been given a more inward or spiritual interpretation.
I had Christian students, Jewish students, Buddhist students, a couple of Zoroastrian students -- they all had this experience. There's no danger in interpreting the symbols of a religious system and calling them metaphors instead of facts. What that does is to turn them into messages for your own inward experience and life. The system suddenly becomes a personal experience.
--Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth, 1988, quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 126
You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk abut the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life -- there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.
--Joseph Campbell, An Open Life, 1989, quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 128
In developing a personal relationship with the Great Spirit, you first pay attention to the fact that you already have a relationship with Spirit. Spirit is not something far off that you need to seek or call or grab or go to Tibet to find. Spirit lives in you; it lives within your body, in every cell. You can touch the Great Spirit by touching into your own aliveness. all you need is a different attitude about how big you are, how deep you are, how high you are. You must be willing to own
that you are God; even though you are a minute part of the All That Is, you are connected and one with it.
--Brooke Medicine Eagle, Open To The Great Mystery, 1990, quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 131
Buddhism does not take its starting-point on grand metaphysical questions like Who made the world? What is the meaning of life? and What happens to us after death? It is not concerned with proving the existence of God or gods. Rather its root focus is on the down-to-earth fact that all existence, including human existence, is imperfect in a very deep way. "Suffering I teach -- and the way out of suffering," the Buddha declared.
--John Snelling, The Buddhist Handbook, 1991,
quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 139
Only those who dare to let go can dare to reenter.
--Meister Eckhart, quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 145
Does the course of action you plan to follow seem logical and reasonable? Never mind what anyone else has to say. Does it make sense to you? If it does, it is probably right.
Does it pass the test of sportsmanship? In other words, if everyone followed this same course of action would the results be beneficial for all?
Where will your plan of action lead? How will it affect others? What will it do to you?
Will you think well of yourself when you look back at what you have done?
Try to separate yourself from the problem. Pretend, for one moment, it is the problem of the person you msot admire. Ask yoursel how that person would handle it.
Hold up the decision to the glaring light of publicity. Would you want your family and friends to know what you have done? The decisions we make in the hope that no one will find out are usually wrong.
--Dr. Preston Bradley paraphrasing of Harry Emerson Fosdick's six point test for deciding right from wrong, quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 166
. . . I find it necessary to describe an old nemesis of mine -- a creature who's been running around loose on Plante Earth over the millennia, steadily increasing in number. He is the Absolute Moralist. His mission in life is to whip you and me into line. Like Satan, he disguises himeslf in various human forms. He may appear as a politician on one occasion, next as a minister, and still later as your mother-in-law.
Whatever his disguies, he is relentless. He'll talk you to your grave if you let him. If he senses that you're one of his prey -- that you do not base your actions on rational self-choice -- he'll punish you unmercifully. He will make guilt your bedfellow until you're convinced you're a bad guy.
The Absolute Moralist is the creature -- looking deceptively like any ordinary human being -- who spends his life deciding what is right for you. If he gives to charity, he'll try to shame you into "understanding" that it's your moral duty to give to charity too (usually the charity of his choice). If he believes in Christ, he's certain that it's his moral duty to help you "see the light." (In the most extreme cases, he may even feel morally obliged to kill you in order to "save" you
from your disbelief.) If he doesn't smoke or drink, it takes little effort for him "logically" to conclude that smoking and drinking are wrong for you. In essence, all he wants is to run your life. There is only one thing which can frustrate him into leaving you alone, and this is your firm decision never to allow him to impose his beliefs on you.
--Robert J Ringer, Looking Out For Number One, 1977, quoted in Constructing A Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 211-212
What I call a yes church has some special characteristiecs that separate it from the extremes. Among them are the following:
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I had intended to write this book anonymously, using my prison number only. But when the manuscript was completed, I saw that as an anonymous publication it would lose half its value, and that I must have the courage to state my convictions openly.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 20
In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as "delusion of reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 23
The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many others. From personal convictions [...] I made myself a firm promise, on my first evening in camp, that I would not "run into the wire." This was a phrase used in camp to describe the most popular method of suicide -- touching the electrically
charged barbed-wire fence. It was not entirely difficult for me to make this decision. There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectation, calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor. He could not with any asurance expect to be among the small percentage of men who survived all the selections. The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the
first few days -- after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 31
I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleeep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deleria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be
as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 41
[...] for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I uderstood how a man who has nothing left in this wolrd still may know bliss, be it only for a
brief moment, in the contemplation of his bleoved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievemnt may consist in enduring his suffereings in the right way -- an honorable way -- in such a position man can, through living contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an
infinite glory."
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 49
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 49
The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 55
In attempting this psychological and a psychopathological explanation of the typical characteristics of a concentration camp inmate, I may give the impression that the human being is completely and unavoidably influenced by his surroundings. [...] But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors -- be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoner's reaction to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?
We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 74
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 75
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg ?
Let me cite the case of Dr. J. He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure. At that time he was generally called "the mass murderer of Steinhof" (the large mental hospital in Vienna). When the Nazis started their euthenasia program, he held all the strings in his hands and was so fanatic in the job assigned to him that he tried not to let one single psychotic individual escape the gas chamber. After the war, when I came back to Vienna, I asked what had happened to Dr. J. "He had been imprisoned by the Russians in one of the isolation cells of Steinhof," they told me. "The next day, however, the door of his cell stood open and Dr. J. was never seen again." Later I was convinced that, like others, he had with the help of his comrades made his way to South America. More recently, however, I was consulted by a former Austrian diplomat who had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for many years, first in Siberia and then in the famous Lubianka prison in Moscow. While I was examining him neurologically, he suddenly asked me whether I happened to know Dr. J. After my affirmative reply he continued: "I made his acquaintance in Lubianka. There he died, at about the age of forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder. Before he died, however, he showed himself to be the best comrade you can imagine! He gave consolation to everybody. He lived up to the highest conceivable moral standard. He was the best friend I ev er met during my long years in prison!" This is the story of Dr. J., "the mass murderer of Steinhof."
How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may pedict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanism of "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 133/134
Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommended that the Statue of liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust
Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 133/134
The Psychiatric Credo:
There is nothing conceivable which would so condition a man as to leave him without the slightest freedom. Therefore, a residue of freedom, however limited it may be, is left to man in neurotic and even psychotic cases. Indeed, the innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis.
An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 134/135
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each others, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes --- within the limits of endowment and environments -- he has made out of himself. In the concentrations camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Ysrael on his lips.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 135/136
You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to "saints." Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 154
So, let us be alert -- alert in a two fold sense:
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor, Man's Search For Meaning, pg 154
What is to give light must endure burning.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor (1905-1997)
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
--Viktor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor (1905-1997)
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
All definitions are arbitrary when speaking of the functions of the human mind, in part because the components of conceptual thought are interdependent and overlapping. It is difficult to define intelligence, imagination, perception, anticipation, reasoning, problem-solving, analysis, calculation, dreaming, projection, conception, questioning, doubting, symbolization, and language without recognizing that each term may be simply a synonym for another, or that aech one somehow uses the others,
and may depend on that capacity for its expression and realization.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 27
The capacity to symbolize allows us to see the essential similarities among seemingly unlike things: to relate the ant to the elepahant in the community of animals; to relate oxygen and iron in a periodic table of elements. It also allows us to visualize in abstraction the concrete representations of the thing itself. This aspect of symbolization is observed in the most sparkling example -- human language.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 27
All sorts of animals communicate with one another: insects, fish, birds, herding animals, and primates. But do they converse with one another? Noam Chomsky has pointed out that every animal communication system that is known consists of a very fixed and limited number or responses which are essentially signals directly related to specific behavior. Human language is not "characteristically informative," to use Chomsky's term. We can, perverse and wily creatures that we are, speak to
intentionally misinform. In addition, our speech may be totally unrelated to anticipated actions or real events. In other words, there are human but no animal storytellers in either sense of that phrase, neither entertainers nor liars.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 28
Animal activities that seem imaginative, brilliant, or intelligent are none of these. The organized behavior of insects is fixed by instinct, not by choice, and the stupid mechanical quality of such behavior can be revealed by its lethal persistence even when environmental conditions have changed, making the formerly life-supportive behavior deadly. The insect, whose behavior seems so efficient, so rational, so purposeful, cannot make a minor change to accommodate to a life-threatening change in the environment.
Even the "tool-making" monkey, prying the termites out of the rotting log with his bent stick, attests to the difference between humankind and the animals. The monkey's tool is discovered, not created, nor will it ever be improved upon. A million generations of monkeys will never create an iron probe. And, like the communications of all animals, the tool is survival-oriented. How does this activity relate -- in any significant way -- to the creation of the telescope? what bizarre "animal"
expends the energy for such an abstract and nonutilitarian purpose as examining the stars? Perhaps the investigation of the heavens was, indeed, originally utilitarian -- driven by our need to understand the nature of God. Then the question may be restated: what bizarre "animal" has the need or the capacity to discover theology and cosmology?
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 33
This primal pair, in selecting knowledge over safety, chose the risks of autonomy over the security and restriction of dependency. By so doing they also assumed responsibility for their own completion. They becaume parents to themselves. Each human being is constructed in such a way that as an infant it will be born incomplete, awaiting the impact of the parent-controlled environment to determine whether it will develop into a fully mature human being or something less.
Thinking people, scientific people, creative, relating, and loving people could all have existed before the Fall. The moral human being certainly, but also the complex psychological human being that occupies this latter half of the twentieth century is the progeny of parents transformed by autonomy exercised against authority.
[...]
Now, here is a couple with whom we can identify. We know these inquiring, defiant, ambitious, inquisitive -- and ultimately confused -- people, the mother and father of us all. Ashamed, frightened, guilty, expecting punishment they know they deserve; whining, blaming each other -- she did it, he did it, they did it, it wasn't I. In all of these we recognize the child that we once were and the child that remains within us always. It is not difficult to read the story of Adam and Eve as the
story of development from the innocence of childhood to the guilt of adulthood -- from dependency to responsibility.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 48-49
There is nothing in lower animals equivalent to the freedom of will of the human being. There is nothing that can mitigate the command of instinct. "Instinct," Kant has said, is "that voice of God that is obeyed by all animals." By Kant's definition, the human being is not an animal, for we are constantly disobeying.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 50
Unrestricted personal liberty has rarely been offered as an ideal for social living by an intelligent thinker. From the dialogues of Plato the the last decisions fo the Supreme Court, one can see debates that will pit the autonomous rights of the individual against the public interest.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 64
Freedom and control are not a moral polarity in which one represents good and the other bad. The entire social structure is built on the right and need of society to control -- indeed, coerce -- certain behavior. Organized religions, organized morality, codified ethics, style and fashion, public education, civil law, constitutional law, criminal procedures all operate within a whole range or explicit and implicit control mechanisms.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 64
With the advent of the single-parent household (often a euphemism for the nonparent household) and the financial need for two working parents in those families that are still intact, there is pressure for earlier and earlier child-care programs. Children a year of age or younger are kept collectively under the tutelage of professional help for as long for as long as eight hours a day. In a family setting, where the ratio of caretaker to child is small, the power of identificaiton and
personality devlopment through role modeling is enormous. The average child will pick up his character traits wholesale through emulation. He is more likely to become the parent, rather than what the parent instructs him to beome. Heterogeneity, that bete noire of the engineers, will be encouraged. In institutions, things are different; conditioning is more cost-effeicient.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 66-67
A crucial fact to keep in mind when considering early "education" is the pasticity that exists in early life. In changing behavior, age is a lever that becomes progressivey shorter. At birth, the inchoate child is all potential, awaiting and demanding modeling into behavior patterns; the arm of the lever is extraordinarily ong. With a proper fulcrum and the proper positions, Archimedes said he could move the world. The parent has that fulcrum and that position, particularly in the first few
years of life.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 67
One other obstacle that seems insurmountable when contemplating either an engineered individual or an engineered society is the nature of the design. In order to proceed to build a person, one must first construct a model, a pattern of correctness or normality. The attempt to define has been one of the conspicuous failures in psychiatry. The nature of virtue has not even been considered. what characteristics shall we include in our design, and who shall be the people to decide.
--Willard
Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 68
The attribute of human behavior that must be most scrupulously respected is the mutability of our nature, our freedom from instinctual fixation. Although we may modify certain behavior, we must not try to produce a human machine -- machines rapidly become obsolete. Nor should we compensate for nature's gift of autonnomy by imposing a developmentally induced predictability. We must not look with envy at the order and stability of the insects. We could not endure the life of the ant. Nineteen
eighty-four has come and gone -- many times. It has never produce a stable, let along a happy, society.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 69
All power has the potential for corruption. We have in the past used some of our powers unwisely and unwell. The capacity to do evil is a risk of freedom, but it is also a component of a definition of the good. If we sacrifice that freedom, that special capacity to look to the stars, we may cease to be a species worth saving.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 70
Human autonomy is dangerous stuff, but it is the very stuff of humanhood. The abandonment of security for freedom was the choice and the heritage of Adam and Eve.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 71
There is a positive reinforcement that encourages us to sacrifice our selfish needs for a common culture- or species-survivial service. Life, for the human being, is more than the avoidance of danger. We are reward seekers. And, unlike the lesser creatures, the beasts of the field, we seek rewards that are not just the nutirents supporting our own individual biological survival. We are created as aspirers. We crave achievement, mastery, and purpose, because they are the stuff that extends the
meaning of human survival beyond the mere perpetuation of the biological shell There is a unique experience of pleasure in peformance, and pleasure in doing good, that is in its way the ultimate driving force for noble behavior. That is the experience of pride.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 91-92
All human sexuality, like all human behavior, is shaped by emotion and imagination, by fantasy as well as reality. Only in animals and int animalistic behavior os such aberrant people as rapists does one see pure sexual drive unadulterated by other sensibilities. With the rapist, sex may be totally separated from affection or knowledge of the other person. But even here one may be surprised. Careful sudy of rapists shows that sex is frequently a secondary factor in the attack. Rage and fear
of women may motivate the rapist more than lust.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 119
The biological evidence is not incontrovertable: human children, with their prolonged dedependcy period, require caring and an extended commitment of time and energy beyond parallel in the animal kingdom. The propensit for such caring is part of the genetic endowment of our species. There is no evidence that the care muts be provide by a woman rather than a man, or that a biological parent is required to nourish children. But huamn children need caring, not just caretaking.
--Willard
Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 146-147
Death is something that happens to flowers, pets, and old people. The concept of death does not exist for the child. I am not sure that it does for the adult.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 148
The human being is not a hothouse flower that requires pefect conditions and a model set of parents to survive and grow up human. It is tough to be a parent, but we are allowed plenty of mistakes, and we all make mistakes. The idiosycracies of the parents, the proportion of affection and approval to punishment and rejections, the conditions that elicit pleasure or anger -- all will vary with the personalities and culturally induced values of the parents. Children treated differently will emerge
as different adults. "Different" does not mean either "better" or "worse." Different is good as long as it falls within the generously broad range that we define as "normal." Human variability is unparalleled in the animal kingdom, and human children will flourish in a diverse range of settings.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 153
One feature that distinguishes the life of the adult from that of the hcild is the central role of work. Adults work. We spend massive amounts of time at our jobs. Yet our undertanding to of the nature of work -- beyond its necessity -- is minimal and contradictory. How is one to explain the paradoxes and dilemmas that surround work? Why is work conceived of as an alterantive to play? Why is work seen as both the burden and the privilege of our species? Why is work so joyless in our modern
culture? Is work an essential part of the nature of the human being, or only an inevitable development of a technological and consumerist society?
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 155-156
Even with the lowest form of work, our culture had so conditioned the population, particularly the male segment, to equate pride and work that the loss of a job was not merely a financial blow but a blow to self-respect. During the recession of the 1970s, television screens were filled with poignant pictures of unemployed mine and mill workers suddenly finding themselves unneeded and useless in industries that were under assault from more cost-efficient cultures.
Our culture does not, for the most part, allow people to starve; unemployment isnurance, welfare aids, and various benevolent institutions of government guaranteed that the unemployed laborer and his wife and children would not go hungry. It was not a matter of hunger, but of pride -- a matter of what work meant, and therefore what it meant to be without it. The sense of despair and humiliation in the eyes of the blue-collar workers will not easily be forgotten by those of us who publicly viewed their shame.
It was not that their employment was so joyous. Their labor was for the most part miserable. It was mining coal in the hills of Kentucky and stoking fires in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. This is work; this is labor. There is no joy or pride, only sweat and toil, backbreaking lavor, and risk to health. Yet the man was supposed to be a provider, to "bring home the bacon." It did not matter whether there was bacon in the house independent of his work -- it was his job to supply food for his
family. His pride, and beyond that his identity, were involved in his bringing home the bacon. Unemployment actually relieved these men of heavy burdens, but as they percieved reality, it was depriving them of their manhood.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 168-169
Given a choice of being an assembly-line worker -- beyond the assembly-line worker, a pediatrician who spends his entrie day doing nothing but examining well babies with an occasional child in need of a stander remedy of antibiotics -- I would much rather be a mother than a pediatrician. Provided -- and what a proviso this is -- that it paid the same, that it commanded the same respect and honor, that it endowed on with the same power. In the early days of the feminist revolution,
women assumed that there was something noble about men's work and wanted their share of the marketplace. But the intellectuals who led the feminist revolution were thinking of jobs that they could achieve -- to be senators, judges, editors of magazines, surgeons. The average man is working in the mill, or the mine, or sorting envelopes in the post office. It is this markeplace that women would be working. The irony remains with their final freedom women are free to enter an area that has
been depleted of joy for most.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 171-172
The human capacity for philosophizing has led to a rich literature that attempts to define the right and wrong and to understand principles of morality that might be useful in guiding human behavior. I have lied in academia long enough to be aware that "moral sophistication" and "morality" are regrettably not synonymous terms. The Hastings Center is an interdisciplinary research organization devoted to ethical and policy questions emerging from the fields of biology, medicine, and health. We
all work together there: biologists, lawyers, philosophers, physicians, historians, theologians, economists, and sociologists. One would expect the moral philosopher to be the most sophisticated, in both analysis and argument, in distinguishing right from wrong. Often, but not always, this is the case, I have seen no evidence, however, that the moral philosophers are in any way morally superior to those less knowledgeable about the nature of ethics. Knowledge and conduct are unfortunately
independent functions of human experience. We are less rational than we like to believe. Knowledge of right and wrong is less likely to deterine moral behavior thatn to rationaize our behavior after the fact.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 178
I am aware of historic studies indicating that in some societies, and at various times, children were not highly valued. The concclusions that are drawn from this seem patently erroneous. Authors go on to assume the value of the child is a recent disocvery, rather than recognizing that societies that places so little value on the life of a child were societies in which the majority would die. The causal acceptance of death, the embracing of a religion ennobling the afterlife, and the apparent
stoicism were simply defenses against the inevitable. The death of a child represents the ultimate pain and sacrifice in the religions and the mythologies of diverse peoples across too many cultures and too many time periods to be considered other than a universal feeling of the species.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 215
Although we can change our nature in glorious and unpredictable ways there are limits to such change. We must be sure that we modify ourselves in such a way as to enhance our survival and, beyond that, our humanness. For what do we gain if we succumb to a tyranny of survival that is indifferent to the nature of the creautre that survives? If what survies is devoid of feeling, imagination, and love, it is not worhty of the name Homo Sapiens.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and
Pinnochio, pg 255-256
We who believe in freedom must walk a perious path. We encourage the emergence of an adult -- by the way we indoctrinate the child -- who will, guided through conscience and identificatoin. "choose" to do good and eschw evil, yet an individual not so constricted and obsessive that he cannot recongize conditions in which he may feel obliged to change or defy his own rules. That is no mean feat.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 256
To respect others, one must respect oneself. To respect oneself, one must feel respect by others. If our only goal were obeedience to law, that could conceivably be established through fear and terror, but, given the current state of our society, it would have to be at such an extreme that the society would be a nightmare not worthy of preservation. The social order is best protected by citizens who care, who see their environment as part of themselves, and who can see a future of hope. We
must find ways of creating a community with which all can identify.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 253
We have too often concerned ourselves dispropotonately with the civil liberties of the individual, ignoring in the process the biological needs of the individual. Central to those needs is a recognition of the Aristotelian verity that we are social animals through and through. If you protect the individual and degrade the community, you will destroy the individual, whose very existence as a human being demands community. A bloated concept of individualism is our greatest danger these days.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 264
The glory of Western democracy rested in rspect for the individual. Who would not prefer the excesses of individualism to the corruption of the overvalued community or state as represented by the almost indistinguishable totalitarian Leviathans of moder fascism and communism? But rampant individualism is becoming the horns of the [Irish] elk. We have created an artifact, the isolated self, that does not exist in biological truth. In the service of this isolated self, we have seen a
deterioration of the concept of pleasure and a reduction of joy to the most primitive hedonistic level, a passive model of immediate and effortless gratification free of pain, immersion, or commitment. We have enshrined the quick fix. Crack is not only the actual poison that is contaminating our urban environments, but the ultimate metaphor for a society that overvalues the individual moment and the individual self.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 264
In the service of this isolated self, we have seen a vulgariation of the concept of rights and an abandonment of a commitment to duty, respect, and responsibility to the larger group. In the name of autonomy, we have made paternalism a sin, and all beneficence suspect. Not only are the mentally ill permitted to freeze to death in the streets, but this is argued before the courts to be a privilege of their autonomy. One would expect as sophisticated an organization as the American Civil
Liberties Union to understand the relationship between true autonomy and cognitive capacities. A paternalistic protection of those who temporarily, or permanently (the organically senile), are incapable of determining their own self-interest is an act of decency, not arrogance. It is our moral duty. Such care should be seen as our ethical responsibility, but responsibility and duty are undervalued currencies in the current social marketplace.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and
Pinnochio, pg 264-265
In defence of our individualism, we have mitigatd our commitment ot marriage in the interests of sexual freedom and pleasure. We Hve invented the loveless and rootless life of the unattached and uncommitted, for the sake of freedom and "fun." But we have trivialized sexuality to a degree that no lower animal could possibly imagine or effect. Animals, after all, are controlled by their biology; we, only by our sensibilities. The promiscuity and vulgarization of sex have led to some of the most
profound social problems of our day: teenage pregnancy is on the increase; venereal disease, once thought to be near eradication in the Western democracies, is now once again on the rise; added to the traditioanl scourges of syphilis and gonorrhea, we have rampant epidemics of gential hepes, chlamydia, and now AIDS. We have made a tragic nightmare of modern sexuality. And it isn't all that much fun.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 266
The reasons for despair seem obvious, the reasons for hope less so. Look around, and the world seems a mess. But it is neither the best of times nor the worst of times. Violence, burualiyt, hunger, injustice, gibtory, war, personal abuse, inequeity exist in our gerneration as they have in all preceding generations. One suspects they exist less now, but takes little comfort from the fact.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 266-257
When Periclean Greece and Imperial Rome talked about the destruction of civilization, they narcissistically referred to their small corner of the world. We are now one small world, and we will rapidly become even smaller.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 268
If there is nobility in our world, it is the presence and consciousness of people that conceptualize that nobility, and thereby creates it.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 269
From the moment we left the Garden and stepped into that unpredictable world east of Eden we were embarked on a unique journey, fraught with danger and immersed in pain, but a journey that only our species was capable of undertaking. We were privileged to abid in the Garden, but we are equally priviliged in our journey from it. We are, in the words of T.H. White, both the once and the future king. We are born underdeveloped, and will remain that way all of our lives, but only this "eternal
embryo," the human being, always remains "potential" in the image of God.
--Willard Gaylin M.D., Adam and Eve and Pinnochio, pg 270-271
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded? Why, as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were soaring? How did it come about that by mid-decade 62 percent of us described ourselves as "truly desperate" about crime -- almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime rates were higher? Why on a survey in 1997, when the crime rate had already fallen for a half dozen consecutive years, did more than half of us disagree with
the statement "This country is finally beginning to make some progress in solving the crime problem"?
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xi
Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xi
We have managed to convince ourselves that just about every young American male is a potential mass murderer -- a remarkable achievement, considering the steep downward trend in youth crime throughout the 1990s. Faced year after year with comforting statistics, we either ignore them -- adult Americans estimate that people under eighteen commit about half of all violent crimes when the actual number is 13 percent -- or recast them as "The Lull Before the Storm" (Newsweek headline). "We
know that we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around or our country is going to be living with chaos," Bill Clinton asserted in 1997, even while acknowledging that the youth violent crime rate had fallen 9.2 percent the previous year.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xiv
The more things improve the more pessimistic we become.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xiv
We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us. Valid fears have their place; they cue us to danger. False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xv
Even concerns about real dangers, when blown out of proportion, do demonstrable harm.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xvi
We all pay one of the costs of panics: huge sums of money go to waste. Hysteria over the ritual abuse of children cost billions of dollars in police investigations, trials, and imprisonments. Men and woment went to jail for years "on the basis of some the most fantastic claims ever presented to an American jury," as Dorothy Rabinowitz [...] demonstrated in a series of investigative articles [...]. Across the nation expensive surveillance programs were implemented to protect children from
fiends who reside primarily in the imaginations of adults.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xvii
The price tag for our panic about overall crime has grown so monumental that even law-and-order zealots find it hard to defend. The criminal justice system costs Americans close to $100 billion a year, most of which goes to police and prisons. In California we spend more on jails than on higher education. Yet increases in the number of police and prison cells do not correlate consistently with reduction in the number of serious crimes committed. Criminologists who study reductions in homicide rates, for instance, find little difference between cities that subtantially expand their police forces and prison capacity and others that do not.
The turnabout in domestic public spending over the past quarter century, from child welfare and antipoverty programs to incarceration, did not even produce reductions in fear of crime. Increasing the number of cops and jails arguably has the oppostie effect: it suggests that the crime problem is all the more out of control.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xvii
Panic-driven public spending generates over the long term a pathology akin to one found in drug addicts. The more money and attention we fritter away on our compulsions, the less we have available for our real needs, which consequently grow larger.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xvii
I do not contend, as did President Roosevelt in 1933, that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." My point is that we often fear the wrong things.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xvii-xviii
One of the paradoxes of a culture of fear is that serious problems remain widely ignored even though they give rise to precisely the dangers that the populace most abhors.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xviii
Disproportionate coverage in the news media plainly has effects on readers and viewers. When Esther Mardriz, a professor at Hunter College, interviewed some women in New York City about their fears of crime they frequently responded with the phrase "I saw it in the news." The interviewees identified the news media as both the source of their fears and the reason they believed those fears were valid. [...]
When professor Robert Blendon and John Young of Harvard analyzed forty-seven surveys about drug abuse conducted between 1978 and 1998, they too discovered that the news media, rather than personal experience, provide Americans with their predominant fears. Eight out of ten adults say that drug abuse has never caused problems in their family, and the vast majority report relatively little direct experience with problems related to drug abuse. Widespread concern about drug problems emanates,
Blendon and Young determined, from scares in the news media, television in particular.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxi
Television news programs survive on scares. On local newscasts, where producers live by the dictum "if it bleeds, it leads," drug, crime, and disaster stories make up most of the news portion of the broadcasts. Evening newscasts on the major networks are somewhat less bloody, but between 1990 and 1998, when the nation's murder rate declined by 20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600 percent (not counting stories about O.J. Simpson).
--Barry
Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxi
Any analysis of the culture of fear that ignored the news media would be patently incomplete, and of the several institutions most culpable for creating and sustaining scares the new media are arguably first among equals. They are also the most promising candidates for positive change. Yet by the same token critiques such as [Sheryl] Stolberg's presage a crucial shortcoming in arguments that blame the media. Reporters not only spread fears, they also debunk them and criticize one another for
spooking the public. News organizations are distinquished from other fear-mongering groups because they sometimes bite the scare that feeds them.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxii-xxiii
To blame the media is to oversimplify the complex role that journalists play as both proponents and doubters of popular fears. It is also to beg the same key issue that the millennium hypothesis evades: why particular anxieties take hold when they do. Why do news organizations and their audiences find themselves drawn to one hazard rather than another?
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxvi
From a psychological point of view extreme fear and outrage are often projections. Consider, for example, the panic over violence against children. By failing to provide adequate education, nutrition, housing, parenting, medical services, and child care over the past couple of decades we have done the nation's children immense harm. Yet we project our guilt onto a cavalcade of bogeypeople -- pedophile preschool teachers, preteen mass murderers, and homicidal au pairs, to name only a few.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxvi-xxvii
Diverse groups used the ritual-abuse scares to diverse ends. Well-known feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Catherine MacKinnon took up the cause, depicting ritually abused children as living proof of the ravages of patriarchy and the need for fundamental social reforms.
This was far from the only time feminist spokeswomen have mongered fears about sinister breeds of men who exist in nowhere near the high numbers they allege. Another example occurred a few years ago when teen pregnancy was much in the news. Feminists helped popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two out of three teen mothers had been seduced and abandoned by adult men. The true figure is more like one in ten, but some feminists continued to cultivate the scare well after the
bogus statistic was definitively debunked.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxvii
Within public discourse fears proliferate through a process of exchange. It is from crosscurrents of scares and counterscares that the culture of fear swells ever larger.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxviii
The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxviii
People who got chastised as PC were trying to create a more respectful and inclusive environment on campuses for groups that largely had been excluded -- a goal that conservatives could not attack head-on lest they lose the already limited support they had in minority communites. Besides, far from being First Amendment absolutists themselves, many conservatives eagerly support restraints on a range of behaviors, from flag burning to the display of homerotic art. So rather than engage in
honest debate with campus liberals and progressives, conservatives labeled them "politically correct". Much the same way their forebears had used the epithet "Communist" a few decades earlier, conservatives of the 1990s accused their enemies of being PC.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 10
The PC scare demonstrates how an orchestrated harangue can drown out a chorus of genuine concern. Faculty and student would raise questions about inequities at their schools only to find themselves made into causes celebres of the anti-PC fear mongering.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 12-13
Once a pseudodanger becomes so familiar it ends up in the dictionary [...], argument and evidence are dispensable.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 14
Some antiabortion activists had been pushing the point [about the ABC link] since the early 1980s, when it first became apparent that as the number of abortions rose in the years after 1973, when the procedure became legal, rates of breast cancer also increased. Not until 1994, however, did the news media pay much attention to prolifers' fear mongering. That year, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published an article in which researchers estimated that having an abortion might raise a woman's risk breast cancer by 50 percent.
To their credit, journalist were circumspect about the study. In contrast to coverage of some other pseudodangers [...], the news media generally did an excellent job of putting in perspective the 50 percent figure. Reporters noted that other studies had found no increased risk, and that even if future research confirmed the figure, the import would be minimal for most women considering abortion. A 50 percent increased risk may sound large, but in epidemiologic terms it is not. It does not
mean that if all women had abortions, half again as many would develop breast cancer; rather, it means that a woman's lifetime risk goes up by 50 percent. If she had a 10 percent probability of developing breast cancer, abortion would raise it to 15 percent. Heavy smoking, by comparison, increases the risk of developing lung cancer by 3,000 percent. Some studies suggest that living in a city or drinking one glass of alcohol a day raises the risk of breast cancer by greater than 50 percent.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 17-18
From the viewpoint of journalists and editors an ideal crime story -- that is, the sort that deserves major play and is sure to hold readers' and viewers' attention -- has several elements that distinquish it from other acts of violence. The victims are innocent, likable people; the perpetrator is an uncaring brute. Details of the crime, while shocking, are easy to relay. And the events have social significance, bespeaking an underlying societal crisis.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of
Fear, pg 24
If the news media merely got the facts wrong about an occasional homicide, that would be no big deal. But the significance they attach to many of the homicides and other violent crimes they choose to spotlight is another matter. The streets of America are not more dangerous than a war zone, and the media should not convey that they are.
Some places journalists have declared crime ridden are actually quite safe.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 26
A report on NBC News in 1977 let it be know that "as many as two million American younsters are involved in the fast-growing, multimillion dollar child-pornography business" -- a statement that subsequent research by criminologists and law enforcement authorities determined to be wrong on every count. Kiddie porn probably grossed less than $1 million a year (in contrast to the multibillion dollar adult industry), and hundreds, not millions of American children were involved. Once again, facts
were beside the point. The child pornographer represented, as columnist Ellen Goodman observed at the time, an "unequivocal villain" whom reporters and readers found "refresingly uncomplicated." Unlike other pornographers, whose exploits raise tricky First Amendment issues, child pornographers made for good, simple, attention grabbing copy.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 32
In more recent years child-pornographers and pedophiles have come in handy for fear mongering about the latest variety of baby-sitter: the Internet. In the 1990s politicians and the news media have made much of the existence of pedophilia in cyberspace. [...]
This time the panic did not rely so much on suspicious statistics as on peculiar logic. With few cases of youngsters having been photographed or attacked by people who located them on-line, fear mongers found it more convenient simply to presume that "as the number of children who use the Internet continues to boom . . . pornography and pedophilia grow along with it."
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 33
In my review of news stories about crimes against children I have been struck by the frequency with which journalists draw unsubstantiated conclusions about the pedophilic tendencies of individuals and whole classes of people.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 38
Homophobia is a recurring element in journalists' coverage of mass murderers. Research by Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University, shows that the media routinely emphasize the supposed homosexuality and pedophilia of men who commit multiple murders.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 39
One recent study published in the medical journal Pediatrics indicates that a child is about a hundred times more likely to be molested by the heterosexual partner of a close relative than by a homosexual. Other research finds that many of the men who molest children not only are not gay, they despise gays. In failing to make note of such research in articles where they represent men like Thomas Hamilton as gay predophiles, journalists do more than misguide those who read or watch
their reports; they feed right-wing groups with material that is then used in interviews with the press and in membership solitications as evidence that gays "seduce our children," as Lou Sheldon put it in a solicitation mailing for his Traditional Values Coalition.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 40
[Recent to 1999. --MN]
In a discerning op-ed piece in the New York Times author Patrick Cooke made a parallel observation: If young Americans have seen tens of thousands of murders on TV, surely, he commented, they have seen even more acts of kindness. On sitcoms, romantic comedies, moveins of the week, soaps, medical dramas, and even on police shows, people are constantly falling in love and hleping each other out. The characters on most prime-time shows "share so much peace, tolerance and understanding
that you might even call it gratuitous harmony," Cooke observes. Why not conclude, he asks, that TV encourages niceness at least as much as violence?
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 42-43
One widely quoted researcher who had made cross-national comparisons is Brandon Centerwall, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington, who has estimated that there would be 10,000 fewer murders each year in the United States and 700,000 had TV never been invented. Centerwall has based these number on an analysis of crime rates before and after the introduction of television in particular towns in Canada and South Africa. But what about present-time comparisons? David Horowitz,
head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a conservative advocacy organization, correctly points out that viewers in Detroit, Michigan, see the same TV shows as viewers in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river. Yet the murder rate in Detroit has been thirty times that in Windsor.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 43
Some of the most seemingly persuasive studies relate what people watched as children to how aggressive or violent they are as adults. A heavy diet of TV brutality early in life correlates with violent behavior later on, the researchers demonstrate. Whether these correlation truly prove that TV violence provokes actual violence has been questioned, however, by social scientists who propose a counterhypothesis that people already predisposed to violence are particularly attracted to violent TV
programs. Equally important when researchers outside the United States try to replicate these studies they come up empty-handed.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 43
The Times at least gave some scarey-sounding statistics in its story about suicide: the incidence of teen and young adult suicides nearly tripled between 1952 and 1992, to 1,847 in 1992.
Those numbers can be read, however, in an considerably less alarmist way. At the conclusion of a forty-year period during which increased in the divorce and poverty rates, decreases in investment in education and counselling services, and the advent of AIDS put more stress than ever on American adolescents, about 1 in 10,000 saw fit to end his or her life. I do not want to minimize the tragic loss, but the numbers pale beside statistics for other threats faced by teens. One in nine goes
hungry for some part of each month, for instance, and the number of hungry young Americans increased by half between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 54
As much as the media and politicians would have us believe otherwise, most American children are not in imminent danger from the overhyped hazards of our age. Researchers have a good idea of what truly puts kids at greater risk. In the case of suicide, for instance, nine out ten teens who kill themselves are clinically depressed, abusing drugs or alcohol, or coping with severe family traumas.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 55
"Sociologist are alarmed by studies saying teenagers are four times as likely to gamble as adults," the Christian Science Monitor reported. A sociologist myself, I have to confess that I have never experienced that sense of alarm nor heard it expressed by colleagues. The statistic rings untrue, conjuring up as it does images of clandestine casinos in the basements of high schoos, with boys whose voices have yet to change serving as croupiers. Actual studies show that the vast majority of kids who gamble engage in nothing more serious than buying Lotto tickets or betting on the Super Bowl with their pals. Kids who do become problem gamblers almost always have other problems, drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, depression, and relationship troubles being the most common. Among the best predictors is having parents who gamble heavily.
Sue Fisher, a British sociologist, studied teens who gamble obsessively and learned that their compulsion was a response to other problems such as unwanted pregnancy or abusive parents. Often when their troubles eased, so did their gambling. Other heavy-gambling teens, Fisher discovered, are merely going through a routine stage in their transition to adulthood. They may appear "addicted" to gambling but actually they are rebelling or mimicking their parents. And once their rebellious period ends, they give up or greatly reduce their gambling.
You wouldn't know any of this from stories in the media.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 56
[Marty] Rimm's exclusivity agreement with Time ensured that true experts on computer networks could neither see nor comment on his study until the magazine hit the stands. As soon as these folks did get their hands on his paper, however, they pulverized it. Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, professors at Vanderbilt University, point out that by his own admission in his paper, of the 917,410 files Rimm says he found, only 3 percent actually contained potentially pronographic images. The images were not readily avialable to children in any event, because they were on bulletin boards that required membership fees. Of 11,576 World Wide Web sites Rimm examined -- cyberplaces children might actually visit -- only nine (.08 percent) contained material that Rimm considered R- or X-rated.
Another of Rimm's statistics included in the Time article had an impact beyond the pages of the magazine. "On those Usenet newsgroups where digitized images are stored, 83.5% of the pictures were pornographic," Time reported. Within days that figure got repeated throughout the media and by members of Congresss who were pushing a piece of legislation to censor the content of the Internet. Conservative groups such as Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and Gary Bauer's Family Research had a field day. The 83.5% figure became a mainstay in their solicitations mailings and speeches.
When critics got a look at Rimm's paper, however, they discovered that the 83.5 percent referred to the proportion of porn postings at just seventeen Usenet news groups. At the time of Rimm's study there were thousands of Usenet groups in existence.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 59-60
Without question every such incident is a horrible tragedy, but once again, kids are not equally at risk. Child molesters, both inside and outside families, tend to target vulnerable children: youngsters with disabilities and poor communications skills, troubled kids whose reports adults distrust, and children whose parents are absent or inattentive.
Most of these facts and figures have been known since 1985, when Diana Griego and Louis Kilzer published a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in the Denver Post and revealed that then-current estimates of missing children were largely fantasies of politicians who had seized on what one congressional aide called "the perfect apple pie issue."
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 61-62
The misbelief that every kid is in imminent risk of becoming a victim has as its corollary a still darker delusion: Any kid might become a victimizer. Beneath such headlines as "Life Means Nothing," "Wild in the Streets," and "'Superpredators' Arrive," The nation's news media have relayed tale upon blood-soaked tale of twelve and fourteen year olds pumping bullets into toddlers, retirees, parents, and one another. Armed with quotes from experts who assert, often in so many words, "everyone's kids are at risk," journalists stress that violent kids live not just in the South Bronx or South Central L.A., but in safe-seeming suburbs and small towns.
The news media seldom pay heed to the fact that in eight out of ten counties in the United States entire years go by without a single juvenile homicide.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 68
We adults have developed a pair of theories to justify both our fear of children and our maltreatment of them. One holds that the world is worse than it ever was. The other holds that some kids are just born defective.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 74
In support of the idea that the world is worse today than ever before much bogus evidence has been put forward. An example was a pair of lists, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal in 1992, comparing "top problems in the public schools as identified by the teachers" in 1940 and 1990. The main problems in 1940 were talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, wearing improper clothing, and not putting paper in wastebaskets. By 1990 the leading problems had become pregnancy, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, rape, robbery, and assault.
Barry O'Neill, a professor at Yale, revealed in 1994 in an exposé published by the New York Times that by the time the Journal printed the two lists they had already been in wide circulation. Passed around in fundamentalist Christian circles since the early 1980s, they first appeared in a national magazine in 1985 when Harper's published them as a curiosity piece. Two years later in his Newsweek column George Will printed the lists as factual, and they were quickly picked up by CBS news. [...]
The best O'Neill could determine, the original source for the later list of problems was a survey conducted in 1975 by the National Center for Education Statistics. That survey, which was of principals rather than teachers, asked about crimes, not general problems. When teachers have been asked about the biggest problems in their schools, they responded with items such as parent apathy, lack of financial support, absenteeism, fighting, and too few textbooks -- not rape and robbery. In
a nationwide survey in 1996 almost half of teachers said that textbook shortages prevented them from assigning homework; one in five reported that classroom disruptions had resulted from students being forced to share textbooks.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 75-76
Public schools are safer, studies show, than other locations where kids hang out, such as cars and homes. Attacks of all types against kids occur far more often away from schools than inside them. So do the bulk of non-crime related injuries and accidents, the exception being sports injuries, a majority of which are sustained at school.
Municipalities do not raise taxes, however, to buy state-of-the-art safety equipment for student athletes. They raise them to buy more surveillance cameras and metal detectors, and to station more police officers in schools.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 76
Parents who responded to these pitches [advertising private psychiatric centers] frequently were informed by psychiatrists that their children suffered from illnesses specific to adolescence that go by names like oppositional deficit disorder, conduct disorder, and adjustment reaction. Parents who took the time to look up these ailments in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual discovered that they are little more than fancy pseudonyms for adolescent rebellion -- or as the director of a patient's rights organization put it, "pain-in-the-ass kid." Based on the DSM, a child qualifies for the label "oppositional deficit disorder" and is a prime candidate for hospitalization if he or she often does any five of the following: argues with adults, defies adult's requests, does things that annoy others, loses his or her temper, becomes easily annoyed, acts spiteful, blames others for his or her own mistakes, gets angry and resentful, or swears.
How many of us made it out of adolescence without going through periods in which we acted like that?
Girls had an especially easy time qualifying for hospital admission; they didn't have to be mean and nasty, just sexually active.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 79
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s American welcomed every permissible excuse to avoid facing up to our collective lack of responsibility toward our nation's children. When Hillary Rodham Clinton's book It Takes A Village came out in 1996, she toured the country to urge better health care, day care, and nutrition for America's youth. What did media interviewers and audiences concentrate on? A dubious real-estate investment she was involved in years ealier, whether she fired members of the
White House travel office, and if her feminism made her a lousy First Lady.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 83
The causes of teen motherhood must be treated as distinct and powerful. Otherwise, it would make no sense to treat teen moms themselves as distinct and powerful -- America's "most serious social problem," as Bill Clinton called them [...].
In what may well qualify as the most sweeping, bipartisan, multimedia, multidisciplinary scapegoating operation of the late twentieth century, at various times over the past decade prominent liberals including Jesse Jackson, Joycelyn Elders, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and conservatives such as Dan Quayle and Bill Bennett all accused teen moms of destroying civilization. [...]
These claims are absurd on their face. An agglomeration of impoverished young women, whose collective wealth and influence would not add up to that of a single Fortune 100 company, do not have the capacity to destroy America.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 91
Early motherhood in itself does not condemn a girl to failure and dependency. Journalists put up astounding statistics such as "on average, only 5 percent of teen mothers get college degrees, compared with 47 percent of those who have children at twenty-five or older" [...]. yet the difference is attributable almost entirely to preexisting circumstances -- particularly poverty and poor educational opportunites and abilities. Studies that compare teen moms with other girls from similar
economic and educational backgrounds find only modest differences in education and income between the two populations over the long term.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 91
Another stereotype of adolescent mothers envisions them as invarably incapable of rearing healthy children. This one too has been conclusively refuted. Researchers document that teenagers having recently cared for younger siblings are sometimes more realistic in their expectations about parenthood than older parents, and more devoted to parenting as a primary endeavor. They tend to have more help than most of the public realizes because as a rule they live with parents or other relatives.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 92
Over the longer haul and out in the real world children of teenage mothers do appear to fare poorly compared with other children, thereby providing politicians and reporters with the oft-cited finding that 70 percent of men in prison were born to teenage mothers. The implication, however, that their mothers' age when they were born was the single or most important variable that caused them to end up in jail is iffy at best. When the children of teenage mothers are compared to the children of
older mothers from similar socioeconomic circumstances there is little difference between the two groups in outcomes such as criminalty, substance abuse, or dropping out of school.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 92-93
In addition to all the contemporary evidence contradicting their positions, those who would blame teen moms for the nation's social ills confront an awkward historical reality. The teenage birth rate reached its highest level in the 1950s, not the current era. Indeed, between 1991 and 1996 the rate declined by nearly 12 percent.
Demonizers of today's young mothers either ignore such facts, or when they cannot, direct the audience's attention away from them.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 93
Fear mongering about mothers directs attention away from fully half of American's parent population -- the fathers. Warning parallel to those about mother are nowhere to be found. Rarely do politicians and journalists warn about unwed dads [...]. On the contrary, wifeless fathers are practically revered.
[...]
In truth, the cursade against fatherlessness is but another surreptitious attack on single mothers. [...] However one phrases it, to insist that children are intrinsically better off with fathers regardless of who the fathers are or how they behave is to suggest that no single mother can adequately raise a child.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 95
Of the innumerable myths told about single mothers the most elementary is single status itself. In reality, many are single only temporarily or only in the legal sense. Two out of five women who are unmarried when their first child is born marry before the child's fifth birthday. One in four unwed mothers lives with a man, often with the child's father.
On occasion mothers portrayed as single do not qualify even on temporary or legal grounds.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 97
Like the elephant that vanishes behind clouds of smoke on the magician's stage, the larger cast of characters that give rise to child mistreatment are obscured amid melodramatic reporting about evil mothers. The coverage can leave the impression that it is not so much social policies or collective irresponsibility that endanger many children in this country but rather an overabundance of infanticidal women.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 101
Journalists, politicans, and other opinion leaders foster fears about particular groups of people both by what they play up and what they play down.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 109
Fear mongers project onto black men precisely what slavery, poverty, educational deprivation, and discrimination have ensured that they do have have -- great power and influence.
After two white boys opened fire on students and teachers at a schoolyard in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998 politicians, teachers, and assorted self-designated experts suggested -- with utter seriousness -- that black rap musicians had inspired one of them to commit the crime. [...] Never mind that, according to a minister who knew him, the Jonesboro lad also loved religious music and sang for elderly residents at local nursing homes. By the late 1990s the ruinous power of rap was so taken for
granted, people could blame rappers for almost any violent or misogynistic act anywhere.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 121
The hypocrisy of those who single out rap singers as especially sexist or violent was starkly -- and comically -- demonstrated in 1995, when presidential candidate Bob Dole denounced various rap albums and movies that he considered obscene and then recommended cerain films as wholesome, "friendly to the family" fare. Included among the latter was Arnold Schwarzenegger's True Lies, in which every major female character is called a "bitch." While in real life Arnold may be a virtuous
Republican, in the movie his wife strips, and he puts her through hell when he thinks she might be cheating on him. In one gratuitious scene she is humiliated and tortured for twenty minutes of screen time. Schwarzenegger's character also kills dozens of people in sequences more graphically violent than a rapper could describe with mere words.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 124
Why when white men kill, doesn't anyone do a J'accuse of Tennessee Ernie Ford or Johnny Cash, whose oddly violent classics are still played on country music stations? In "Sixteen Tons" Ford croons, "If you see me comin'/Better step aside/A lotta men didn't/A lotta men died," and in "Folsom Prison Blues" Cash crows, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." Yet no one has suggested, as journalists and politicians did about Shakur's and 2 Live Crew's lyrics, that these lines
overpower all the others in Ford's and Cash's songbooks.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 125
When Presidents and the Press Collude the Scares Never Stop
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 129, Chapter 6 subheading
Drug abuse is a serious problem that deserves serious public attention, But sensationalism rather than rationality has guided the national conversation. Misinformed about who uses drugs, which drugs people abuse, and with what results, we waste enormous sums of money and fail to address other social and personal problems effectively.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 131
[...] the availability heuristic. We judge how common or important a phenomenon is by how readily it comes to mind. Presented with a survey that asks about the relative importance of issues, we are likely to give top billing to whatver the media emphasizes at the moment, because that issue instantly comes to mind.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 133
As a sociologist I see the crack panic of the 1980s as a variation on an American tradition. At different times in our history drug scares have served to displace a class of brutalized citizens from the nation's moral conscience.
[...]
Similarly, in the 1980s as poverty, homelessness, and associated urban ills increased noticeably, Presidents Reagan and Bush [Sr.], along with much of the electorate, sidestepped the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens who had been harmed by policies favoring the wealthy. Rather than face up to their own culpability, they blamed a drug.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 135-136
Some journalist do make a point, of course, of combating exaggerations with facts. [...]
As a rule, though, reporters maximize claims about youthful drug abuse rather than contextualizing them. Most of the major media ran stories about a survey released in 1997 by a research center at Columbia University headed by Joseph Califano, the former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. There had been a huge increase in the use of hard drugs, several of the stories reported. Specifically, 23.5 percent of twelve-year olds (more than twice as many as the previous year) reported use
of cocaine, heroin, or LSD. In reality, the 23.5 percent figure represented the percentage of twelve-year olds who said the knew someone who used those drugs, not their own drug use. While most reporters did not conceal that the question had been asked this way, they called the survey "an urgent new alarm to address what many label a growing crisis" (CNN), [...].
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 142
Drug scares are promoted primarily by three means: presidential proclamations, selective statistics, and poster children. The first two posit a terrifying new trend, the last gives it a human face.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 143
Why would major news media dissemintate the speculations of a wannbe expert many months after he had been refuted by certified experts?
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 157
Upon landing at the Baltimore airport, as he taxied to the terminal, the pilot of my flight from Los Angeles announced: "The safest part of your journey is over. Drive home safely."
He was right. We stood a greater chance of being killed driving the few miles into Washington from the airport than in the 2,500-mile trip across the continent. In the entire history of commercial aviation, dating back to 1914, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Three times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile acccidents in a single year. The average person's probability of dying in an air crash is about 1 in 4 million, or roughly the same as winning the
jackpot in the state lottery.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 183
How do the news media minimize the excellent safety record of American's airlines? The same way discount appliance stores bring down prices on VCRs. It is a commonplace that retailers need not make a large profit per sale if they make a lot of sales. Likewise, reporters need not scare the daylights out of us in individual stories if they run lots of stories.
In the ValuJet crash [in the Everglades, Florida,] 110 people died. Yet USA Today alone ran more than 110 stories about the crash.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 195
Fear mongers make their scares all the more credible by backing up would-be experts assertions with testimonials from people the audience will find sympathetic.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 207
Statements of alarm by newscasters and glorification of wannabe experts are two telltale tricks of the fear mongers' trade. [...]
If journalists would curtail such practices, there would be fewer anxious and misinformed Americans.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg 208
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
It would be a mistake, however, to regard the Scientific revolution as leading directly to secularization. The leading scientists (Galileo and Isaac Newton, for example) were devout. Almost all scientists were at least conventional believers. Indeed, Newton thought that the laws of physics which he formulated made the existence of God more certain rather than less so, since only a Supreme Intelligence could have created such a marvellously ordered and rational universe.
The philosophers inspired by the new science, like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, took pains to protect religious belief from skeptical attack. Their very act of protecting it helped subtly to undermine it. They seemed to imply that faith could not withstand rational scrutiny and was primarily a matter of subjective choice.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 36
The philosophes (probably best translated as "intellectuals") were self-proclaimed apostles of an "Englightenment." This term implies the existence of prior darkness, largely the result of Christianity, which was equated with superstition and ignorance. In their mental world there was no room for mystery or the supernatural. Whatever could not be discovereed or proven rationally was false.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 37
The anti-religious sentiment to the Enlightenment was not solely a matter of ideas. Voltaire also often said about the Catholic Church, "Crush the infamous thing!" In all the Western societies, education was largely the responsibilty of the churches, and the churces, established by law, were highly influential. Thus the anti-Christian intellectuals also opposed the church as an institution and a social force. The statement "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your
right to say it," though often attributed to Voltaire, did not represent his views accurately. He was willing to use coercion against his intellectual enemies.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 39
As far back as the Reformation a few poeple had, for religious reasons, advocated complete religious toleration. Later, many people espoused limited religious toleration as a way of avoiding destructive civil wars. In the eighteenth century, the intellectuals began to advocate religious toleration as a matter of principle. Their motives were somewhat mixed. In part they urged religious toleration out of respect for individual conscience. In part, however, it was out of the conviction that all
religious beliefs were equally false and that all should be equally tolerated. Voltaire rejoiced that, in a socity where there were many religious groups, all of them would be weak.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 39
The French Revolution of 1789 accomplished many of the goals of the enlightenment, sweeping away by violence all of the social insitutions to which the intellectuals objected, including the church. Most of the leading philosophes were dead by then; the few still alive found that their ideas did not save them from prison or even execution. If they approved of many of the goals of the Revolution, they did not approve its methods. The had believed in reason, but the Revolution seemed to
be the triumph of violent passions and hatreds.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 40
If the Revolution was in one sense the fulfillment of the Enlightenment, it was in another sense its repudiation. It destroyed the philosophes' dream that, having given up religious authority, man could remake his life peacefully and tolerantly. Instead, discrediting all traditional authorities ushered in a period of near anarchy. During the so-called Reign of Terror, thousands of Frenchmen were summarily guillotined. Most of them were probably innocent of any crime, and few of them had been given even the semblance of a fair trial. The Terror, an orgy of hate and revenge, was strong disproof of the Enlightenment belief that man, left to himself, would inevitably behave in a rational and just way. The dark side of hman nature asserted itself with a literal vengeance in the mid-1790s.
The Terror was the first example of a familiar modern phenomenon: a movement to remake the world in the name of humanity gives birth to a murderous and destructive fanaticism. Every modern revolution has borne the same witness. It is one of the strongest arguments against total reliance on man and his goodwill. It has also given rise, among thoughtful people, to a strong distrust of all movements which proclaim that they have the welfare of "humanity" at heart. Time and again, this has meant the crushing of individual human being in the name of a political abstraction.
The facts of the revolutionary Terror are well-known, yet their implications have not been widely recognized. Secular Humanists have often manipulated public opinion in their favor by charging that religion has a history of bloody persecution. When they want to invoke the specter of murderous intolerance they talk about either the Catholic Inquisition or the "witch-burnings" carried out by both Catholics and Protestants. Rarely is there reference to the "Committee of Public Safety," which
implemented the Reign of Terror in the name of humanity.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 40-41
The [American] nation was originally the largely Protestant colonies of the Eastern seaboard; only later were predominantly Catholic areas admitted to the Union. But by 1775, much of the Protestant elite of thse Eastern colonies had ceased to be orthodox Christians in the way their ancestors had been. This was especially true of the gentlemen planters of Virgiana, who played a major role in the establishment of the new nation. Some, notably Thomas Jefferson, seem to have been Deists. They believed in a Supreme Being and a moral law based on reason, but not in divine revelation. Others, like George Washington, were nominal Anglicans according to the familiar English pattern of the time. They maintained at least a loose affiliation with the church but did not seem to make religion an important part of their lives. In the North, the stern Puritanism of the seventeenth century had been modified to the point where many leading New Englanders could be called Deists.
There were thus certain paradoxes in the spirit of the new nation. The Declaration of Independence forthrightly acknowledged dependence on God; the Constitution did not mention him. America was in some ways a very religious nation, but, especially among its leaders, this religion was often ambiguous.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 49-50
Most of the Founding Fathers, to one degree or another, were fearful of the possibility of religious conflict, intolerance, and persecution. There had been instances of these in colonial America. The examples from Europe were more numerous and more disturbing. These founders hit upon a radical new experiment -- a nation whose basic structure guaranteed freedom of worship for all inhabitants and forbade any union of church and state. [...] This was a great benefit for the people of the new
nation. Virtually nowhere in the world at the time was complete freedom of worship permitted and nowhere were citizens free from the obligation to support a church whose teaching they might find acceptable.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 50
The period 1945-1965 was a morally conservative time in American life. Traditional values were publicly honored and to a considerable extent lived by. (For example, after a predictable increase immediately after the War, the divorce rate actually began to decline.) This helped provide a stable environment, based on a broad moral consensus. It was a good time in which to raise children.
The less happy side of this moral conservatism was that it was often unthinking, merely habitual, and based on social custom.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 56
One of the weaknesses of the prevalent religiosity of the 1950s was the ease with which it accepted material prosperity. Relatively little thought was given to helping Christians cope with an economic success that might corrupt. Some preachers even equated prosperity with divine favor, a recurring temptation in the history of the church. For a long time there appeared no basic incompatibility between prosperity and fidelity. If anything, prosperity was seen as a way for devout Christians to give more money to the church or to charity.
But a subtle psychological process was taking place. More and more people were becoming accustomed to all their "needs" being met. At first these needs were really that. The Depression of the 1930s and the privations of the war years left many people close to poverty. But gradually "needs" came to be indistinguishable from "wants." Not only did people expect to have a car, they needed two, and then three. The annual vacation had to be taken at a comfortable resort. Every household had to get every new and expensive technological device, from kitchen equipment to large-screen televisions. Clothes were discarded merely because they were a bit out of style.
So long as this expectation of desire-fulfillment was confined to material goods it was dangerous to faith but not lethal. The graver trouble began when it was tranferred to the spiritual and psychological planes as well.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 57-58
Rapid, and even dramatic, upward mobility was a close corollary to the prosperity of the post-war period. Before the was, the proportion of high-school graduates attending college rapidly increased, until it reached nearly half in the early 1970s. During most of that period a college degree was practically a guarantee of economic opportunity. Millions of Americans who attended college were able to pursue goals which for their parents would have been utterly unrealistic.
This mobility reinforced the sense of self-reliance already alluded to. It also inculcated in people a sense of the necessity of "hanging loose," ready to move in whatever direction opportunity might call. American industry after World War II practiced a system of "planned obsolescence," whereby consumer products, machinery, styles, and many other things were expected to be discarded after a few years, to be replaced by something new. People became used to expecting that they would discard their old possesions periodically and replace them with models that were brighter and more modern.
Both things together -- social mobility and planned obsolescence -- created a mentality in which fixed beliefs, unchanging fidelities, and eternal truths came to seem like liabilities restricting movement and change. The person with the fewest commitments -- marital, religious, moral, institutional, intellectual -- was the person best able to take advantage of all the opportunities which society offered.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 59-60
If America was still a predominantly religious society in the early 1960s, it went through a secularization process which was amazingly rapid. The process is not complete by any means. In some ways America remains a very religious nation. But common attitudes, and especially the kinds of attitudes which are regarded as respectable, underwent a swift change between 1965 and 1970. Although it was perhaps only a minority who were most affected, they were the trend-setters. They either had little
interest in religion or were hostile to it. They either rejected traditional morality or were willing to compromise it endlessly. They contrived to place traditional religious belief on the permanent defensive.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 60
The protests of the young against war, poverty, racism, and other undeniable social evils was, in part, motivated by genuinely outraged idealism. It was, in that sense, a credit to their sincerity. It was also partly the reaction of a generation which had always gotten what it wanted, "How dare the world not conform to my exectations" was, in effect, the cry of many. These young people had a low tolerance for frustration, and their rebellion was a collective demand that their parents'
generation alleviate their frustration.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 64
Young people had first pitted themselves against political institutions which they had come to regard as illegitimate. They refused to be drafted into the armed forces, disrupted work at campus institutes connected to the military, and prevented "reactionary" speakers from being heard. From there it was not very far to developing a visceral sense that all forms of established authority, all rules, all demands for obedience, were inherently illegitimate. The same government which wanted young people to fight in what they considered an immoral war also refused to let them use drugs. The same college authorites who cooperated with an immoral government forbade students to make love in the dormitories. The same parents who had, allegedly, acquiesced in an unjust socitey tried to impose hypocritical rules on their children.
What emerged from all this was a simple, only half-conscious principle of thought and behavior: "Whatever or whoever tries to tell me what to do is oppressing me. Any law, any institution, any figure of authority which I have not created myself is my enemy, an unjust oppressor of my liberty."
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 66
The 1970s was one of the few times in history when the older generation looked to the younger for guidance on how to live, rather than the reverse. At first disapproving, then intrigued, then sympathetic, finally thrilled, many parents began to emulate the "courage" of their offspring in throwing off all conventions. The young had snapped certain psychological bonds, and the vibrations of that snap struck responsive chords in their parents' psyches as well.
There were, of course, a variety of parental responses. Some of the older generation remained strongly disapproving of what the youth culture had wrought, and heartborken when it affected their own children. Probably most parents were driven to an acceptance of the inevitable. It seemed as though every social force had conspired to make it impossible to bring up children according to the values the parents believed in. They learned to live with situations they would previously have found
intolerable. Others, however, welcomed the assault on traditional values which the young had spearheaded. Where they did not join in the attack themselves, they were willing to enjoy its fruits, or to applaud the attackers.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 68
What the culture of the 1970s taught many people was to place themselves first in any relationship and to be unwilling to make even minimal sacrifices for the sake of theres. [...]
Almost everyone has been affected by this spirit of self-indulgence. There is, in effect, a great conspiracy in America to extend toleration to all forms of questionable behaviour as a way of ensuring toleration for one's own. Homosexuality is a case in point. Many people now espouse the cause of "gay rights" because they realized that a society which approves of homosexuality will not disapprove of very mnay things.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 70
The humanistic psychologists have corrected the sometimes excessive pessimism and narrowness of classical psychology. In some ways their work is more easily reconciled with Christianity than is Freud's. For this reaosn, it has had great appeal in religious circles. However, Vitz points out that it finally rests on foundations which are incompatible with Christian faith. It has no realization of sin, so that practially all human impusles are treated as good. Evil is usually dismissed merely as
"failure to grow," or as the unfortunate result of psychological "repressions" of various kinds.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg
It is not clear that people today actually behave in a more sinful way than their ancestors did. What is undeniably different, however, is how they think about their sins.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 75
A skewed modern psychology not only recognized neurotic guilt, which is real and a perversion of genuine moral sense, but equates all sense of sin with such guilt and defines it as sick. There is no longer the possiblity of repentance, because the sis itself is rationalized, even proclaimed virtuous. Repentance is ruled out as a product of a neurotic guilt which stifle personal growth. Sins of the flesh, traditioanlly regarded in Christianity as the least serious because [they are] mostly the
result of weakness rather than pride, have now been turned into sins of pride. The sinner wears his sins as a badge of honor, boasts of his emancipation from all moral authority, and in effect, dares God to judge him.
--James Hitchcock, What is Secular Humanism?, pg 75
Whatever one's religion in private life may be, for the office-holder nothing can take precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts -- including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state.
--John F. Kennedy, quoted in What is Secular Humanism?, pg 62
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The only truth that unites all sacred texts, from the Bible to the Koran to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is that there is not a single intentional laugh among them.
--Lawrence E. Joseph, Common Sense, pg 28
Keeping thoughts straight frequently entails making picutres in one's mind, called mental representations, and then thinking about the pictures, a procedure known as metarepresentation.
A tall order, all this thinking about thinking and seeing, yet eighteen months is the age when children begin to engage in pretense and to recognize pretense in others; when a child may happily make believe that a book is a sandwich, or, [...] that a banana is a telephone. And without confusion; a child of a year and a half or so is normally quite capable of first talking into, then taking a bite out of said banana, and going along if Daddy does the same. A few months later, children become to understand the opposite of make-believe: they know that something's strange when a banana starts talking, if a man tries to take a bite out of a real telephone, or if the sofa starts tiptoeing across the room. (Unless, of course, these things happen on television, which very young children accept right off as its own different world.) By around age two, children get the feel of emotional make-believe, when they pretend to have feelings they really don't have; the book/sandwich tasted good, or the message on the banana/telephone was sad.
[...]
Psychologist take pain to stress the universality of the results they report, and although it is a quite true that researchers choose normal, neutral experimental milieus to keep their results unbiased, even that supposed neutrality shows bias. What proportion of the world's children live in homes without telephones, or without bananas to use as props in games? If a three-year-old in sub-Saharan Africa desperately preteds that a stick is a nice, ripe banana, or when her counterpart in the perpetually dissolving Yugoslavia patientely dials the wall, is that act bolstering their imagination, destroying their common sense, or both?
When children are forced to use their imagination to repel insane surroundings (as they must in so many parts of the world), or to deny basic personal truths [...], symbols become desperate alternatives to reality, not just useful representations of it. An important distinction separates make-believe for the fun of it from pretense that is a defense against the world. Yet though it's tempting to conclude that children forced by inhuman circumstances to retreat into their fantasy worlds are
therefore some how common-sense-impaired, it often seems that adult who come from such embattled backgrounds have a firmer grasp of reality than those of us who didn't have to fight so hard. Common sense says that even young children can understand the difference between playing games and playing for keeps. Up to a point short of permanent trauma, some mental facility may be gained by sometimes having to pretend, rather than simply choosing to.
--Lawrence E. Joseph, Common
Sense, pg 67-69
In her classic study of Japanese society, The Chrysanthemum and the Rose, [Ruth] Benedict contends that in "guilt" cultures, as found in most Christian countries, including the United States, codes of conduct are based on questions of intrinsic right and wrong and stem primarily from an individuals's relationship with God, or with his or her own internal standards. In "shame cultures," such as Japan and, Magnusson persuasively argues, Iceland, society, not concience, is the judge.
Values are contingent; the orientation is less toward principles than appearances -- whether or not you get caught. The "guilt" system's escape valve is unburdening by religious confession or psychotherapy. But such talking cures are not possible in a "shame" culture, for the whole idea is to save face and keep things secret.
--Lawrence E. Joseph, Common Sense, pg 131
The reverse side of ignorance is cultural arrogance, where we simply assume that our culture is the only game in town.
--Lawrence E. Joseph, Common Sense, pg 145
The following rules are intended as a guide to what's CS [common sense] and what isn't, regardless of the rendition.
1. Common sense always rings true.
Plausibility, Raymond Chandler observed, is largely a mater of style. The CS-style is deft and often sharpened by wit, though not just for the sake of wordplay or to the point of being dismissed as a joke: the West African proverb, "No one tests the depth of the river with both feet," hits the tone in any language. For all their air of authority, CS maxims and proverbs are anything but consistent from one to the next.
2. It may not mean a thing even if it has that CS swing.
What rings CS true can nonetheless be outmoded or false. "If God had intended us to fly, we'd have been born with wings," has the tone but not the substance. So does "A woman's place is in the kithen."
3. Beware of BS in CS form.
By falling into the habit of assuming that those who are intelligent are also good, we are ripe for the plucking by the smart ones who aren't.
4. The CS instinct is to get the job done.
"Common sense is making your best guess and going with it." --James Lovelock, biologist
5. Common sense is a good projective test.
Most people's opinions about common sense are as emphatic and direct as the subject itself, but sometimes a little decoding is necessary.
6. Couples have their own form of common sense.
What's CS to couples when they are together may be quite different than what it is to either member alone. And whether or not they agree is often less telling than the way they go about it.
7. Powerful people can define what's CS.
8. What's common sense, all to often, is what's common sense to men.
If for no other reason than their comparative restraint from irrational violence, women just seem more CS than men.
9. Common sense is what's humble at heart.
[...] "Common sense is knowing what you can do and knowing what you can't do, and not letting your ego tell you any different. . . . " --Tommy John, former baseball player
10. Using common sense is doing the right thing.
Common sense is the workaday wisdom one is expected to have. It's the craft of reasonable living, not the art of pondering life.
--Lawrence E. Joseph, Common Sense, pg 166-175
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Some people -- I call them eradicationists -- seek to drive nigger out of rap, comedy, and all other categories of entertinment even when (perhaps especially when) blacks themselves are the one using the N-word. They see this usage as bestowing legitimacy on nigger and misleading those whites who have little direct interaction with African Americans. Eradicationists also maintain that blacks' use of nigger is symptomatic of racial self-hatred or the internalization of white racism, thus the rhetorical equivalent of black-on-black crime.
There is something to both of these points.
--Randall Kennedy, nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, pg 45
I am not ruling out criticism of the novel. Perceptive commentators have questioned its literary merits. It is undoubtedly true, moreover, that regardless of Twain's intentions, Huckleberry Finn (like any work of art) can be handled in a way that is not only stupid but downright destructive of the educational and emotional well-being of students. To take a contemporary example, the producers of Mississippis Burning intended their film to carry an antiracist message, but
that did not prevent it from contributing inspiration to a wayward youth who, in 1990, burned crosses outside the residence of a black family in St. Paul, Minnesota, in an effort to frighten them into moving.
--Randall Kennedy, nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, pg 140
When we call each other 'nigger' it means no harm. But if a white person uses it, it's something different, it's a racist word
--Ice Cube, and reprinted in nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, pg 51
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. [A word is] the skin of a living thought [that] may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
--Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, and reprinted in nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, pg 51
There are certain well defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting of 'fighting' works--those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
--U.S. Supreme Court, Chaplinsky v: New Hampshire, 1942; the fighting words doctrine, and reprinted in nigger: The
Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, pg 69
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
The right wing hates America. They are the first to wave the flag and loudly proclaim their love of country. They are also the first to stab their country men and women in the back when it suits them.
Now that Bush is safely in power for another four years they are wasting no time in showing us that they are firmly in charge and not taking any prisoners. Their goals are very simple. They want to destroy the government's ability to do anything except fight wars and make the wealthy even wealthier.
--Margaret Kimberley, The Right Wing Hates America, 17 Dec 2004
In early 2003 the occupation of Iraq was becoming a certainty. Despite the acquiescence of the media, the entire Republican party, and far too many wimpy Democrats, thousands of Americans joined the rest of the world in demonstrating against the approaching atrocity. The press barely acknowledged the existence of dissent, and the right wing vilification began in earnest.
The protesters were said to hate America but love Saddam, tyranny, and terrorism. They were accused of not supporting the troops, as if sending men and women needlessly to their deaths was proof of love.
--Margaret Kimberley, The Right Wing Hates America, 17 Dec 2004
While Donald Rumsfeld was showing his love for GIs fighting for our freedoms, the rest of his gang were telling the rest of us that they must eliminate social security, the only safety net Americans have, in order to save it.
The scam should have been obvious to anyone paying attention when the right wing claimed to be concerned about the life span of black men. Now they are acting like Henny Penny, declaring that the sky will fall unless social security is destroyed to help Wall Street make more money.
Meanwhile, the soldiers everyone claims to support are returning not to homes but to homeless shelters. Their story is as old as warfare itself. They are dealing with poverty and gun shot wounds but also with memories of the people they killed.
--Margaret Kimberley, The Right Wing Hates America, 17 Dec 2004
Their sick dreams of domestic and foreign domination have been germinating for many years. They are going to make America an empire and they are going to make themselves richer, whether by going to war in Iraq, or putting the Wall Street foxes in charge of the social security hen house.
They hate us and they hate our freedoms too. Intelligence reform means nothing of the sort. A driver's license is now a national identity card. Mere membership in organizations labeled as terrorist is now a federal offense. Despite these alleged improvements in intelligence gathering, the incompetent Condoleezza Rice, in charge of the nation's security before September 11, 2001, was kicked upstairs to become Secretary of State. So much for reform.
--Margaret Kimberley, The Right Wing
Hates America, 17 Dec 2004
The same people who want to build an empire abroad want to build one at home as well. They view the vast majority of Americans as troublesome inconveniences to be placated with lies. They can't say that they want a police state, so they say they are reforming intelligence. They can't be honest and say they will eliminate social security and medicare, so they say they will strengthen or reform them.
It is tempting but dangerous to be in denial in the face of this onslaught. Words like strengthen and reform have now taken on a sinister meaning. Those innocuous words are now used to enrich the already wealthy, and empower the already powerful.
Soon they will say that war is peace and freedom is slavery. At that point there can be no more denial or excuses. They hate you and they are letting you know it.
--Margaret Kimberley, The Right Wing Hates America, 17 Dec 2004
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Instead of trying to understand the religious Right the Left tries to point out the irrationality of the Right's positions, imagining that one more good argument will knock the socks off the Rightists, and then everyone will throw away their crutches and start a stampede to the Left. Imagine their surprise when it doesn't happen.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back From the Religious Right
Americans give a tremendous amount of credit to anyone who can name a pain that they've been experiencing but have been unable to locate.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back From the Religious Right
The Left Hand of God means looking at the universe through the perception that love, kindness, generosity and caring for others are the central ontological realities of life, and that when they do not manifest in the world in which we live, the world is distorted and needs to be healed. The Right Hand of God, conversely, means looking at the universe through the perception that life is a struggle of all against all, and that the only path to security is through domination of others.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
. . . many of the millions of people who get attracted to the Religious Right are not motivated by excitement for their political program, but by the experience of community, caring for others, and its ability to recognize and address the deep distortions in life that are caused by a societal ethos of materialism and selfishness.
You can't undermine that attachment by arguments against what is really peripheral to their motivation.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
By its tone-deafness to the spiritual suffering of the American people, the Left continues to miss the fundamental crisis that demands a social transformation, and in so missing this reality, it clears the path for reactionary forces to enter the spiritual arena and manipulate that crisis in destructive and potentially fascistic directions.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
I believe that, as a methodological principle, we ought to try to find the rational kernel in the irrational shell, to coin a phrase, or to start by asking what reasonable and decent things people are seeking when they're attracted to the Right.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
Here, it is important to distinguish between the hard core of the Right -- which has many people who are racists, sexists, homophobes or fundamentalists with rigid thinking and sometimes filled with anger -- on the one hand, and the tens of millions of others who were not always attracted to the Right but who, in the past 30 years, have been moving to, and voting with, the Right.
It is this latter group that I studied, and it is they, not the hard core of the Right, that I've found to be moving to the Right for reasons that are not a manifestation of either evil or stupidity.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
Our New Bottom Line: Institutions should be judged efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power (The Old Bottom Line) but also to the extent that they generate love and caring for others, generosity and kindness, ecologically sensitive behavior, ethical awareness, and enhance our capacities to respond to the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.
We should be talking in that kind of language, a language that transcends the normal discourse of the Left and the Right and reaches to the highest aspirations of the human soul.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
Empathically put yourself in the place of people whose actions we don't agree with. Too often progressives can do that when it comes to foreign terrorists but can't do that when it comes to right-wing voters. The truth is that the same logic applies: There are people who are acting in ways that we rightly deplore, but our task is to understand the underlying and well-intentioned motives, and then to help people find a better way to achieve what is good in what they want (in the case of
terrorists, a nonviolent way; in the case of right-wing voters, a more progressive way).
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
. . . stop assuming that people who don't agree with us are stupid or evil. Because others hear that we are saying that and feel that their lives are being dismissed, their problems are being trivialized, their beings are being disrespected, and that makes it impossible for them to hear anything else that we might have to say.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
Spinelessness is only part of the problem. The other part is that Dems present themselves as concerned primarily about inclusion -- bringing into the material well-being of American society all those who have been left out. I want to do that, and so I completely support and am proud to have been part of the struggles for inclusion.
But this approach doesn't go deep enough, because it fails to speak to many millions of Americans who, though they may want more economic security, also want something more than that.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
Money in politics is distorting, but let's not forget that the impact of the civil rights movement, the women's movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement was greater than any amount of money could ever purchase. It remains the case that the major deficit of the Left is not inadequate money, but inadequate compassion for and understanding of the spiritual needs of the American people.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
We have to recognize that Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, the two great leaders for nonviolence in the last century, were both deeply embedded in their own religious traditions, and that there are great capacities for religious or spiritual people to contribute deeply to the development of a progressive world. But today the hostility toward religion and spirituality in many corners of the liberal and progressive culture (though not all corners certainly) pushes away many people who
would otherwise be involved and who might contribute major new elements to the thinking and to the successful outreach of a movement for peace and justice.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
Leftists have to decide if they are more attached to winning peace, justice, and environmental sanity in the world -- in which case they need to make hostility to religion and spirituality an unwelcome sentiment on the Left -- or if they are more attached to their cynicism and elitism and ability to laugh at or ridicule those who hold on to a religious and spiritual vision of the world.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
Those who agree with a spiritual perspective need to support each other.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
The Left needs to be challenged on its religiophobia. Most on the Left are as unaware of how deeply they disrespect and demean religious and spiritual people today as they once were of how deeply they disrespected and demeaned women or gays and lesbians.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
We spiritual progressives have to work on both fronts -- challenging the Right and its very destructive policies and on challenging the superficiality and one-dimensionality of the Left with its resultant self-defeating policies.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
A world that takes love and kindness, generosity and caring for others, and responding to the universe with awe and wonder seriously will be a world that has no place for exploitation, manipulation or technocratic, reductionist and maniuplative thought or action. So we are not calling for some capitulation to a mythical center, but a transcending of all those categories and reaching toward higher ground, which is the basis for common ground.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, Excerpt: The Left Hand
of God, 10 Feb 2006
And our central spiritual notion is this: The well-being of Americans depends on and is intrinsically tied to the well-being of every other person on the planet and on the health of the planet itself, so every chauvinistic and every ecologically insensitive approach is not only immoral but self-destructive, as it abandons the divine mission of human beings to be partners with God in the healing, repair and transformation of our world, our planet and ourselves.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10
Feb 2006
A politics that takes seriously both working on our inner lives and working on our social healing is the only politics that is sustainable, and it is the only politics that can win.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, 10 Feb 2006
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
In 1996 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimisitic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. [...]
Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible futures, as did President Clinton. [...]
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated -- especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.
Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop -- which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions -- they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, [...]. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, [...]. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, [...].
These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime -- well then, the power to stop criminals had been within reach all along. [...]
These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the expert's mouths to journalists ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom.
There was only one problem: they weren't true.
There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years eariler and concerned a young woman in Dallas name Norma McCorvey.
Lke the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. [...] But in Texas, as in all but a few states of that time [1970], abortion was illegal. McCorvey's cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey's name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. [...]
So how did Roe v: Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?
As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v: Wade -- poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get -- were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v: Wade these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as the children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
[...]
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?
Zero.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 4-6
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work -- whereas economics represents how it actually does work. Economics is above all a science of measurement. It comprises an extraodinarily powerful and flexible set of tools that can reliably asses a thicket of information to determine the effect of any one factor, or even the whole effect. That's what "the economy" is, after all: a thicket of information about jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the tools of economics can be just as easily applied to subjects that are more -- well, more interesting.
This book, then, has been written from a very specific world view, based on a few fundamental ideas:
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them -- or, often, ferreting them out -- is the key to solving just about any riddle, [...].
The conventional wisdom is often wrong. [...] Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes. The answer to a given riddle is not always right in front of you. [...]
"Experts" -- from criminologists to real estate agents -- use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. However, they can be beat at their own game. [...]
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. If you learn how to look at data in the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Because there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 13-14
It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economics, such a case is known as information asymmetry.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 67-68
If you were to assume that many experts use their infomation to your detriment, you'd be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don't have the informaion they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn't know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn't dare challenge them. If your doctor suggests that you have angioplasty -- even though some current research suggests that
angioplasty often doe s little to prevent heart attacks -- you aren't likely to think that the doctor is using his informational advantage to make a few thousand dollars for himself or his buddy.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 70
Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear. Fear that your children will find you dead on the bathroom floor of a heart attack if you do not have angioplasty surgery. Fear that a cheap casket will expose your grandmother to a terrible underground fate. Fear that a $25,000 car will crumple like a toy in an accident, whereas a $50,000 car will wrap your loved ones in a cocoon of impregnable steel. The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival
the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 71
It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." He did not consider it a compliment.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 89
In 1828, New York became the first state to restrict abortion; by 1900 it had been made illegal throughout the country. Abortion in the twentieth century was often dangerous and usually expensive. Fewer poor women, therefore, had abortions. They also had less access to birth control. What they did have, accordingly, was a lot more babies.
In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme circumstances; rape, incest, or danger to the mother. By 1970 five states had made abortion entirely legal and broadly available; [...]. On January 22, 1973, legalized abortion was suddenly extended to the entire country with the U.S. Supreme Courts ruling in Roe v: Wade. The majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, spoke specifically to the would-be mother's predicament: [...]
The Supreme Court gave voice to what the mothers in Romania and Scandanavia -- and elsewhere -- had long known: when a women does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't yet received enough education. She may
want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 138
Before Roe v: Wade, it was predominately the daugthers of middle- or upper-class families who could arrange and afford a safe illegal abortion. Now, instead of an illegal procedure that might cost $500, any woman could easily obtain an abortion, often for less than $100.
What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v: Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three. What sort of future might her child have had? One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors -- childhood poverty and a single-parent househo ld -- are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.
In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 138-139
Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v: Wade was hitting its late teen years -- the years during which young men enter their criminal prime -- the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued
to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 139
It may be more comforting to believe what the newspapers say, that the drop in crime was due to brilliant policing and clever gun control and a surging economy. We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time, such a reckoning is correct. But
when it comes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes -- the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 139-140
No one is more susceptible to an expert's fearmongering than a parent. Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the steward of another creature's life, a creature who in the beginning is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parenting energy simply being scared.
The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things.
--Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, pg 149
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Moral Literacy or: How To Do The Right Thing
ISBN 0-87220-196-1
Dewey # 170.44 M828
Taboo morality tells you what to do and what not to do simply as a matter of decree. Certain things are deemed simply taboo and that is an end to it. Maybe some god or other authority has declared that the thing in question is taboo; in any case, no reason is given for declaring the moral prohibition. [...] Rational morality, by contast, seeks to give reasons for its judgements and prohibitions; nothing has to be taken on faith, as simply so. If an adequate reason can't
be given, then this is admitted and the prohibition dropped or at least held in suspicion.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 11
Secondly, relativists are often shrilly moralistic in their defence of relativism; they think that moral absolutism is a bad view, encouraging intolerance and so on. But I ask them: is absolutism itself only bad in a relative way -- only wrong for them and not neccessarily for others? If so, then it might not be wrong for me -- I can believe in it and act on it. On the other hand, if it is wrong for everybody, then it is absolutely wrong -- which contradicts the relativist's position. So
moral relativism is either self-refuting or it has no claim on my moral beliefs. In either case, I don't need to take it seriously. This is, I know, a 'philosophical' argument against crude relativism, but it is an argument which neatly exposes the logical absurdity of the view.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 12-13
What I am anxious to stress is that we should do our moral thinking with the same organ we use for other kinds of thinking, namely the head. We should use our reason, not our prejudices or our faith or our parents or our society. Emotions can come into it, but they shouldn't be allowed to run away with our brains -- as so often happens in moral argument and debate.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 14
Morality thus fixes limits to personal freedom: limits to what desires you can legitimately satisfy. Basically, it is a set of rules for harmonizing what I want to do with what is good for others.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 14-15
Moral knowledge is not in itself very intellectually difficult to achieve -- nothing like as hard as learning calculus or French -- and it is really only prejudice and vested interest and laziness that stand in the way.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 17
. . . being intelligent is not what gives you the right not to be abused. The reason it is wrong to cause pain to people is not that they are intelligent or members of the human species. It is that pain hurts, it is bad to suffer it, people don't like to be in pain. If you want to know whether an action is wrong, you have to look at its actual effects and ask if they are bad for the thing being acted on -- not ask what else happens to be true of the thing.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy,
pg 25
The sentience criterion also has the advantage of coming in degrees: organisms can be more or less rich in sentience, depending on how complex their mental life is. A human foetus will gradually acquire more sentience as its nervous system develops and it experiences more things as pleasant or painful. This implies that the longer the foetus has to develop the more serious is the act of aborting it, so that in the final stages it will be as serious as post-natal infanticide. We thus have an explanation of the wrongness of late abortion that fits the fact that it gets more wrong the longer you wait. Acccordingly, the longer you wait the better reason you need to make the abortion morally defensible: that is, the harder it becomes to override that value attaching to the foetus's life. The wrongness comes in degrees because sentience comes in degrees. When you wrongly take a life, what you are taking is a centre of consiciousness. But where there is no such centre, the question of wrongness does not arise.
This more-or-less position will not suit those who like their morality black and white; nor will it please people who want moral principles to be so absolute as not to allow exceptions in the face of overriding reasons. The issue of abortion seems to me to show that a sensible morality cannot be like that. To many things have to be taken into account. The sentience criterion offers, I think, the most reasonable and realisitic approach to the question of abortion, in which no simple
all-or-nothing rules are going to be forthcoming. It is a matter of balance and judgement, guided by the idea that sentience is a central source of value. You can't just invoke some simple general principle -- like "choice" or "the right to life" -- and hope to crank out a straightforward answer applicable to all cases. Abortion is not "always wrong", but nor is it "always permissible". It depends on the details of the case -- both of the state of the foetus and the consequences of giving birth
to it for all concerned.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 37-38
You may believe that revenge justifies violence, but this is a different kind of issue from that of (say) the resort to violence in self-defence. The question I am most concerned with here is the use of violence as a means -- either to some definite further objective or as a general deterrent against future violence. So: when may you use violence as a means to secure an end you desire?
This quesion is forced upon us because of the relationship, or lack of it, between power and justice in human affairs. I am sorry to have to report that people don't always do as they ought.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 42
. . . 'moral balance' -- the bad guy should suffer in proportion to the suffering he has caused.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 47
The enormous place occupied by sex in human life is amply attested by its role in art, both classical and popular, as well as in advertising and ordinary conversation -- not to mention its private place in our own heated imagination. Among the facts of life, sex is one of the biggest. What moral rules should be applied to sexual behaviour? When sex meets ethics what should we, as both sexual and ethical beings, do about it?
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 53
It is wrong to deprive people of their freedom for no good reason, since their happiness largely resides in the extend of their freedom. We should be tolerant of others, up to the point at which their actions infringe our own liberty.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 53-54
. . . it is wrong to have sex with people who don't want to have it with you, or don't want to have it in the way you do, but it is not wrong to have it with someone who shares your desire. Rape is wrong, but voluntary intercourse is fine. This follows from the general principle that freedom is a supreme good that requires a certain special kind of reason to curtail.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 54
. . . there is no good reason for thinking that acts of intercourse before the marriage ceremony are wicked or shameful, while those that immediately follow are blessed. The marriage ceremony isn't a kind of moral magic, capable of transforming the bad to the good just like that.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 56
. . . there is a deeply rooted tendency for people to misunderstand the relationship between sex and disease. Superstitiously, they believe that the link between the two somehow shows the fundamental immorality of sex; and this is particularly true for diseases that are most easily transmitted through kinds of sexual act commonly regarded as "abnormal" -- anal sex, for example. There is thus a tendency to see disease as the punishment for sex, as a proof of its sinfulness.
--Colin McGinn,
Moral Literacy, pg 57
Avoid risky sex, use a condom, get checked -- but don't wax moralistic and metaphysical about this being Nature's punishment for sexual immorality. After all, no one thinks that flu is divine retribution for talking to other people!
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 58
I would like to suggest that the proper nature of sex, from a psychological point of view, involves a desire for another person as a sentient and physical entity: it is a complex passion aimed at another person conceived as possessing a sensual nature. That sensual nature is the proper object of sexual attention -- a living body capable of sexual feelings and desires.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 60
If you just can't desire a single person for longer than a day, say, then it seems as if your desires lack some kind of authenticity. You are like a person who can't retain an interest in any one subject for longer than a week, and who takes up one enthusiasm after another, only to tire quickly of each one and move restlessly on to another. This is a person who is never really interested in anything, in whom the "interest-drive" is shallow and unauthentic. This may be why, ironically
enough, compulsively promiscuous people are not really interested in sex at all, but use sex to satisfy some other need, such as the need for intimacy or excitement or parental disapproval.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 66
We reserve a special moral contempt for the kind of person who stirs up hatred and distrust between people -- by telling lies, exaggerating, omitting key facts, betraying confidences. Since people are naturally inclined to believe what they hear, the verbally unscrupulous can always perpetrate damage to someone by mere words. And those who take the morality of words seriously always make a special effort not to utter things that may unfairly harm a person's reputation or prospects -- not to
speak of inciting physical violence against that person. I know that I myself reserve a special circle in hell for the slanderer, the malicious liar, the insidious whisperer of falsehoods -- the Iago figure. Be on the alert against such people! Remember that words can be as weighty as deeds.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 81
Since words can function as weapons, very effective ones to a credulous audience, they fall under the usual rules governing weapons control. If they are used to cause unjust harm, they ought not to be uttered. They are morally wrong.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 82
You need a beliver as well as a liar. The liar himself does no direct harm; he merely induces others to. But given this differnce, it can't be right to treat the mere act of speaking, however malicious it may be, as if it were equivalent to the violent act it provokes. Hence there is never the same moral rationale for banning potentially harmful speech as there is for banning the harmful acts it may cause.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 83
Democracy and free speech are deeply connected values, which is why the suppression of free speech is a sure sign of dictatorship of one kind or another. Political subversion is in fact a good thing if it proceeds in this democratic way, since it is nothing other than informed political change.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 85
Free speech is the engine of social improvement; and suppressing it is a recipe for stagnation and worse. And remember, this holds as much for families as for superpowers.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 85
Now for blasphemy. In this case [...] I would take an even less compromising position. Here free speech should be inviolable. This has nothing to do with not taking religion seriously; it is strictly a point about what should be legally prohibited and what shouldn't. There are two kinds of case we might consider. In one kind, the speech act isn't intended blasphemously, and doesn't take that explicit form, but is rather intended as a joke about, or a serious criticsm of, some religious tenet.
In the other kind of case, the remarks are intended blasphemously, expressly to offend and wound the religious, and as an insult to God and his followers. The line between these kinds of case may not always be sharp, but it is usually clear what kind we are dealing with. It is the difference between accidental blasphemy and intended blasphemy.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 87
Depravity shouldn't be made illegal: people should be legally free to be as depraved as they like, so long as they harm no one else.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 89
Why not be a bad person? What reason is there for being a good person? The answer is, there is no reason -- or no reason that cuts deeper, or goes further, then the tautology "because goodness is good".
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 95
A good person is truthful: habitual deceivers are not good. And truthful not only to others but to themselves: they seek out and respect the truth for their own consuption, not fooling themselves about where the truth lies. She who loves goodness also loves truth.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 96
In a sense anyone can be morally beutiful, though not anyone can exhibit musical or literary beauty. This is because moral beauty is more an affair of the will than other kinds. So if you want to make up for a lack of looks, you don't have to become an opera singer: you can simply become a decent human being.
--Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy, pg 96
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
According to a May 3, 2006, ABC News report, "One in five children is now approached by online predators." This alarming statistic is commonly cited in news stories about prevalence of Internet predators, but the factoid is simply wrong. The "one in five statistic" can be traced back to a 2001 Department of Justice study issued by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children ("The Youth Internet Safety Survey") that asked 1,501 American teens between 10 and 17 about their online experiences. Anyone bothering to actually read the report will find a very different picture. Among the study's conclusions: "Almost one in five (19 percent) . . . received an unwanted sexual solicitation in the past year." (A "sexual solicitation" is defined as a "request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult." Using this definition, one teen asking another teen if her or she is a virgin - or got lucky with a recent date - could be considered "sexual solicitation.") Not a single one of the reported solicitations led to any actual sexual contact or assault.
Furthermore, almost half of the "sexual solicitations" came not from "predators" or adults but from other teens - in many cases the equivalent of teen flirting. When the study examined the type of Internet "solicitation" parents are most concerned about (e.g., someone who asked to meet the teen somewhere, called the teen on the telephone, or sent gifts), the number drops from "one in five" to just 3 percent.
This is a far cry from an epidemic of children being "approached by online predators." As the study noted, "The problem highlighted in this survey is not just adult males trolling for sex. Much of the offending behavior comes from other youth [and] from females." Furthermore, "Most young people seem to know what to do to deflect these sexual 'come ons.'" The reality is far less grave than the ubiquitous "one in five" statistic suggests.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look,
Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
Much of the concern over sex offenders stems from the perception that if they have committed one sex offense, they are almost certain to commit more. This is the reason given for why sex offenders (instead of, say, murderers or armed robbers) should be monitored and separated from the public once released from prison. While it's true that serial sex offenders (like serial killers) are by definition likely to strike again, the reality is that very few sex offenders commit further sex crimes.
The high recidivism rate among sex offenders is repeated so often that it is accepted as truth, but in fact recent studies show that the recidivism rates for sex offenses is not unusually high. According to a U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics study ("Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released from Prison in 1994"), just five percent of sex offenders followed for three years after their release from prison in 1994 were arrested for another sex crime. A study released in 2003 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that within three years, 3.3 percent of the released child molesters were arrested again for committing another sex crime against a child.
Three to five percent is hardly a high repeat offender rate.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
In the largest and most comprehensive study ever done of prison recidivism, the Justice Department found that sex offenders were in fact less likely to reoffend than other criminals. The 2003 study of nearly 10,000 men convicted of rape, sexual assault, and child molestation found that sex offenders had a re-arrest rate 25 percent lower than for all other criminals. Part of the reason is that serial sex offenders - those who pose the greatest threat - rarely get released from prison, and the
ones who do are unlikely to re-offend. If released sex offenders are in fact no more likely to re-offend than murderers or armed robbers, there seems little justification for the public's fear and the monitoring laws targeting them.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
While the abduction, rape, and killing of children by strangers is very, very rare, such incidents receive a lot of media coverage, leading the public to overestimate how common these cases are. [...]
There are several reasons for the hysteria and fear surrounding sexual predators. The predator panic is largely fueled by the news media. News stories emphasize the dangers of Internet predators, convicted sex offenders, pedophiles, and child abductions. The Today Show, for example, ran a series of misleading and poorly designed hidden camera "tests" to see if strangers would help a child being abducted. Dateline NBC teamed up with a group called Perverted Justice to lure potential online
predators to a house with hidden cameras. The program's ratings were so high that it spawned six follow-up "To Catch a Predator" specials. While the many men captured on film supposedly showing up to meet teens for sex is disturbing, questions have been raised about Perverted Justice's methods and accuracy. (For example, the predators are often found in unmoderated chatrooms frequented by those looking for casual sex - hardly places where most children spend their time.) Nor is it surprising
that out of over a hundred million Internet users, a fraction of a percentage might be caught in such a sting.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
Because there is little hard data on how widespread the problem of Internet predators is, journalists often resort to sensationalism, cobbling a few anecdotes and interviews together into a trend while glossing over data suggesting that the problem may not be as widespread as they claim. But good journalism requires that personal stories - no matter how emotional and compelling - must be balanced with facts and context. Much of the news coverage about sexual predation is not so much wrong as
incomplete, lacking perspective.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
The news media's tendency toward alarmism only partly explains the concern. America is in the grip of a moral panic over sexual predators, and has been for many months. A moral panic is a sociological term describing a social reaction to a false or exaggerated threat to social values by moral deviants. (For more on moral panics, see Ehrich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda's 1994 book Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance.)
In a discussion of moral panics, sociologist Robert Bartholomew points out that a defining characteristic of the panics is that the "concern about the threat posed by moral deviants and their numerical abundance is far greater than can be objectively verified, despite unsubstantiated claims to the contrary." Furthermore, according to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, during a moral panic "most of the figures cited by moral panic 'claims-makers' are wildly exaggerated."
Indeed, we see exactly this trend in the panic over sexual predators. News stories invariably exaggerate the true extent of sexual predation on the Internet; the magnitude of the danger to children, and the likelihood that sexual predators will strike.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
As it turns out, Attorney General Gonzales had taken his 50,000 Web predator statistic not from any government study or report, but from NBC's Dateline TV show. Dateline, in turn, had broadcast the number several times without checking its accuracy. In an interview on NPR's On the Media program, Hansen admitted that he had no source for the statistic, and stated that "It was attributed to, you know, law enforcement, as an estimate, and it was talked about as sort of an extrapolated number."
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
According to Wall Street Journal writer Carl Bialik, journalists "often will use dubious numbers to advance that goal [of protecting children] . . . one of the reasons that this is allowed to happen is that there isn't really a natural critic. . . . Nobody really wants to go on the record saying, 'It turns out this really isn't a big problem.'"
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
Besides needlessly scaring children and the public, there is a danger to this quasi-fabricated, scare-of-the-week reportage: misleading news stories influence lawmakers, who in turn react with genuine (and voter-friendly) moral outrage. Because nearly any measure intended (or claimed) to protect children will be popular and largely unopposed, politicians trip over themselves in the rush to endorse new laws that "protect the children."
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look,
Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
Politicians, child advocates, and journalists denounce current sex offender laws as ineffective and flawed, yet are rarely able to articulate exactly why new laws are needed. Instead, they cite each news story about a kidnapped child or Web predator as proof that more laws are needed, as if sex crimes would cease if only the penalties were harsher, or enough people were monitored. Yet the fact that rare crimes continue to be committed does not necessarily imply that current laws against those
crimes are inadequate. By that standard, any law is ineffective if someone violates that law. We don't assume that existing laws against murder are ineffective simply because murders continue to be committed.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
In July 2006, teen abduction victim Elizabeth Smart and child advocate John Walsh [...] were instrumental in helping pass the most extensive national sex offender bill in history. According to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the bill's sponsor, Smart's 2002 "abduction by a convicted sex offender" might have been prevented had his bill been law. "I don't want to see others go through what I had to go through," said Smart. "This bill should go through without a thought." Yet bills passed without
thought rarely make good laws. In fact, a closer look at the cases of Elizabeth Smart and Adam Walsh demonstrate why sex offender registries do not protect children. Like most people who abduct children, Smart's kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, was not a convicted sex offender. Nor was Adam Walsh abducted by a sex offender. Apparently unable to find a vocal advocate for a child who had actually been abducted by a convicted sex offender, Hatch used Smart and Walsh to promote an agenda that had
nothing to do with the circumstances of their abductions.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
The last high-profile government effort to prevent Internet predation occurred in December 2002, when President Bush signed the Dot-Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act into law, creating a special safe Internet "neighborhood" for children. Elliot Noss, president of Internet address registrar Tucows Inc., correctly predicted that the domain had "absolutely zero" chance of being effective. The ".kids.us" domain is now a largely ignored Internet footnote that has done little or nothing to
protect children.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
Simply knowing where a released sex offender lives - or is at any given moment - does not ensure that he or she won't be near potential victims. Since relatively few sexual assaults are committed by released sex offenders, the concern over the danger is wildly disproportionate to the real threat. Efforts to protect children are well-intentioned, but legislation should be based on facts and reasoned argument instead of fear in the midst of a national moral panic.
--Benjamin Radford,
Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
The tragic irony is that the panic over sex offenders distracts the public from the real danger, a far greater threat to children than sexual predators: parental abuse and neglect. The vast majority of crimes against children are committed not by released sex offenders but instead by the victim's own family, church clergy, and family friends. According to a 2003 report by the Department of Human Services, hundreds of thousands of children are abused and neglected each year by their parents
and caregivers, and more than 1,500 American children died from that abuse in 2003 - most of the victims under four years old.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, "danger to children is greater from someone they or their family knows than from a stranger." If journalists, child advocates, and lawmakers are serious about wanting to protect children, they should turn from the burning matchbook in front of them to face the blazing forest fire behind them.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
Eventually this predator panic will subside and some new threat will take its place. Expensive, ineffective, and unworkable laws will be left in its wake when the panic passes. And no one is protecting America from that.
--Benjamin Radford, Predator Panic: A Closer Look, Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2006
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
In Our Own Best Interest
ISBN 0-8070-0226-7
Dewey # 3223 S389I
By trusting solely in morality and often unenforceable law to make the grade, we risk relegating human rights, in the eyes of its detrators, to the realm of rhetoric, if not phantasm. We need to recognize that our sanctity will not be tarnished by a little toughness. We need to be unafraid to say to Americans, both to the public and to policymakers, that human rights are not only moral imperatives or legal commitments. We need to be unafraid to say, "Support human rights! They're good for
us!"
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 36
More than twenty years ago when I first visited a police state, I remember waking up in Cold War Prague and thinking to myself, "I've got to be careful today what I say." It was an entirely new experience for one who had been raised in a democracy, albeit one that had no doubt had tapped my phone during the Nixon years. My concern was not for myself but for my hosts. I knew full well not to implicate them in any way. I knew the government was listening. So trained were Czechs of that day to exercise caution that it was not until my host and I were on a West German train steaming toward Munich that we even broached the subject of politics. Even then in a private train compartment, my friend was wary. He spoke in hushed tones, almost in code. He glanced around warily although we two were the only ones there. What was so remarkable aabout this performance was that he was defending the Czech government!
That is one of the things represssion does to people: it make them think in unnatural ways.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 39
I have a lot of respect for Jimmy Carter. I once sat in a meeting he held with a group of business CEOs on one side of the table and a group of religious leaders on the other. The meeting was designed to determine how the two communities could work more cooperatively together. The former president started off by turning to the business leaders and saying in his quiet, steely way, "You in the business community don't really care about poverty in America. If you did, you could end it." The
business folks were nonplussed. [...] Then Carter turned to our side of the table: "and you religious leaders should be even more deeply ashamed. You have far more resources than you allow. You don't care very much about truly helping the poor either." I have a lot of admiration for an equal opportunity insulter.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 52
The Romanian revolution reminds us of lessons we seem constantly to forget: that regimes which rely on total control of a populace may look sturdy from the outside but are often far more fragile than they appear; that human rights violations against ethnic minorities and religious groups (or, in other contexts, against women or sexual minorities) are often early warning signss of that fragility; and that although granting every legitimate social group a voice and a share of power may make
life more complicated for a government, paradoxially it is sometimes the only thing that will preserve it.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 58
[...] although corruption alone may not destabilize a country, it is a powerful contributor, for it undermines trust in government, stains the political system, and speeds economic decay by removing investment incentives for private enterprise.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 61
Some of the clamor may be sour grapes, and some of ithe inevitable fallout of economic transformation. But just as the market reforms, labor agreements, and safety nets of the turn of the twentieth century salvaged the United States, and with it U.S. capitalism from class warfare that might have split apart the country, so those who promote a globalized economy would be wise to match their enthusiasm for earning with a corresponding commitment to free minds and fair play.
--William F.
Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 102
Rail against capitalism as you will, but recognize that since we are stuck with it, the test now is to make it work for the largest number of people.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 103
The state of New Jersey acknowledged in 1999, for instance, that its state police had engaged in systematic racial profiling in deciding which cars to search for contraband, with 77 percent of the cars searched having been driven by blacks or Hispanics and 21 percent by whites, even though the number of stopped vehicles in which drugs or weapons were actually found was roughly the same across race. In Maryland, 70 percent of the drivers stopped on Interstate 95 by state police were
African-American, even though only 17.5 percent of the speeders were black. Similarly, the attorney general of New York determined that even adjusting for different crime rates among racial groups, Latinos were stopped and searched by New York city police officers 39 percent more often than whites. For African-Americans the figure was 23 percent more often. Perhaps the most absurd example of such racial targeting, however, comes from Des Moines, Iowa, where a black man named Theophilis Bell was
stopped for riding his bycycle without a headlamp. Bell subsequently demonstrated in court that 98 percent of bicycles in Des Moines had no headlamps, but that every person arrested for that "crime" in the month prior to his stop had been black, even though Des Moines' population is overwhelmingly white.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 157
One does not have to be blind to the unsavory nature of many convicted criminals nor unsympathetic to their victims to recognize that a society that mistreats prisoners in the name of being "tough on crime" is engaged in a degreee of self-destructive behavior that would make the worst neurotic blush. The simple fact about prisoners that many Americans seem to want to ignore is this: most of them will get out.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A.,
In Our Own Best Interest, pg 165
Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa county in Phoenix, Arizona, bills himself "America's Toughest Sheriff." He has generated immense publicity through his claims that by feeding inmates rotten bologna, making them wear pink underwear, and housing them in tents under Arizona's hot sun, he had made jail life so unpleasant that no one will want to return. The only problem is that when the sheriff commissioned an Arizona State University researcher to prove his claim, Professor John Hepburn discovered that before Arpaio had taken over the jail, the rate of inmate rearrest was 61 percent; five years after he had instituted his tough program, the rate was 62.3 percent. Green bologna was hardly the worst of Arpaio's offenses, however. The Justice Department foced him to stop his deputies from repeatedly zapping prisoners with stun guns and using a metal restraining chair to inflict excruiciating agony rather than to calm down uncontrollable prisoners, the purpose for which it was intended. Unfortunately, the 1997 "settlement agreement" Arpaio signed with the Justice Department to avoid a lawsuit didn't come in time to save the life of Scott Norberg, who died in that restraint chair, or to save Maricopa County taxpayers the $8.25 million they and their insurance companies had to pay to settle Norberg's family's claims.
Joe Arpaio would be unimportant except for the fact that his philosophy of criminology has made him the state's most popular politician, thus illustrating how easy it is to confuse Americans about what is really in their best interests when it comes to dealing with criminals. But Arpaio is less interested in criminal justice and protecting the public than he is in advancing his career. I learned this when I appeared with him on the late-night talk show Politically Incorrect, which was being taped at his invitation from the Maricopa County Jail in front of an audience of inmates. Throughout the program Arpaio and I went head to head, I pulling no punches about his worst behavior; he insulting me with his cruelest cuts. When we walked off the stage into the back lot I could not imagine that the sheriff was very happy with me. When I saw him gathering a group of his largest and most intimidating deputies and heading my way, I thought for a moment that I might rather be back in Liberia. But then the sheriff stuck out his hand. "You know," he said, "you and I are putting on a great show. Any chance you can get us on Larry King Live?" The fact is, though, that it is not just the prisoners who are suffering from the sheriff's "show" but all Maricopa County ciizens, whether they know it or not.
More than two million Americans are now behind bars, the second highest incarceration rate in the world (645 per 100,000 population), second only to Russia. At least half of those are nonviolent offenders. It is beyond the bounds of this book to tackle the many controversial aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system -- from its racism to its ineffiencies to the relationship between the drug wars and the growing privatization of prisons to the fact that many states now spend more on
incarceration than e ducation. Nor would I deny that many of those in prison deserve to be there. But none of them deserve to be brutalized or subjected to neglect. Not only does that do us a disservice as a people who like to think of ourselves as civilized, but it also makes our country a more dangerous place for everyone.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 168/169
The second thing we know is that the race of the victim of a capital crime is a profound determinant on whether the perpetrator of that crime will be sentenced to death or to a lesser penalty. Defendants charged with killing white victims are at least 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants charged with killing blacks, even though the number of black and white victims are roughly the same. This means that the death penalty is indisputably administered in a racially
biased way and, as with any penalty meted out disproportinately because of bias (be it sentencing for petty theft, wearing a dunce cap for disobeying a teacher, of being spanked by a parent), such discrepancies undermine the legitimacy of the system itself, be it criminal justice, education, or parental. That cannot possibly make for a less dangerous society.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 171
If government action, then, provides a model for citizens to follow, what model does the death penaly provide? When the government executes capital offenders, it is sending a contradictory messages to 280 million people. It is sending the message that it presumably wants send -- that is, if you commit a crime of like order, this is what will happen to you -- but it is also sending the message that violence is the province of the powerful; that violence signifies victory, success, triumphs,
retribution, and toughness. An adviser to Governor Jeb Bush of Florida caught this spirit perfectly when he was quoted in state papers as saying of a speeded-up death penalty process, "Bring in the witnesses, put [the prisoner] on a gurney and let's rock and roll." How could any would-be capital criminals possibly ignore the message that violence may very well be a simple solution for their problems too? [...] I submit that one of the reasons criminals continue committing capital crimes even
when they know they may face the death penalty is because when it comes to the execution drama, they identify not with the "victim" who receives the jolt of electricity or lethal dose of drugs but with the powerful figures who administer them.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 173
Do we really think the crime rates in other industrialized societies, none of which except Japan have the death penalty, are so much lower than ours simply the people in those societies are "nicer" than we are? Or might it have something to do with the way the United States administers justice?
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg ?
To insist that that we must choose between supporting human rights and defending our national interests is not only a phony choice but a foolish one.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 183
It is hard to come up with a better moral compass for decision-making than utilitarian calculation as to how many people will endure how much suffereing. This means that addressing human rights claims will sometimes have to be a lower priority than negotiating an arms control agreement, for example.
The problem of course is that it is often impossible to make such calculations with any sense of assurance that they are accurate.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 191
Crime can be fought without abusing citizen's rights. Drugs can be interdicted without targeting innocent people. Wars can be fought without committing war crimes. In fact, all of these goals can be achieved even more readily if they are accomplished in a manner that honors human rights.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 191/192
Among the reasons to exclude torture from a government's bag of tricks is that the information received under such duress is rarely reliable.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 192
The resentment capricous torture spawns in the affected community, to say nothing of the affected individual, inevitably makes relations with the governing authority even worse.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 192
Are all human rights violations of equal that to the United States? Of course not, and, as I said earlier, some may not directly affect Americans' interests at all. But you can be pretty sure that one set of violations signals the possibility of others. If a country employs child soldiers or persecutes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgenered people or intimidates religious minorities or tolerates acid burnings of women, for example, it is a good bet that that country will be guilty of other
abuses -- that it may tolerate environmental toxins, fail to regulate cyberfraud, or ignore treaty commitments at will. A new realism will understand human rights violations in a holistic fashion.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 194
Oh, what a shame! To think that we need selfish reasons to care about our fellow human beings.
--Unknown, printed In Our Own Best Interest, pg 196
Ultimately I do not care why we staunch another's suffering. Only that we do what we can to stop it. Only that we not remain indifferent. This book is a polemic against those who would cloak indifference in the raiment of "interests." It is an appeal to Americans to judge their interests wisely. A similar book could be written for every country in the world. But it is meant as nothing more than a supplement to a much more abiding conviction: that if we would live in a world with honor, we
must not let misery go unmet. A world worth keeping sleeps ill with the torn unmended.
--William F. Schultz, executive director, Amnesty International U.S.A., In Our Own Best Interest, pg 197
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints
Ed. Roman Espejo -2003
ISBN 0-7377-1241-4
Dewey # 362.280835 S984
It is not a thing to do while one is not in one's best mind. Never kill yourself when you are suicidal.
--Edwin Shneidman, psychologist, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 34
Most suicide is a dreary and dismal wintry storm within the mind, where staying afloat or going under is the vital decision being debated. It is a place where we can't reach them, and their memories cannot save them.
--Edwin Shneidman, psychologist, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 46
The impetus for inner turmoil in the hearts of American adolescents in recent years cannot be gleaned from superficial clues such as whether a teenager plays violent video games, listens to Marilyn Manson CDs, or dons black trench coats, school psychologists say. Young people, they say, rarely wear their angst so conveniently on their sleeves.
--Jessica Portner, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 66
Finding an answer to the riddle of self-murder is not like tracing the origins of a disease to a single genetic marker. Suicide is more akin to a multicolored tapestry whose yarn must be unraveled strand by strand.
--Jessica Portner, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 66
At the core of every suicidal individual's personality is a demanding perfectionistic streak consumed with criticizing, cutting down, nit-picking, and downright tyrannizing every major, minor, and even minuscule behavior. The perfectionist leaves no stone unturned in order to yield an unfavorable report card of one's self.
--Howard Rosenthal, behavioral science writer, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 85
My personal creed asserts that every person is sacred. I see the holiness of life enhanced, not diminished, by letting people have a say in how they choose to die. Many of us want the moral and legal right to choose to die with our faculties intact, surrounded by those we love before we are reduced to breathing cadavers with no human dignity attached to our final days. Life must not be identified with the extension of biological existence. [Assisted suicide] is a life-affirming moral choice.
--Reverend Bishop Spong, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 95
Making someone die in a way others approve, but he believes a horrifying contradiction of his life, is a devastating, odious form of tyranny.
--Ronald Dworkin, Life's Dominion, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 97
The darkness that is shrouded by this euphemism physician-assisted suicide is murder. We would be much better off as a society if we would stop playing semantic games and call things what they are. To help someone kill himself or herself is as wrong as murder. Even the president of the Nebraska Hemlock Society [Carl Schmitthausler] has said: When you strip away the euphemisms, we're talking doctors killing patients.
That the healing art of the physician should be perverted in such a way as to make the physician an agent of death is nothing short of monstrous. The physician's vocation is to heal, to comfort not to kill! However, compelling the reasons advanced for this action in the death of another human being is nothing short of murder. Any society which condones such killing is writing its own death warrant.
--Cardinal Bernard Law, Satement on Physician-Assisted Suicide, 09 May 1977, reprinted in
Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 115
The highest ethical imperative of doctors should be to provide care in whatever way best serves patients' interests, in accord with each patients' wishes, not with a theoretical committment to preserve life no matter what the cost in suffering. . . . The greatest harm we can do is to consign a desperate patient to unbearable suffering -- or force the patient to seek out a stranger like Dr. Kevorkian.
--Marcia Angell, editor, New England Journal of Medicine, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing
Viewpoints, pg 121
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to slit his throat.
--Antonin Artaud, philosopher and playwright, reprinted in Suicide: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 155
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
Modern optimists like Buckminster Fuller like to speak of "synergy," as if there were some magical form that could hold out against the laws of thermodynamics. Surrounded by the signs of an impending tragedy, the collapse of his whole industrial civiliazation, the liberal optimist refuses to believe in tragedies any more: the past was tragic because they did not have computers in those days. Liberals like Zbigniew Brzesinski and Herman Kahn believe we can eliminate the tragic flaw in man; following Brzezinski, we can replace the chaos of politics with the systems of management; following Kahn, we can hook up the brain to computers to create an electronic superman. In the science fiction vision of Arthur C. Clarke, the ultimate society of the future will be programmed by a giant computer, and politics, economics, art, and entertainment will be taken care of in a domed city whose magic circle keeps out chaos and old night.
Although that miracle seeems far off, Buckminster Fuller is still reaching out for it and has already drawn a sketch of a dome over Manhattan. For men like Fuller, Brzezinski, and Hahn, tragedy is inconceivable. Their faith in progress is so unthinking that they cannot but believe that some technological miracle will deliver us at the last dramatic moment. Though we have not been reared on myth, we have all been raised on movies and believe that just as all seems lost and the savages are about to burn the circle of covered wagons, the cavalry will charge in with a joyous noise of bugles and salvation.
The Greeks knew better.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 1/2
Nature builds semi-permeable membranes, but only man is vain enough to build a wall. Behind that human form set between the opposites of sea and land, man holds out for a while. But after that while, the forces of erosion wear it down, and all that bright armor is tumbled into mud.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 2/3
We live at an interface between order and disorder, and cannot move into one singly without destroying the disequilibrium that is basic to change and evolution. Order and disorder, energy and transformation: it seems almost molecular. Put enough energy into the lattice, and the metal will turn into gas; slow down the volatile gas, and you can have metal to outlast an aeon. Once again, the Greeks seem to have understood the nature of the choice. In Thucydides's Peloponnesian War, choice
is dramatized in the conflict between Sparta and Athens. Be like Sparta and you can live with your highly ordered, barrack-like institutions intact for eight hundred years; be like Athens and you can create everything we know as Greek Culture and burn out in ninety years. It is a choice between a Spartan death in life; of an Athenian life in death. And the choice is all a matter of values.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 4/5
Like the sixth century A.D., the sixth century B.C. was an age of darkness. The civilizational wave of Sumer and Egypt were receding; whatever was left of the original cultures was lost in the mud and shallows of militaristic states. R. M. Adams has shown that in the evolution of urban society in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, cultures began as theocracies, became militaristic polities, and ended up as conquest states. Another way of looking at this evolutionary process is to see that a culture
begins in an explosion of myth, a sacred image of natures, self, and society that unites all men in a common dream, and then slowly the forces of routinization take over and the dream begins to fade. The prophet becomes a priest; the shepherd-king becomes a pharaonic Solomon. As the forces of palace, marketplace, and army develop, the myth decays until nothing holds man together but brute force. The disintegrating polity is finally compressed into the militaristic fascist state. Since every
state organized for conquest also organizes its enemies to conquer it, such militarism creates the dismal cycle which leads to the destruction of civilization.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 5
If we are going to humanize a technology that now contains thermonuclear warfare, ecological destruction, and such subtler destructions as psychosurgery, electrical stimulation of the brain, aversive therapy, and behavioral modification, we will need more than the liberal humanism expressed in the the implicit system of values of the behavioral sciences and the traditional humanities. The world view of the liberal intellectuals is a Marxist-Freudian mapping of the outer world of society and
the inner world of the psyche; but that sophisticated world view does not contain the celestial and chtonic energies we need to appreciate the machine for what it is worth. To see technology in proper scale, we need cosmic consciousness, and that consciousness comes more from meditation than from reading Marx or Freud.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 11
[Continued to quote below]
If we cannot humanize our technology with liberal humanism, we can with animism. And that is the importance of the contemporary world of animistic communities like Findhorn. If we can converse with plants, hear the spirits of wind and water, and listen to the molecular chorus singing the ninety-nine names of God in the crystal lattice of the metal of our machines, then we can have the consciousness we need to live in a culture in harmony with the universe.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil
and World Order, pg 11
In an unconscious fashion, man has already begun to shift away from materialism to information, and the giantism of the machines he once worshiped is given way to tiny circuitry. If the space program sent off rockets to the moon that were taller than skyscrapers, it spun off to earth machines in which millions of electrons danced on the head of a pin. As our entire technolology becomes as miniaturized as our hand-held calculators and desk-top computers, the whole scale of the human body to technology changes. Like paleolithic hunters of the Solutrean culture, whose tools were pieces of sculpture in their hands, we will hold technology and not be held by it.
As the scale of man to machine changes, so does the scale of the individual to institutions. In an electronic technology, one need not drive to a Berkeley-type university to watch a lecture on a television console with four hundred other students; he can stay home to watch the Berkeley university program on cable television, and if he doesn't like Berkely, he can switch the channel to Harvard of Oxford. As more students stay home, and as more information is carried on cable, the university
will no longer have to sustain a huge complex of buildings. the university will grow smaller as it grows larger and the university will be everywhere and the campus nowhere.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 11/12
As one moves from the institutions of civilization in church, university, and capital-intensive factory into the new planetary villages, he moves into a religion without priests, a university without professors, and manufacture without factories. The factory mass-produces cheap goods with built-in obsolescence, but in an era of scarcity of materials in which "The Limits to Growth" are envisaged, we will no longer be able to afford the waste of energy and materials contained in the mass
production of cheap goods. Of necessity, we will have to return to the medieval craft-guild workshop. Since the goods will have to be crafted to last a lifetime, they will have to be built with a Zen mindfulness to every detail, and so the labor intensive workshop will contain, not an army of workers, but a mystery guild of contemplatives. Like the furniture of the Shakers, the goods of the planetary village will be very good indeed.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 12/13
As the Church lost the vision of its founder, so has the country lost the vision of its founding fathers, but now that industrial society is strangling in its own contradictions, we have one last chance to re-vision human society.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 13/14
In the nineteenth century the polarities of culture were the romantic artist and the industrial engineer. Then Shelley could say that, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." But now that is no longer true. In the shift from civilization to planetization it is the mystic who has become the unacknowledged legislator of the worlds: a Sri Aurobindo or a Teilhard de Chardin, and not a Norman Mailer or an Andy Warhol. The artist cannot save civilization, and in the search for form it is not the artist who will discover and create the new culture. We have lived long enough with the myth of The Artist, and now that the paintings decorate banks and the poems lead to suicide, it is time to move on and let the artist remain behind, whimpering in the corners of his ego.
In abandoning The Artist we will not lose the beautiful, we well regain the beauty the artist lost sight of.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 15
[Reference: Saul Bellow, "Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology", Harper's Magazine, August, 1974, pg 69]
Thoughts can become inverted when they are reflected in actions.
The doctor who thought he was inventing a pill to help women become pregnant was actually inventing the Pill. The existential psychologists who created the "Third Movement" as a counter to Freudian and behavioral psychology thought they were creating new forms of the elimination of the self. [...]
If the learned psychologists did not know what they were doing in the "Third Movement," we should expect that the creators of most social movements and revolutions have no idea of what the outcome of their thoughts will be.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 17
Radicals are not the only ones who misperceive the outcome of their thoughts. President Nixon thought that in moving to create an all-volunteer army he was moving to demilitarize the coutnry; actually the was completing the transformation of America into a banana republic. Professional soldiers have little difficulty in firing on civilian crowds, and army juntas have even less difficulty in taking governments away from the effete "pinkos" who lack the cojones to do their own fighting.
And so we encounter the paradox: Dr. Ilich, in trying to be radical, became truly conservative; President Nixon, in trying to be conservative, became truly radical.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 18/19
We are supposed to be a spiritual, God-fearing nation in conflict with the Godless materialism of the Communist countries. And yet Mao's China is built on self-sacrifice, hard work, frugality, Benedictine poverty, ecological respect for nature, and deep belief in the power of meditation on the thought of Mao. In Mao's Mary Baker Eddy version of Marxist dialectical materialism, if one has right thnking he does not need machines. Mao thinks he is creating a religionless society, but really he
has created the largest Puritan state in the history of mankind. We think we are the inheritors of Plymouth Plantation, but actually we are the decadent Europe that the Pilgrims left behind.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 19
[Continued to quote below]
What these paradoxes of opposites are all about is a phenomenology in which it is part of the very nature of passionate conflict to turn one into his own enemy. "We become what we hate" is an old yoga maxim. And in watching the conflict of the Irish Troubles, the Dublin yoga, George William Russell ("A.E"), developed the maxim into a principle of political science: "By intensity of hatred nations create in themselves the characters they imagine in their enemies. Hence it is that all
passionate conflicts result in the interchange of characteristics."
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 19
Technology is not a tool, it is a culture. As an environment of symbols whose most important expressions are not machines and buildings but the institutions they embody, technology is powerful enough to warp even starlight as it passes through its field. When you live in such an environment, you are not free to pick up one tiny tool and use it as you choose. You are overwhelmingly constrained to perform according to the culture of rationalization and the process definition of values. Because
the technocrat claims that values are not eternal a priori forms of human consciousness, he is free to bend them to fit the requirements of his time. The real thrust of this book, like the real transformations of the new MIT, is the call for a shift from technological hardware to the implementation of an advanced technological society. And if such traditional values as religion or the Constitution stand in the way, they must be modified in a progressive fashion. Values, as every good
liberal knows, are not Platonic forms or "pure categories of the Understanding"; they are constantly changing accommodations to historical change: since man is in process, he can be processed.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 21/22
When Western Man moved from a Christian to a commercial civilization in the Industrial Revolution, he became no longer a loyal subject of the throne and altar, but a citizen. Now that the age of the middle-class industrial nation-states seems to have stopped, and now that another technological revolution seems to be taking off like a multistage rocket, it appears that the era of the citizen is to be left behind, floating with the junk of history. In a period of executively directed
government, the indivi dual citizen and his representatives appear unable to deal with government, war, economic disorder, crime, pollution, and cultural decay. In solitary confinement before his color TV, the citizen is made a part of all that is happening on a planetary scale and impressed with is powerlessness to act on precisely that planetary scale. Closed in upon himself, the citizen is not the yeoman structure that creates the content of the Republic, but simply a photograph in a collage
enormously larger than himself. And so the cycle of history turns and man has become a loyal subject, not to the throne and altar of Chrisitan civilization, but to the electronic hierophants of the Mysteries of behavioral science.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 22/23
The structural processing of information in the human mind is dualistic: light and dark, good and evil, yes and no, this or that, 1 or 0. [...] If you say, "Love Big Brother," you are setting up the syntax to say, preconsciously, "Do not love Big Brother." If you say, "Behave Nicely," you are bringing into consciousness the possibility of its opposite. All human thoughts come into the mirror as they become relfected in consciousness; the subconscious is, therefore, not so much Freud's jungle of repressed desires as it is the mirror-image of a particular culture. A society, behavioral or Baptist, is therefore going to contain the negation of itself if the people are conscious. [...] Everything contains its contradiction.
Conflict is, therefore, not simply an expression of the cultural environment as Skinner would have us believe. Conflict is the expression of the tragic necessity in which the contradiction must exist if its positive is to be. In the binary world, man knows by twos: Joy and suffering, birth and death, good and evil. Put a man in a behavioral utopia, and he is still a man thinking in terms of 1-0, kiss-kill, love-hate. Only by altering the very structure of consciousness can
conflict be eliminated, but to effect that alteration, we would have to eliminate the mind. People who could never turn structures inside out, think in mirror-images, dream up Marxist contradictions and deal in the values of positives and negatives would be literally mindless. Thus in order to perfect man, science would have to create a society in which no science was possible.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 25
Mind is the content of consciousness, but not its structure; there is the knower and the known, but what is that consciousness that is neither knower nor known?
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 31/32
The fetus lives in the oceanic feeling of oneness; its body temperature is matched to that of the amniotic fluid so that it cannot sense where it ends and the universe begins. In this primordial state all is one, and since mind is two we can imagine that the fetus is mindless. Then comes birth, the fall from unity into multiplicity, and the beginning of twos in the self and the other. But multiplicity makes a new order possible in the segmental articulation of language, and so we find the
Hegelian dialect of: (1) Unity, (2) Fragmentation, (3) Reintegration. But the culture cannot create language any more than the wind can create sailboats; culture can only startle the brain into mind.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 32
So many holes have been poked in Western Civilization that now that all the hot air is gone and a cold and alien wind is coming in, the civilized elite seem to be drawing deeply into themselves and their old convictions in search of warmth and comfort. In these declining years of the Magnus Annus the most interesting minds seem to have moved on long ago; now only the "intellectuals" are left wrapped in their greatcoats of Europe and dreaming of leftist politics or the "new" creations of the
avant-garde; but these are about to freeze to death. Better to turn and die running in a new direction than to stand still and become an historical monument of ice. If one moves in a new direction, he takes a risk that contains the possibility of survival; there is always the chance tha the paths others have taken out of Western Civilization may truly lead to a better place.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 35
Because our culture is moving from one era to another, it seems like a radio that is caught in the spaces between two powerful stations all kinds of noise and static are flooding in before we move on into the clear information and music of the next station. Demonology, Scientology, and an Alexandrian proliferation of cults overwhelm us along with the music of a coming age. One struggles to focus and lock in upon the proper wave length, but the attempt to separate the information from the
noise becomes in credibly difficult. Too often one falls back on snobbery and prefers to see prophets who wear their loincloths discreetly under their doctoral robes.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 40
If the individual is to survive, he will have to have a life that does more than meet the basic need of his survival. It is one thing to stand with your fellow men in a subway in Tokyo or New York, and quite another to stand with them singing Handel's Messiah. Human evolution is not simply a matter of creating a technology for our survival, or, as many political scientists suggest, building a fresh ethic for our technology. If we envision man as a clumsy beast who has to hurry
to catch up with his own stainless-steel technology, then we fail to understand that technology and ethics spring from the very depths of culture, and in those depths, only the artists and the prophet can touch the very wellsprings of our being.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 51/52
[Continued to quote below]
Culture does not spring forth from institutes financed by the state. Culture bursts forth from the unconscious: it rises from the cthonic powers of the earth and descends from the celestial visitations of the gods. Christian civilization flowed forth from a baptism in a river by a wild man of the desert; Islamic civilization flowed forth from a vision in a cave. You cannot create Christianity out of Newton's Principia, but you can create the Principia out of Christianity.
--William Irwi n Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 52
The seventeenth-century scientist did not learn how to solve the problems of the sixteenth-century alchemist; he learned how to stop looking for the salamander in the flames. Twenty-first-century man will not learn how to control "the Green Revolution," he will learn how to listen to plants; he will not learn how to control the weather, but to commune with devas of the wind; he will not learn how ethically to control the use of psychosurgery and electrical stimulation of the brain, but how to
cure through etheric invocation. Planetary man will not learn how to humanize technology by thinking like a machine, he will humanize technology through animism.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 52
Culture is full of many surprises because culture is full of the play of opposites.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 53
But cultural transformations do not proceed in easy transitions; they move in quantum leaps, and only a conversion experience or a revelation can give one the energy to leap across the abyss that separates one world view from another. A Roman Senator cannot become a Frankish Christian without first dying and being reborn.
--William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order, pg 54
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
To be a "nigger" in America is to be not a man but someone's slave. For the rich white man of Yankee America, the nigger is a sub-man. Even the poor whites consider the nigger their inferior. They say: "to work as hard as a nigger," "To smell like a nigger," "as dangerous as a nigger," "as ignorant as a nigger." Very often they do not even suspect that they too are niggers, slaves, "white niggers." White racism hides the reality from them by giving them the opportunity to despise an inferior,
to crush him mentally or to pity him. But the poor whites who despise the black man are doubly niggers, for they are victims of one more form of alienation -- racism -- which far from liberating them, imprisons them in a net of hate or paralyzes them in fear of one day having to confront the black man in a civil war.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 21
. . . "right to vote," the absurd freedom to chose which of two, three, five, or eight thieves will be granted the privilege of exploiting the masses.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 39
Imperialism is not interested in flags: one flag more or less in no way disturbs its universal system of exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor. An obedient "nationalist" government is the surest ally for Washington, as Latin America shows by many an example. What the Americans fear is socialism, popular revolution.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 47
That is why every worker who comes to realize the injustice of his condition, the condition of his fellows, and consequently of the vast majority of men, is immediately confronted with the most gigantic practical problem that has ever presented itself, first to men, then to collectivities: How to transform thousands of years of exploitation of man by man and of incessant murderous wars, how to transform centuries of accumulation of capital and concentration of wealth at the expence of
men's progress and freedom, how to transform this long history of massacre, pillage, and slavery into a new history of peace, justice, and freedom? How to transform a world dominated and perverted by money, hatred, and violence into a world without money, hatred, or violence? How to make a world without niggers?
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 57
How . . . ? Is is not a theoretical problem but a practical one, because it is solely a problem of the relationship of forces. It is a question of overturning the present relationship of forces; of seeing to it that the weak -- the vast majority of the two billion inhabitants of the planet, whose numbers give them a natural, inalienable right to control their own affairs -- become the stronger, the sole masters of their fate, the sole artisans of their social universe; of seeing to it that the powerful -- the small minority who make up the international business bourgoeisie and who monopolize economic, political, and social affairs, the means of communication, the engines of war and the reigning ideologies -- are reduced to impotence, held in check, prevented from exploiting human labor for their profit.
It is a question of making men equal, not only in law but in fact.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 57
You cannot abolish slavery without abolishing the power of the master and the relation of master to slave.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 59
At first glance, the problems raised by the evolution of humanity at each historical stage always appear insurmountable. The picture one paints for himself, and describes to others, of this society wihtout exploitation, for the achievement of which one is ready to take up arms, is like something out of science fiction.
And in the beginning, your utopia makes some people pity you, others ridicule you, and the majority look upon you as a kind of mystic without God! It is not long before you have acquired a reputation for being a dreamer -- a fellow who is "sincere" but "idealistic." If on top of that, you intend to go on to action, then you become ipso facto a "communist," an "anarchist," an irresponsbile and dangerous man who, in the interest of society, should be locked up as soon as possible in a
prison or insane asylum. As long as you only preach your utopia, the established order is content to take note of your "dissent" with contempt of indifference. But as soon as you begin to act, the old system hastens to turn you into a publice menace and a criminal, so as to be able to bury you alive before your "idealism" puts Molotov cocktails, dynamite, and rifles into the hands of the workers and the young people, who are very receptive to the idea of Utopia, which is all they are waiting
for to rise up en masse against those who organize, profit from, and defend oppression.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 59-60
The author of this book is an idealist who, from childhood on, learned from his father to long for a better world in which the men who work anonymously from day to day -- the farmers, workers, day laborers like my father -- could enjoy life after having toiled so hard to subsist, to endure . . . and to perpetuate the species. Enjoy life not by getting drunk on the weekend, by "drinking up their pay," beating their wives and children and destroying themselves in useless fits of anger, but by possessing the material and intellectual means of creating something in this world; of giving of themselves to others and of exchanging with them something other than curses, sarcasms, and humiliations.
"I wonder when we'll be able to take it easy for a bit and enjoy life without worrying about tomorrow," my father often said. And with a bitterness mingled with resignation, my mother would answer: "When you're born for half a loaf, you can't expect . . ." My mother was learning to forget all the dreams of happiness that, like all women, she had had in her youth. And she did not want to discuss fantasies with my father. What was the use? You hurt yourself by hoping. You increase your disappointments and life become unbearable. Better to expect nothing and take what comes, as it comes.
My father would say nothing, suppressing his hopes the way on holds back sobs. I would look into his deep, gentle eyes and read a mixture of immense kindness, silent suffering, and perhaps also grief. Sometimes he would smile, just long enough to tell me, without opening his lips, that his dreams could be realized, that one had to believe that.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 61
For a workingman's son, nothing in life is laid out in advance. He has to forge ahead, to fight against others and against himself, against his own ignorance and all the frustrations accumulated from father to son, he has to surmount both the oppression laid upon his class by others and his own congenital pessimism, to give his spontaneous revolt a consciousness, a reason and precise objectives.
Otherwise, he remains a nigger, he turns into a delinquent or a criminal, he consents to becoming at the age of thirty the ruin of a man . . . a bitter and disenchanted slave.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 62
When a "great darkness" such as characterized by the Duplessis regime from 1944 to 1959, extends over a whole people, those who ask themselves questions about man's destiny are sometimes tempted to despair of others and of themselves. The triumphant reign of Stupidity seems to justify the metaphysics of the Absurd, of individual Anarchy and of Nausea. Before going through its "quiet revolution," Quebec went through the dictatorship of Stupidity; and for a long time the
Québ&eacoute;cois struggled vainly, in anxiety and despair, like penniless prisoners who are totally ignorant of the procedures that cause them to be in prison one day and in court the next, then in prison again, without ever understanding the working of the machine that shifts them badk and forth in a universe from which all light, reason, and meaning are shut out, the universe called Justice, Law and Order, the Public Interest.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 62-63
Pity is a crime against man. man has right to the truth, even if it iis hard as granite. For a human world can only be built, develop, and endure on a foundation of truth.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 88
Captialism has always toleratd a small minority of dissenters -- of men who "talk" revolution -- as a clever subterfuge to make poeple believe in the existence of democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought (without freedom of action!). Business unionism, which is an institution of the capitlist system, applies the same strategy to maintain the illusion of democracy among the working class. But strikers have only to reject the betrayals of the leaders they are supposed to have
elected themselves (in their own interest) for "democratic" unionism to call out the cops with their nightsitcks and the goons of the underworld. And while the most courageous of the strikers take their way to prison like common criminals, the bigshots, in the name of the working class, sit down with the bosses to a good steak!
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 96
"Lucidity" became the big thing! And as each man was to determine his conduct and morality on the basis of his conscience and his freedom, that is, in the last analysis, on the basis of his personal interests, "lucidity" varied from one individual to another and everything become "ambiguous" and consequently "gratituous." Sartrian responsiblity, like Christian responsiblity, was only an ideology that served as a façle;ade, an ideology required by the daily spectacle of millions of innocent people throughout the world being massacred by the imperialist West. "Lucidity," verbal protests, petitions, scathing and artful ways of washing one's hands! And to think that after twenty years, in the era of the atomic bomb, the war in Vietnam, famine in India, and the bloody repression of the revolutions in Santo Domingo, the Congo, and Watts, this "respectable" comedy still goes on in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and elsewhere.
The high treason of the pure and of the right-thinking who disdainfuly judge Lyndon B. Johanosn but who will never perform the smallest concrete act to overthrow him! The clear conscience of those who weep over the assassination of Kennedy and the much more terrible assassination of the Vietnamese people, but who will never dare to compromise themselves by joining with the "disruptive youth" who get clubbed down in the streets of the "free world"!
Nothing is so disgusting to me as the lucidity of the members of this new Establishment. And I don't care whether they refuse Nobel Prizes or not. That kind of honesty make me want to vomit. The pharisaism of the rebels in dinner jackets and satin slippers is an admirable complement to the neo-pharaohism of the Soviets who condemn the war in Vietnam and at the same time collaborate with the Americans. What do we care -- we, the hewers of wood, the drawers of water, the cutters of sugar cane, all
the niggers of the entire world -- what do we care about intellectual and moral "trials"? What do you expect us to do with all these piles of papers that "judge" but do not change anything? We need hands, brains, and weapons . . . not bourgeois literature-with-a-bad-cosncience-but-a-fine-lucidity.
--Pierres Vallieres, White Niggers of America, pg 153-154
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
It is an attitude of suspended skepticism that is most commonly held by people who take threat rumours seriously, rather than certainty of belief.
--Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic, pg 43
When most American use the word "cult," they don't do so in its technical sociological or anthropological sense, as simply a new religious group in a society. Instead, when people label a group a "cult," they mean to denote that it is a dangerous, manipulative, secretive, conspiratorial group. Moreover, a cult is seen as a heresy, a threat to decent, traditional cultural values.
--Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic, pg 53
The most crucial support for rumors comes from eyewitness testimonials. There are always people who volunteer eyewitness accounts which seem to verify even the most bizarre rumor stories. They may do so to satisfy a variety of personal motives: to obtain attention and prestige, to express their own fantasy fears, to attack some group they hate, to amuse themselves or others, or to express some kind of mental delusion. However, the collective creation of rumors cannot be fully explained solely on the basis of these personal intentions.
Rumors need to be regarded as a social process of collaborative story telling which expresses people's desires for a consensual explanation of ambiguous circumstances.
--Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic, pg 58/59
In order to avoid vague notions of what constitutes a "rumor-panic," in my research I defined a "rumor-panic" as a collective stress reaction in response to a belief in stories about immediately threatening circumstances. A rumor-panic in a community can be identified by the existence of widely occuring fear-provoked behavior. Examples of fear-provoked behavior include: 1) protective behavior, such as the widespread buying of guns or preventing children from being in public places; 2)
aggressive behavior, such as group attacks on people perceived to be the source of threat, or the destruction of property; and 3) agitated information-seeking at community meeting for "news" about the threat and intensified surveillance of the community by police and vigilante groups of citizens.
--Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic, pg 59
The Satanic cult legend combines the blood ritual myth with another ancient subversion story. This second story tells us about Satan's rebellion against God and his struggle to subvert the souls of men and women, and, thereby, destroy God's moral order. This particular combination of myths has a long history. It was frequently used in scapegoating attacks upon Jews, lepers, and people accused of being heretics or witches. The power of this combination is that it offers both secular and sacred symbols and appeals to both secular professionals and religous traditionalists. The presumed Satanists can be regarded as either dangerous social deviants or as agents of supernatural evil or both.
The danger of such powerful subversion mythology lies in its demand to find scapegoats. Inevitably, real living scapegoats will be found.
--Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic, pg 77
Jungian psychologists call this process "projecting one's shadow." According to this theoretical notion, our "shadow" consists of all those things about ourself which are the opposite of our basic values but nevertheless are still part of our identity. Our "shadow" is everything about which we feel guilt, shame, and regret. It is hidden, in a sense, from our daily thoughts about our conduct because it is too painful to think about. So, we deny the existence of our "shadow" and condemn it by condemning the moral "evils" which most outrage us in others. The essence of this process is denial and projection. As the cliché points out: we hate most those qualities in others which we dislike most in ourselves.
The scapegoat deviance of Satanism can be viewed as a projection of serious unconscious inner conflicts in the feeling of a great many parents about how they relate to their children.
[...]
the essential quality of supposed Satanists is that they do evil things to children. If Satanism is a projected "shadow" for inner conflicts which are difficult to face consciously, then we Americans are telling ourselves that we regret the way we mistreat our children.
--Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic, pg 205
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
As any psychiatrist or consumer of pornography will testify, the kinds of tortures (abasement rituals) documented in photographs at Abu Ghraib prison are familiar in sadistic fantasies and their representation in domination-and-bondage culture. They are deeply rooted in the psyche and readily accessible in the society, but they normally remain confined to imagination or bounded by consensual relations.
In order to have such scenarios be acted out with impunity on unwilling subjects, there must be a climate of permissiveness created by authority figures. Such permission can be granted through direct orders, condoning the behavior, or an attitude of dismissive negligence.
--Report drafted by Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Abu Ghraib Means Triumphalism, 01 Jun 2004
Whether or not the abasement rituals were a matter of explicit or suggestive policy, they occurred within an environment of dismissive negligence. Treatment of prisoners according to international standards was not a top priority of military leaders and bureaucratic defense intellectuals who conceived and have managed the occupation of Iraq. Regarding the consequences of their neglect of their own power and interests, the leaders were short-sighted.
--Report drafted by Dr. Michael A.
Weinstein, Abu Ghraib Means Triumphalism, 01 Jun 2004
The sheer sense of triumphal power does not lead to attempts to exert that power unless there is a reason to do so -- it is possible to sit back and bask in the glories of one's potential supremacy and to act prudently to maintain it through deft interventions. In the case of the occupation of Iraq, the sense of triumphal power was converted into policy through a utopian ideology of American hegemony, explicitly and officially stated in the Bush administration's National Security Strategy in 2002.
The premise of that document is that the military advantage of the United States opens a window of opportunity for the country to eliminate all effective rivals to its power for several generations to come. That window will close unless the United States is willing to undertake pre-emptive wars against perceived threats to its dominance. America's high card is military might and it needs to be played. Might will insure that the rest of the world will have to acquiesce in whatever
interventions are undert aken, and will guarantee their success. Iraq is the first test of the triumphalist doctrine and, perhaps, the last.
--Report drafted by Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Abu Ghraib Means Triumphalism, 01 Jun 2004
The over-valuation of power represented in the premise that the United States is a hegemony able to structure the world according to the perceived interests of its leaders without taking other powers into account leads to dismissiveness toward the political strength of opponents. If one believes oneself able to get what one wants on one's own, one is tempted to deceive, distort, break longstanding rules, reject compromise with potential allies, override opposition, create enemies, neglect
consensus building, underestimate the unfavorable consequences of policies, and otherwise act with impunity. Dismissiveness passes over easily into demonization -- you're either with us or against us, and if you're against us, you're evil and unpatriotic. If, in addition, one believes that one has a monopoly on truth and goodness, one will listen only to oneself, and will ignore everyone else.
--Report drafted by Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Abu Ghraib Means Triumphalism, 01 Jun 2004
The problem for triumphalists is that interests affected adversely by their policies will not buy into the hegemonic scenario and will resist in whatever ways they can. Over-valuation of power inexorably causes backlashes that undermine visionary dreams and eventually results in loss of power in the world for the triumphalist state.
--Report drafted by Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Abu Ghraib Means Triumphalism, 01 Jun 2004
Over-valuation of power breeds fantasy, which breeds adventurism, ending in ad hoc expedients that make the fantasy ever more distant from reality and generate more unpleasant surprises. That has been the story of the Iraq affair.
--Report drafted by Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Abu Ghraib Means Triumphalism, 01 Jun 2004
(Return to Quotations Files Index)
I may look like a longhaired musician, but I know Islamic logic. I studied the Koran as a child, and I continue to go back to it as a source of inspiration for my music. There is absolutely nothing in the Koran that forbids music. On the contrary, the Koran says that the prophet David was given the gift of singing and that when he sang the mountains swayed. Why would God give a prophet such a gift if it were evil? And the Hadith they cite as banning music criticizes things like "idle talk,"
which obvious ly only refers to gossip, not music. I researched and studied this topic and spent two-and-a-half hours discussing it with the most prominent mullah in Peshawar. But instead of responding to my arguments, he just fell back on apocalyptic imagery. I saw through him, but I still treated him respectfully. In fact, he ended our discussion by entreating me "from the heart" not to be angry with him, and asking me to come and see him again. Then he sang a song to me, and asked me to
perform it at my next concert. After two-and-a-half hours of saying music was sinful, he was standing there singing to me.
--Salman Ahmad, founder and leader of the Pakistani rock group Junoon, 2006
The fact is, these mullahs don't really believe what they are saying. They're attacking music because they are afraid of losing their gig. They see a longhaired musician getting 30,000 people at a concert, and they see us as intruding on their market share. In Pakistan, 50 percent of the population is under 25, and they are the ones who are attracted to rock music and videos. When I starting interviewing the students at the madrasas, all they wanted to talk about was Junoon's music. They knew
all the songs, and were asking for my autograph. But once the cameras came on, they all mouthed the same preprogrammed commentary, saying that music was forbidden.
--Salman Ahmad, founder and leader of the Pakistani rock group Junoon, 2006
The kids say what they say because they're poor and they get free food and education from the madrasas. Their parents leave them there and say, "raise them." There's no other social safety net, so the kids have no choice but to echo the party line. But when the mullahs aren't watching, they watch satellite TV, discuss cricket matches, and do all the other things that normal kids do. If they were provided with any other economic opportunities, they wouldn't be there. Even though all music is
banned in Peshawar, there are three or four rock bands from there that have made videos that are running on satellite music channels in Pakistan. I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't be sure, but I think the mullahs are losing.
--Salman Ahmad, founder and leader of the Pakistani rock group Junoon, 2006
Keep this in mind, once one scapegoat has been eliminated, another one has to be found.
--Jeffrey Ashman 29 Nov 1993
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided
responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.
--Kevin Baker, The Past and Future of A Right-Wing Myth, 15 Jul 2006
The Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, has an amazing visual impact. No matter how many times you hear the number of casualties, it's nothing compared to seeing the names. It's too much to deal with - it's overwhelming, and it's meant to be. It's meant to show you, one name at a time, the costs of war
--Bloodletters.com anti-censorship web page, introductory paragraph
Whoever you are, there is some younger person who thinks you are perfect. There is some work that will never be done if you don't do it. There is someone who would miss you if you were gone. There is a place that you alone can fill.
--Jacob M. Braude
It is long accepted by the missionaries that morality is inversely proportional to the amount of clothing people wore.
--Alex Carey
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
--Edith Cavell
[Her last words before she was executed by the Germans in 1915. --Anita Roddick]
There's a trope that I hear a lot among people who support same-sex marriage. It goes like this: "What are these people so afraid of? How does same-sex marriage destroy marriage? How on earth could my marriage in any way affect anybody else's?" Or, when spoken by heterosexual supporters of same-sex marriage: "How on earth could somebody else's marriage in any way affect mine?"
Of course I see what they're getting at. And I certainly appreciate the sentiment and support behind the statement. But I actually think it's somewhat simplistic, maybe even a bit naive. I think same-sex marriage does, and will, have an effect on opposite-sex marriage.
Not in an immediate cause-and-effect way, of course. When Adam and Stephen get married in Massachusetts, it doesn't send out magical death-rays across the country to destroy the marriage of Alan and Evelyn in Kansas.
But I think it has an effect. Not a trivial one, either. And I think the movement to legalize same-sex marriage does itself a disservice by acting like it doesn't.
Here's why.
In order for our society to accept or even tolerate same-sex marriage, a lot of fairly basic, deep-rooted ideas have to change. The way we define family. The way we think of what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman. The importance of sex and sexual fulfillment. What we consider natural and normal. Etc., etc., etc.
All of these things shape our practice of marriage, our understanding of what it is and what it's for. And in order for us to accept or even tolerate same-sex marriage, all of them will need to change.
Thus changing the shape of marriage.
All marriage.
--Greta Christina, Greta Christina's Blog. 02 Oct 2007
I'm embarrassed to say I long ago stopped reading this story of enormous human tragedy and significant global consequence. Why is that? Some of it is my personal failure. I'm callous, parochial, and maybe even stupid. But more of it may be my--our--professional failure.
There is little doubt that the nature of a person's religious universe shapes and orders his or her understanding of the physical one. We know the Catholic church for centuries fought scientific discovery, certain that questioning ancient preconceptions about nature also questioned aspects of the supernatural. This way of looking at things continues into the twenty-first century, especially in the gulag of creepy places that is George Bush's America, places where they discuss topics like the
Mark of the Beast in hushed tones.
--John Chuckman, Seeking the evil one, 28 Apr 2004
It was that sly, clever Voltaire who declared, "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him." A slight altering of his words tailors them to the American experience. Simply remove the word God and put Devil in its place, for, although America is sometimes called a God-fearing nation, Devil-fearing is nearer the truth.
--John Chuckman, Seeking the evil one, 28 Apr 2004
For many years, America enjoyed the blessing of having Communism against which to rage and threaten. It made for a balanced, harmonious universe: America as God's Kingdom, ready with sword and buckler to defeat the Evil One, and all those other nations out there providing an unsaved mob to fill America's tent and contribute to the mighty battle.
Communism as Evil One played to rave reviews for decades, but all good things do come to an end, including the planet itself if you embrace the tortured, perhaps psychotic, visions of the Book of Revelation.
America's new Official Evil One is a little difficult to define, but some ambiguity likely serves the cause well. After all, those Americans who believe in speaking in tongues, as does the current Attorney General of the United States, don't specify the languages. Any babble will do. It is clear, however, that America's new Great Awakening has to do with Islam and people wearing strange headgear. In the humble, but direct, language of places like the Midwest and Texas, it's about
turban-heads. Unlike god less Communists, this newly discovered slithering mass of evil believes in God, but it might just as well not since it calls him by the wrong name and reads the wrong holy book.
--John Chuckman, Seeking the evil one, 28 Apr 2004
The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.
But the Christian nationalist narrative has a fatal flaw: it is based on revisionist history that does not stand up under scrutiny. The bad news is that to true believers, it does not have to stand up to the facts of history to be a powerful and animating part of the once and future Christian nation. Indeed, through a growing cottage industry of Christian revisionist books and lectures now dominating the curricula of home schools and many private Christian academies, Christian nationalism
becomes a central feature of the political identity of children growing up in the movement. The contest for control of the narrative of American history is well underway.
--Frederick Clarkson, History is Powerful - Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters
Well, burning people alive was a specialty of the competing churches in Europe after the Reformation, a charming custom that Puritans brought to the land that would become America. The practice has gone through many changes and refinements, and it is jealously retained by America's Hi-tech Army of Roundheads. As I write this, they are using helicopter gunships to burn and blow up women and children in Fallujah.
--John Chuckman, Seeking the evil one, 28 Apr 2004
We dutifully report each day's events, every one a bit more horrible than the last, and pretty soon all begin to look and sound alike....
Yes, I care about man's inhumanity to man, but I care more about whether this latest event brings the world or the U.S. closer to the brink. A reader--even a high-minded, liberal thinking one with a worldview--wants to know, "What does this mean to me?"
--Doug Clifton, executive editor, Miami Herald, in an e-mail to his staff at the height of the genocide, Jul 1995, and which appeared in Harper's
Saying it's your job don't make it right
--Cool Hand Luke
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
--Ann Coulter, Columnist, National Review Online, Sept. 13, 2001.
God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it! It's yours.'
--Ann Coulter, on Hannity and Colmes
As I think about the conflicts across the globe these days, whether it be in Iraq, Israel and Palestine, Chechnya, India and Pakistan or even the recent war in Yugoslavia, one fact stands out like a sore thumb.
All of these wars are being driven by right-wing religious fundamentalism.
Church and state are one.
Terrorism is driven not by greed, or lust for power, but rather religious zeal.
--Mark Cripps, Religious crusades in the 21st century, circa Oct 2004
In the United States, it is the ultra-conservative right-wing religious groups that hold the strings of power in the Bush government. It is this very large group that supports the war in Iraq. They view this war as a religious crusade. Ironically, however, the Iraq government under Saddam Hussein was more of an oligarchy than a theocracy.
--Mark Cripps, Religious crusades in the 21st century, circa Oct 2004
When I was is Yugoslavia in 1997, I saw first hand the brute force of religious fundamentalism. Christian Catholic versus Muslim versus Christian Orthodox.
I have found myself wondering each and every day since that traumatic experience how the atrocities, violence and destruction committed during that war could be in the name of any god.
--Mark Cripps, Religious crusades in the 21st century, circa Oct 2004
Governments and the media have suggested root causes for the ongoing conflicts are a derivative of economic problems (e.g., poverty, under-development), or as legacies of colonialism and the Cold War (e.g., lack of democratic institutions, systematic exclusions of minorities, institutionalized political inequalities). The role of religious differences in conflicts is thereby dismissed as secondary and trivialized.
But when people are poor and oppressed, where else do they have to turn but to religion?
--Mark Cripps, Religious crusades in the 21st century, circa Oct 2004
Until governments in this modern age are able to shed the influence of religion from politics, I expect to be thinking about the conflicts around the world for a long time, and wondering what's the point? All in the name of God? How sad that we humans can take something as wonderful as faith and turn it into a reason to kill.
--Mark Cripps, Religious crusades in the 21st century, circa Oct 2004
Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.
--State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 22 Aug 2001
Moral panics about sex don't often deal with issues like the availability of contraceptives to people based on their economic level or racial background. They don't deal with the underlying complexity of abortion or teen pregnancy. They're a remarkable diversion from very real problems that affect human beings, and they can divert attention and resources away from those problems.
--Mary deYoung, professor of sociology, Grand Valley State University, Michigan
Moral panics about sex don't often deal with issues like the availability of contraceptives to people based on their economic level or racial background. They don't deal with the underlying complexity of abortion or teen pregnancy. They're a remarkable diversion from very real problems that affect human beings, and they can divert attention and resources away from those problems.
--Mary deYoung, professor of sociology, Grand Valley State University, Michigan
Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
--Ani DiFranco
Antisemitism is a real and ignoble part of America's cultural heritage. It was brought to the New World by he first settlers, instilled by Christian teachings, and continually reinforced by successive waves of Prtestants and Cahtholics who pupulatee american shores. Like a genetic disease, it has been transmitted from one generationto the next, but, like a folk tale, it has been added to, transformed, and adapted to particular times, places, and circumstances. It has been present in Christian societies for almost two millennia but its manifestations have varied according to historic circumstances. One or more of the following symptoms, however, is used as an excuse whenever the disease occurs: the Jew is the Christ-killer, the economic exploiter, the eternal alien, the subversive element within Christian civilization, or the embodiment of evil.
Although hostility toward Jews predates the christian era, it is the Christian image of the Jew that has dominated the consciousness of the western world. That image took over a thousand years to draw, and another three or four centuries to complete the most extraordinary details. By the middle of the fourteenth century the perception of the "perfidious" Jew had been so thoroughly embedded in the mind of Christian Europe that seven hundred years later its essential ingredients still remain in
place.
--Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, pg xix
You'd think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek," "good will toward men," "blessed be the peacemakers" and "judge not lest you be judged."
Yet somehow I'm not getting a peace, charity, tolerance and forgiveness vibe from the conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office.
I'm getting more the feel of a vengeful mob - revved up by rectitude - running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels.
--Maureen Dowd, Slapping the Other Cheek, 14 Nov 2004
Men fear their own likeness, that is the source of racism.
--Jean-Pierre Dupuy, quoted in The Traitor and The Jew, pg 49
You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.
--Meister Eckhart, theologian (c. 1260-1327)
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
--Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
No one has ever become poor by giving.
--Anne Frank, Holocaust diarist (1929-1945)
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
--Anne Frank, Holocaust diarist (1929-1945)
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
--John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - )
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
--John Kenneth Galbraith
If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.
--Samuel P. Ginder, US navy captain
When citizens distract themselves from economic disruption by focusing not on common matters of public policy but on personal matters of sexual purity, social historians call it a "moral panic" -- and, from the Starr report, which almost cost us a president, to the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, the U.S. has had a runaway panic on its hands for at least a decade. Unfortunately, American journalism is making it worse -- in part by covering precisely the wrong stories about sex and
politics.
--E.J. Graff, Monkey Business and Moral Panic, Columbia Journalism Review, 12 Oct 2005
When is a scandal merely voyeurism, and when is it an invitation for investigative journalism? In theory, most of us agree: on the one hand, the media should never cover consensual and private adult behavior, even when it might seem unsavory. On the other, the media should always cover coercive or criminal behavior, especially when it abuses public power or reveals official hypocrisy. But in practice, for the last decade, the American media have been getting it backward.
--E.J. Graff,
Monkey Business and Moral Panic, Columbia Journalism Review, 12 Oct 2005
(Islam) is a very evil and wicked religion; wicked, violent and not of the same God (as Christianity).
--Rev. Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, November 2001.
A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them, by selecting, isolating, and emphasizing an aspect of another people's life, and making it symbolize their difference.
--William Green, and reprinted in The Origin of Satan, pg xviv
Of course, when I talk to God, I ask for mercy for myself. For everyone else I ask for justice.
--Aaron Goldblatt
How many major corporations are there where there's major holdings of Jewish interest? Take the top 500 corporations. You know darned well there's virtually none. If you want to relate to the Bank of America, I'll tell you this, and this keeps my head firmly screwed on: The Bank of American grows about the size of our bank every six weeks.
--Bram Goldsmith, one time chairman of City National Bank of Beverly Hills, and quoted in Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death, by Robert Scheer,
pg 40
While many, if not most, so-called evangelicals are conservative, it's not true of all evangelicals. The evangelical right doesn't have a monopoly on "moral values," nor do they have a monopoly on proper and rigorous biblical interpretation.
--Sean Gonsalves, What it Means to be 'Evangelical', 09 Nov 2003
In fact, having been deeply steeped in a fundamentalist religious tradition my entire life, I'll go so far as to say that these Bible-thumpers are just that - people who thump on the Bible without bothering to open it up and wrestle with the prophetic tradition contained within.
--Sean Gonsalves, What it Means to be 'Evangelical', 09 Nov 2003
Young men pressed into the service of empire have always paid for it with their lives. Rudyard Kipling's epitaph for them still resonates today:
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
Although we say we believe in God, we really believe in man. I've lived in Washington D.C. for thirty years and I hear this all the time. They never verbalize it quite this way, but what they're saying is, "If we just get the right man in the White House, and the right people in the Supreme Court and Congress, we've got the kingdom of God." This concerns me a great deal.
--Richard Halverson, former Senate Chaplain, 1994
A large percentage of those who choose to be police officers go into the field in order to exercise control and authority over others. They are taught from the earliest days at the police academy that communities of color are dangerous, crime-infested places -- the perfect places in which to demonstrate that authority. Combine that with the so-called "blue wall of silence," the unwillingness for one cop to break ranks with another, and you have a recipe for explosion.
--Ronald Hampton,
excecutive director of the national Black Police Officers Association, and reprinted in In Our Own Best Interest, pg 157
The belief, on which much apologetics tends to be based, is that everyone must believe in something. This is the Constantian assertion that religious belief is unavoidable. Constantine knew that if people were no longer classically pagan, they would have to be made imperially Christian. You cannot run a world without people believing in something. Our best minds were enlisted in the Constantian enterprise of making the faith credible to the powers-that-be so that Christians might now have a
share in those powers. After all, we would never be culturally significant if we Christians talked a language unintelligible to the Empire. Apologetics is based on the political assumption that Christians somehow have a stake in transforming our ecclesial claims into intellectual assumptions that will enable us to be faithful to Christ while still participating in the political structures of a world that does not yet know Christ. Transform the Gospel rather than ourselves.
--Stanley
Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens
We live in 2005 and, then again, not. All over the globe, women live in repressed circumstances in which they are chattel, and barely educated, entitled, equal or free. Laura Bush is to be applauded for her outreach to these women, and bringing increased attention and guaranteed rights. We should all be doing more.
Many religions, in their orthodoxy, and many cultures, in their antiquity, are more fearful of women than of any bombs. They wish to keep them weak.
So women are kept out of the mosque, pushed upstairs at the temple, excluded from the church's inner sanctum. Why their silence is treasured in the name of faith remains a mystery for the ages.
Here, in our land of infinite possibilities, we need to be more noble, and rise above baser instincts toward suppression. Criticism, certainly; well-reasoned arguments, surely. But every time someone attacks a woman with personal invective, simply for being strong and smart, suspect a coward shrouded in ignorance and fearful of change.
--Karen Heller, in a review of a book about Hilary Clinton, 13 Jul 2005
In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
--Herodotus, historian
It is my duty to report all that is said; but I am not obliged to believe it all alike.
--Herodotus, Greek historian, c. 440 B.C.
The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.
--Bill Hicks
Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without a belief in a devil.
--Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Live truth instead of professing it.
--Elbert Hubbard
Stopping genocide doesn't commit America to intervene everywhere. It actually sets the bar to intervention very high and justifies the use of force only when large numbers of civilians are facing extermination, mass deportation or massacre and where force can actually turn the situation around.
--Michael Ignatieff, journalist
...anytime the public enforcers become the enemy we all need to get mad as hell and make sure something is done to stop it or get ready to start living in a police state. Power is as addictive as hemp.
--Tom Jones
The ideologues in Washington think that the invasion can't go wrong, but their moral certitude is going to clash with realities on the ground.
--Raad al-Kadiri, Petroleum Finance Co., quoted in Wall Street Journal, Feb 2003
Take a look at yourself as a thinker. Psychologists have shown that different people take different general approaches toward evaluating information. One of the ways in which we differ relates to how we organize and structure our beliefs and attitudes, and this affects how we view the new information we read about. For example, Milton Rokeach has found that some people, whom he calls closed-minded or dogmatic, are characterized by
1. a rigid manner of thinking and sharply defined difference between what they believe and what they don't believe
2. unqualifed rejection of unacceptable beliefs, no matter how little or how much the beliefs differ from their own
3. lumping of conflicting views without differentiating between them
4. a view of the world as threatening and hostile
5. a regarding for authority figures as absolute and evaluation of other people according to whether they accept or reject the authority figure
--Jeffrey Katzer, Kenneth H. Cook, Wayne W. Crouch, Evaluating Information, pg 45
[And continued to quotation below]
Naturally, few people are completely dogmatic. People vary in their degree of dogmatism and in their ability to be open-minded. A revealing trait of dogmatic individuals is that they are not able to perceive differences between the attributes of a message. In other words, they are not able to evaluate information independent of the source.
--Jeffrey Katzer, Kenneth H. Cook, Wayne W. Crouch, Evaluating Information, pg 45
The late Rev. Jerry Falwell was one of the most powerful men in American religious and political life. He was also an avowed segregationist, contending that Africans were the cursed descendants of Ham, and worthy only of subservience to white people. He was an adamant opponent of civil rights legislation, calling the Civil Rights Act a "civil wrong."
His segregationist ardor became inconvenient when he sought a national audience. He removed many of his sermons from the 1950s and 1960s from his Liberty University archive. His lies paid off as the media made Falwell the Christian spokesman for all issues related to religion and politics. They soft-pedaled or even ignored his attacks on the civil rights movement. Yet Falwell's followers were under no misapprehension. They knew what their man wanted and followed in his foot steps.
--Margaret Kimberley, Falwell and Savage Christians, 31 May 2007
Mark Uhl, a student at Liberty University, was in possession of homemade bombs when he was arrested at Falwell's funeral. He reportedly planned to use them against any protesters who might disrupt the festivities. [...]
While Americans have been told to fear Islam and all things Muslim, Christians are riding around with home made bombs. The Uhl story was mentioned by the media for only a day or two. The threat from Christians who publicly express a willingness to die for their faith goes unreported.
--Margaret Kimberley, Falwell and Savage Christians, 31 May 2007
The terror attack that took place on September 11, 2001 was an aberration in more ways than one. Muslims were the perpetrators, but that is usually not the case. The purveyors of hate and violence in America are almost always Christians.
Recently members of that same group had a collective hissy fit about Muslims. A Pew poll indicated that a small number of American Muslims, a minority of only 8 percent, considered suicide bombing acceptable under certain circumstances. The vast majority, 78 percent, said suicide bombing against civilian targets was never acceptable.
The selective outrage was immediate, but few commentators pointed out what Christians tell pollsters about their urge to maim and kill. Most Christians, 65 percent of Protestants and 72 percent of Catholics, believe that torture is justifiable under certain circumstances. Nearly half of Americans, 46 percent, believe that it may be acceptable to deliberately target civilian populations in war time. An average of 75 percent of Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco believe that such
attacks are never acceptable.
--Margaret Kimberley, Falwell and Savage Christians, 31 May 2007
Christians perpetrated the crusades, the inquisition, the slave trade and imperial adventures too numerous to mention. It may be comforting to pat ourselves on the back and consign those behaviors to past centuries. We are living in the 21st century after all. Who would use the name of the Christian God to justify mass killing? A majority of modern day American Christians, that's who.
Perhaps the argument used against Muslims should be applied to Christians instead. Their religion has been hijacked by fundamentalist fanatics while the non-fanatics remain silent. The term clash of civilizations is definitely a misnomer. There can be no clash unless both sides are in fact civilized. Any assertion of American civilization is clearly open to question.
--Margaret Kimberley, Falwell and Savage Christians, 31 May 2007
Fundamentalist Islam remains an enigma precisely because it has confounded all attempts to divide it into tidy categories. "Revivalist" becomes "extremist" (and vice versa) with such rapidity and frequency that the actual classification of any movement or leader has little predictive power. They will not stay put. This is because fundamentalist Muslims, for all their "diversity," orbit around one dense idea. From any outside vantage point, each orbit will have its apogee and perigee. The West
thus sees movements and individuals swing within reach, only to swing out again and cycle right through every classification. Movements and individuals arise in varied social and political circumstances, and have their own distinctive orbits. But they will not defy the gravity of their idea.
--Martin Kramer, The Drive for Power, Jun 1996, reprinted in Middle East: Opposing Viewpoints, pg 72
There is a struggle for human freedom to be waged not only against external centers of irresponsibile power but against those equally irresponsible internal forces which in varying degrees dominate the mind and heart of every man. Because of them, man may be free of all arbitary external controls, yet live under the power of internal compulsions which make of him an automaton; insatiable in his needs, inflexible in his methods, and incapable of learning intellectually or of maturing
emotionally through e xperience. Because of these inner processes, man may be an absolute monarch or constitutionally elected president, an abstract artist, or a prescise scientist, a criminal or a clergyman, yet not possess the greatest of all freedoms -- the freedom to change.
--Dr. L.S. Kubie, and reprinted in Is It Really So?, pg 63
On May 26, 2004 -- more than a year after the invasion of Iraq -- the Times published a belated semi-mea-culpa article by two top editors, including executive editor Bill Keller. The piece contended that the Times, along with policy makers in Washington, were victims rather than perpetrators: "Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one."
Sociologists define a moral panic as mass hysteria generated by exploiting people's worst fears, often for the sake of an underlying political agenda.
For example, remember the furor in the 1980s over the supposedly widespread satanic ritual abuse of children by daycare workers and parents? It turned out to be a series of hysterical events that have since been entirely discredited -- although some of the accused remain in prison.
Moral panics have taken place throughout history. From 1730 to 1731, for example, scores of homosexuals were burned alive in a sex panic that rose out of the fear that God would punish "sodomy" by allowing the North Sea to break through the dikes that defend Holland. Two hundred and fifty trials were held, and 75 men and boys were executed -- frequently burned alive.
Every moral panic has a few essential elements, most of which were first outlined and named in British sociologist Stanley Cohen's 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. One or more groups -- researchers call them "moral entrepreneurs" -- start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing cultural values. For example, the civil rights and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, which dramatically altered society's rules about sex, race, and gender, inspired a fearful moral panic
among many conservatives who believed the outcome of these movements would be the total dissolution of western civilization.
--Cindy Kuzma, Sex, Lies, and Moral Panics, 28 Sep 2005
Form the dawn of civilization onwards, crowds have awlway undergone the influcence of illusions. . . . The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy illusions is always their victim.
--Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd
Each cultural group sets up its rules for virtuous behavior, sanctifies actions which contribute to the preservation of the hive. Society is based on the control and direction of socio-sexual behavior. The particular soc-sex virtues of the group emotional, symbolic, and stylistic are usually determined early in the group's history by dominant leaders who impose their fourth imprint sexual eccentricities on the culture. St. Paul didn't like women. Mohammed was polygamous-exploitive. Luther
was paternal. Since most modern societies have been codified by menopausal, power-oriented men, the moral systems tend to be prudish, exploitive and chauvinistic. Social responsibilities thus determine virtue and sin which are always sexual in nature.
--Dr. Timothy Leary
The peacocks were in cages in a zoo and the people were staring there, admiring their beauty and their color and their carriage and so on. A flock of sparrows was flying over; and one of the little sparrows looked and said, "Hey, those are birds and look how people are admiring them. Nobody looks at us at all. I'm going to do gown and see why." So he flew down; the flock kept flying, but he flew down to take a look. He saw the plumes and so on of the beautiful birds. And as the peacocks were strutting, one of the plumes fell out. So this little sparrow picked up the plume and stuck it in his tail and started to strut with the peacocks. Now people started to laugh. They thought it was hilarious. He realized that they knew he wasn't a peacock . . and now he flew and flew and tried to catch up with his flock that had continued to fly. And the poor little sparrow died of a broken heart.
And I think that sometimes some of us [Jews] think that we are peacocks in the eyes of other people. But still they [Gentiles] think we're sparrows.
--Sidney Levine; quoted in Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death, by Robert Scheer, pg 39
Robertson is one of the chief purveyors of religious bigotry in America. To reward his outfit with government funding is an insult to every American taxpayer. Robertson was one of the earliest critics of the "faith-based" scheme, but I guess 30 pieces of silver was enough to change his mind.
--Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United for Separation of Church and State
Deceive boys with toys, but men with oaths.
--Lysander (395 B.C.E)
I have no reason to go into the ghetto. One of my grandparents came out of it. I don't want to go back into it. I see these guys with their yarmulkes eating bacon on their salads at the club. They want to become more Jewish, whatever that means. It's not religious -- it's an ethnic thing. What virtue is there in ethnic emphasis? Black isn't more beautiful than white, white isn't more beautiful than black, and we have beautiful Jews and we have stinkers, and so does everybody else. Who's
kidding whom with all this nonsense? You know, it's insecurity, the whole thing is insecurity. Roots, roots, roots -- Baloney!
--Rabbi Magnin; quoted in Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death, by Robert Scheer, pg 34
A futurist is a very giddy man who is shocked into mindless ecstasy each time he comes upon yet another horror waiting to disrupt the lives of everyone. He shrieks that this new invention will create such a state of instability that only he who can adapt to a condition of total transcience will have any chance of survival. The futurists know nothing of the upsets and catastrophes that have afflicted mankind for as long as we have been living on the planet. He assures us that we are the first
people in all time to be threatened by total disaster.
--Andrew Malcolm, The Tyranny of the Group, pg 161
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
--Malcolm X
Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars -- caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms.
--Malcolm X
The only reason to be in politics is to be out there all alone and be proven right.
--Chris Matthews
Today the real test of power is not the capacity to make war but the capacity to prevent it.
--Anne O'Hare McCormick
Between the ridiculously popular incarnation of clean-slate Christianity currently permeating American culture, and books catering to the idea that it's possible to live a sin-free life once one's been "saved," it's no wonder there are so many sanctimonious pricks running around, judging and condemning those of us who are just trying to live the lives we were given and exerting no effort to hide that we're flawed and make the occasional mistake.
The sad and infuriating thing about these wankers is that they don't even understand the most basic principle of Christianity--if there were such a thing possible as a clean-slate life, there wouldn't be Christians in the first place. Jeesy Carpenter didn't crawl up on that cross because no one would ever sin again; he did it because they would.
That's the whole raison d'etre for the religion so important to them they can't read Harry stinking Potter. And they don't even seem to care.
--Melissa McEwan, The Washington Post indulges its fantasies of a Harry Potter book with Christian overtones, at the web journal Shakesville, 19 Jul 2007
It's been said that those who use the Bible as an excuse to pass laws against private sexual conduct that's none of their business should read the entire book instead of just the dirty parts.
--Joel McNally, Far-Right Politicians Give Christians a Bad Name, 09 Oct 2005
Of course, reading the Bible doesn't do any good if people can misinterpret poetic language that encourages love and compassion for one another as somehow advocating the exact opposite - hatred and intolerance.
--Joel McNally, Far-Right Politicians Give Christians a Bad Name, 09 Oct 2005
It is an injustice to good-hearted Christians everywhere that politicians today define moral issues in the most small-minded, divisive ways imaginable.
--Joel McNally, Far-Right Politicians Give Christians a Bad Name, 09 Oct 2005
There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.
--Donella Meadows
I can't get that picture of England [pointing at a hooded Iraqi man's genitals] out of my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, we were morally superior to them.
--Mary Jo Melone, columnist for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, 07 May 2004
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
--Stanley Milgram
Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted systematically to answer the question with which this column began. [Are religious societies better than secular ones?] But in the current edition of the Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called Gregory Paul tests the hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush administration, that religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion." He compared data from 18 developed democracies, and discovered that the Christian fundamentalists couldn't have got it more wrong. "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion ... None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction."
Within the United States "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the Northeast where ... secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms."
Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion -- especially absolute belief -- and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and adolescent abortion. Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the under-5s in Portugal, the U.S and Ireland and put the U.S. -- the most religious country in his survey -- in a league of its own for gonorrhea and syphilis. Strangest of all for those who believe that Christian societies are "pro-life" is the finding that "increasing
adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator ... Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data."
--George Monbiot, Better Off Without Him?, 13 Oct 2005
The rich countries in which sexual abstinence campaigns, generally inspired by religious belief, are strongest have the highest early pregnancy rates. The U.S. is the only rich nation with teenage pregnancy levels comparable to those of developing nations: it has a worse record than India, the Philippines and Rwanda. Because they're poorly educated about sex and in denial about what they're doing (and so less likely to use contraceptives), boys who participate in abstinence programmes are
more likely to get their partners pregnant than those who don't.
--George Monbiot, Better Off Without Him?, 13 Oct 2005
. . . if we are to accept the findings of this one -- and so far only -- wide survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.
--George Monbiot, Better Off Without Him?, 13 Oct 2005
God gave us the heavens, and by studying their movement, we learned science, and from science, we learned to make life comfortable and even munificent. Organized religion, on the other hand, separates God from nature, substitutes faith for science and belittles God's gift of human intelligence by promoting ignorance.
--David Morris, co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, Thomas Paine and Intelligent Design, 17 Nov 2005
I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.
--Joe Mullally, computer salesman
The hardest lesson we need to learn in life and the one we generally fail to heed, is not to make judgments on superficial appearance. We know better, we've been embarrassed before. We have miscalculated a thousand times in ways that have hurt ourselves and others. And each time we afterwards slap ourselves on the forehead swearing we will never do it again. But of course we will, because we are only human. The best we can do is restrain ourselves from the most egregious examples--the casual
prejudices which threaten at any moment to veer off into bigotry. One Sunday morning that ugly bug sacrificed herself to teach me the painful lesson one more time.
--Patrick Murfin
The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?
--A.J. Muste, reprinted in Censored 2003, pg 253
In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
--Martin Niemoeller 1892-1984
Few women today would trade places with the typical 1950s woman and mother, the one fervently idealized by so-called "pro-family" groups. In the 1950s, women didn't approach parity with men in education and, guess what, their housework time was constant -- despite having new "time-saving" technologies. This was the era in which birth rates soared and doubled the time devoted to child care. And with women assigned to endless tasks of the home, men shouldered the full responsibility of supporting the family economically. One dire consequence was that one in four Americans in the mid-1950s lived in poverty. By the end of the 1950s, one in three American children lived in poverty.
Not surprisingly, researchers in the '50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be "very happy" in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the '50s was that many couples didn't really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy. With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion -- the exact legislative agenda of today's pro-life movement! -- teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the '50s than today.
Postponing or planning marriage and children have allowed women to get a foothold in the workforce. And this has led to important benefits: They have made their families wealthier. Today, the rate of poverty is half what it was in the 1950s. In fact, now if a husband is the sole breadwinner the family is four times more likely to be poor than one in which the wife brings home an income too. Dual income homes earn nearly two-thirds more than that of families in which the husband alone works.
Consequently, the percentage of children living in poverty has decreased 50 percent since 1959. Money may not be everything. But it's something.
--Cristina Page, Contraception Saves Money and Marriages. 21 Dec 2006
Today, more husbands count on their wives to bring home a significant share of the family wealth; nearly one in four women now earn more than their husbands. With this, men have options to leave a negative work environment, change careers, take more career risks and be more involved, indeed better, fathers than ever before. You'd never know this if you listened to the so-called pro-family groups set on convincing us that the way we live now is tearing our country apart. Because of the pro-choice movement's efforts, we now have a true Family Man, the very one the right wing seems to still be looking for.
Men have as much at stake as women (if not more) with the religious right's intensifying attacks against family planning. A University of Michigan study found that children's time with their fathers increased significantly only in families in which the mother worked outside the home. Fathers today spend much more time with their children than '50s fathers -- a difference of more than one hour each day. And most, by the way, are aware of this difference. Eighty-four percent report that they spend more time with their kids and get more joy out of fatherhood than their fathers did.
So much joy that the vast majority of men, 72 percent, say they would sacrifice pay and job opportunities for more time with their families. Dads today are even more affectionate with their children: 60 percent hug their school-aged kids every day and 79 percent of fathers tell their children they love them several times a week. States James Levine, who heads the Fatherhood Project. "Children whose fathers are involved with them show better education achievement, fewer problems in school, and they're better off socially."
So much for the break-up of the family caused by sexual liberation and pro-choice, pro-birth control movement. Just the opposite is true. The family is more financially secure, and more enjoyed than ever before. And what better family value is there than valuing the family?
--Cristina Page, Contraception Saves Money and Marriages. 21 Dec 2006
The anthropologist Robert Redfield has argued that the worldview of many people consists esentially of two pairs of binary oppositions: human/nonhuman and we/they. These two are often correlated, as Johnathan Z. Smith observes, so that "we" equals "human" and "they" equals "not human."
--Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan, pg xviii
This vision of cosmic struggle, forces of good contending against forces of evil, derived originally from Jewish apocalyptic sources and was developed, as we have seen, by sectarian groups like the Essenes as they struggled against the forces they saw ranged against them. This split cosmology, radically revising earlier monotheism, simultaneously involved a split society, divided between "sons of light," allied with the angels, and "sons of darkness," in league with the power of evil.
Followers of Jesus adopted the same pattern. Mark, as we have seen, tells the story of Jesus as the conflict between God's spirit and the power of Satan, manifest in the opposition Jesus encountered from evil spirits and evil people alike. Each of the gospels in its own way invokes this apocalyptic scenario to charactrize conflicts between Jesus' followers and the various groups each author perceived as opponents. We have seen, too, that as the movement became increasingly Gentile, converts
turned this sectarian vocabulary against other enemies--against pagan magistrates and mobs engaged in bitter struggle with the growing Christian movement, and against various groups of dissident Christians, called heretics--or, in Paul's words, "servants of Satan."
--Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan, pg 179
Christians in later generation turned weapons forged in first-century conflict against other enemies. But this does not mean that they simply replaced one enemy with another. Instead, Christian tradition tended to accumulate them.
--Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan, pg 179
When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.
I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine -- in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.
I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light -- truth, understanding, knowledge -- is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.
I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world -- into the black places in the hears of men -- and change some things in some people. Perhaps [others] may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.
--Alexander Paraderos to Robert Fulghum, and reprinted in It Was On Fire When I Lay Down It, pg 172-173
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
--Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine
The Christian right in America is the mirror image of the Islamic fundamentalists.
--Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, Nov 2004
My experience of living with people of diverse religions and cultures taught me that one will never be at peace with the other if one is at war with oneself. This simple truth is the essence of my message to Muslims throughout the world: Know who you are and who you want to be, and start working with who you are not. Find common values and build with fellow citizens a society based on diversity and equality. The moment you understand that being a Muslim and being European, or American, are
not mutually exclusive, you enrich your society.
--Tariq Ramadan, What Does America have to Fear from Me?, 31 Aug 2004
The us-versus-them mentality of fundamentalists all over the world is the product of ... [an] understanding that central authority must be defended at all costs in a culture which has no other means to resolve its members' differences.
--Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors, 1993
"Intelligent design" is not a scientific concept. It's a religious concept. And because I don't subscribe to that particular brand of religion, I feel that I and my daughter, my family, are being ridiculed, and my daughter feels the pressure. I reserve the right to teach my child about religion... And I have faith in myself and in my husband and in my pastor to do that, not the school system.
--Christy Rehm, plaintiff in the ACLU's intelligent design case taking place in Dover,
Pennsylvania, Oct 2005
Being multiracial has allowed me to see things from both sides of the color line. It opens my mind to differences of all types, so that I don't prejudge anything or anyone. That's something I wish we could all do. If I could have any wish, it would be to be able to go inside people's heads and flip the little switch that controls racial categorization and racism. I think people would be surprised at how many more genuine friends they would have if we all met each other in the dark.
--Naomi Reed, as quoted by Donna Jackson Nakazawa, in A New Generation is Leading the Way; Parade, 06 Jul 2003
His eyes had been gouged out, his head smashed in, the skin had been stripped from his lower legs and all his fingers and one ear had been cut off. [...] Police say they suspected Thong Sophal had killed himself.
--Reuter article datelined Mok Mampul, Cambodia, about the torture-murder of that dissident, 1997
Dictators do not appear overnight. They must gradually assume more and more power over time so that the population does not realize what is going on, or does not feel it is worthwhile to object.
But to maintain control, dictators "seduce" their population into greater and greater atrocities, over time. There is more than simply acclimating the population involved to the dictator's agenda. By tricking the population into acceptance of greater and greater atrocities, the dictator will eventually reach a position where the people will be too afraid to examine what they themselves have become. Trapped by the fear of examining themselves, such people turn into the most fanatical of the dictator's supporters. They dare not look at the dictator's evil for to do so is to look at their own. Once the dictator can trick his people past that point, they are his slaves. Hitler used this tactic. So did Stalin.
The people of the United States stand at that point right now. That the US Government is using torture on POWs (just as Hitler did) is beyond argument. One can either stand up and denounce that torture and demand the firing of all who took part in it (and the end of the war), or one is by default complicit, an accessory after the fact, seen by all to condone such barbarism.
Anyone who steps across that line is trapped. Unable to look at what they themselves have become they will refuse to look at what the government has become, indeed will create or accept any justification, no matter how thin and transparent, rather than question that government. And indeed this web site gets email from people who have already crossed that point, and are trying to explain why torture is really necessary "this time".
So, you are down to a choice. There is no more being neutral, or sitting on the fence. As Bush himself said, you are either with him or against him, and unless you are actively against him and his war machine, then he wins by default. Unless you stop them now, sooner or later, Bush and the administration will succeed in turning this nation away from the principles it was founded on, into something powered by fanatics so afraid to look in a mirror that they will inflict any pain on any people, rather than do so.
Time to decide.
--Michael Rivero, The Point Of No Return, circa 2004
Religions are based on stories. The Jewish Religion is based on the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Christian religion adds the story of Christ. The Moslem religion is founded on the stories of Mohammad. Buddhism grew from the story of Buddha. The faith of the religious person is founded on the belief that the story of their religion is historical fact. In contrast, the faith of the spiritual person is nurtured by what their religion's story teaches about man, God and their relationship. Whether their religion's story is fact, metaphor or a combination of both doesn't matter to them.
Spiritual people enthusiastically embrace rational scientific knowledge, accepting evolution as the physical means through which God created all life. The religious person must categorically reject such provable facts because it conflicts with their religion's story that God created everything in 6 days, some 5000 years ago. This acceptance or denial of rational evidence is a wide-ranging marker for distinguishing the religious from the religious-spiritual. For instance, we often hear religious people claim that allowing same-sex marriage would start us down a "slippery slope" towards legalized polygamy, incest and all kinds of other horrible consequences. Religious- spiritual people recognize that such fears are irrational and they themselves see no rationale reason why granting equal rights would threaten the sanctity of their own marriage.
Religions tend to provoke judgment. The purely religious believe that those who don't abide by their laws are inferior, misguided or immoral. The spiritual and religious-spiritual are non-judgmental and tolerant of other people's differences. They believe that all people have the same rights regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. And finally, in the broadest definition, the religious believe their religion holds all the truth and answers. In contrast, the spiritual and
religious-spiritual see life as a God-given opportunity for discovery.
--Jerry Rose, The Answer to Religion in Politics: Spirituality, 06 Jun 2005
Evil is envy or hatred of the good for simply being the good.
--Alice Rosenbaum
It is getting hard to see what fundamentalism has to do with religion.
Take the Beslan carnage. What was it really about except a brutalized nationalism? The attackers' sole demand was for Russia to leave Chechnya. They said they were ready to die because they had lost their families and had nothing to lose. These are not religious motives even if the people holding them are Muslim extremists. It's stunning how many fundamentalist groups are based on creating a strong, transformed state: in Israel, or the Taliban, the (Buddhist) Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka -- and
don't forget U.S. right-wing evangelicals, who carry great weight in the Republican Party and White House. Even bin Ladenism is obsessed with the humiliation of Muslim and especially Arab nations. In a way, it is Arab nationalism for this century, though it cloaks itself in fanatical religious garb.
--Rick Salutin, When Religion is Not, 10 Sep 2004
Malise Ruthven, in his book Fundamentalism, suggests the mindset trivializes and "mundanizes" the "transcendental" sources of religious experience. The point of most religion is not to shift all meaning to a heavenly realm, but to sanctify aspects of life on our level while remaining connected to a "higher" realm. That is what most ritual, prayer and acts of goodness intend. They happen here but have meaning on that other level. Fundamentalism dissolves the tension between levels by wanting
it all right here, right now, in terms of entities (the state of Israel, the axis of evil) that we can see and either embrace or destroy. It's so palpable. Here are the signs, here comes the Antichrist, there go the elect to hover above, now comes the cosmic battle and Bob's your uncle. It makes religion an oddly unmysterious, unawe-inspiring thing, which moves you more as a horror film does than as the mysterium tremendum written about by historian Rudolf Otto: causing you to shudder and
wonder. This only makes you feel icky and fretful. The point about such fundamentalists is not just that they are being un-Christian or un-Muslim with their haughtiness, suicide etc. The point is they have actually secularized religion by --literally -- bringing it down to earth.
--Rick Salutin, When Religion is Not, 10 Sep 2004
Nobody at school knows what to make of me. Gangs of those Irish-Italian-Swede dumpling girls talk to me slowly, through foot-long smiles, swearing how close they've always been to their domestic help. But at the Afro Pride meetings, there's always some sister grumbling out loud about infiltration by funny-featured, white-talking spies.
--Ruth, the daughter of a white, German physicist and a black American singer
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
--William Saroyan
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
--Mario Savio, 03 Dec 1964, Sproul
Hall Steps, U.C. Berkeley
When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think.
--Pat Schroeder
That evil is cruelty and the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself.
--Judith Shklar, and reprinted in What Evil Means to Us, pg 16
Here's what Obama said:
"Somehow we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves in each other. You know, people talk a lot about the federal deficit, but one of the things I always talk about is an empathy deficit."This is no idle observation. It happens to be true. Our capacity for empathy in public life has been diminished, and not solely because of inattention or callousness. Habit, custom, and our political and philosophical theoretical orientations have conspired to make the political sphere a colder place.
Since the Enlightenment, empathy, friendship, intimacy, and companionship have been all but exiled from the political sphere, a place ideally reserved for dispassionate and objective deliberation about brute facts. This was a radical break from classical political theories.
--Glenn W. Smith, Seeing with Tucker Carlson's Eyes, 13 Jul 2007
. . . empathetic bonds between citizens threaten loyalty to the state, or even to lesser organizations like businesses. How many of us have had bosses whose management strategies included the interruption of friendships or alliances among inferiors? Here's how Kurt Riezler, philosopher, pre-World War I assistant to the German chancellor, and friend of Leo Strauss, summed up authority's dread of interpersal bonds among its subjects. His is not an extreme view. He just had the guts to say out loud what other theorists of authority disguised in less blunt language.
"Whichever way friendship is defined in a given society, whether it is considered a private concern or a public matter, it always is a political phenomenon ... friendship can easily become the basis of conspiracy. Every dictator and tyrant is aware of the potential threat of friendship. Dictators know that friendship often provides a bond more enduring than other social bonds and hence can become a power base from which their power can be assailed. In political persecutions and proscriptions of all manner, inquisitors have always included the friends of their primary enemies in their attack. History has numerous examples to support this point. If one becomes a victim of the Stalin purges in Russia, one's friends were likely to be implicated also."
--Glenn W. Smith, Seeing with Tucker Carlson's Eyes, 13 Jul 2007
Tucker Carlson might be very empathetic, have very close friends, be loyal and willing to sacrifice for their betterment. But those qualities don't extend, and shouldn't be extended, to our relationships with others in the political sphere. Citizens are not empathetic friends.
Add to this a dose of insecure masculine fear of intimacy and we can begin to see from Carlson's point of view that Obama's use of the word "empathy" in a political context was jarring and, really, intolerable. Empathy is analogized to pot-smoking. Both put us in a fog and make us less fit to make the kind of tough, hyper-rational, and un-emotional decisions one must make in a dog-eat-dog world. The problem is that Carlson's view, shaped as it is by custom, habit and dominant philosophical
considerations, is wrong. Human beings are not who the Enlightenment thought they were. Reason is emotional. Thought is embodied. Empathy is critical to human development. Children learn language because of networks in their brains which allow them to mimic the movements and utterances of others.
--Glenn W. Smith, Seeing with Tucker Carlson's Eyes, 13 Jul 2007
Empathy allows us to engage in what anthropologists call "shared intentionality." We can work together on a project because I am able - in simple tasks and complex ones as well - to see the task from your point of view and organize my movements to complement yours.
People with brain injuries or development difficulties that inhibit empathy are often unable to engage fully with others in cooperative play or work.
--Glenn W. Smith, Seeing with Tucker Carlson's Eyes, 13 Jul 2007
As George Lakoff has written, our political values are shaped by metaphors extended from models of the ideal family. There is the nurturant model, in which care and responsibility are central, and there is the strict father model, in which obedience and discipline are central. Most people carry both values with them. They are nurturant and empathetic in some parts of their lives and authoritarian in others. For classical thinkers - and to ancient and contemporary members of smaller and less
complex political organizations, tribes, nomads, etc. - there was a place for empathy and more dispassionate authority. By rejecting empathy as inappropriate in political conversation, Tucker Carlson is, in a sense, rejecting a key part of our humanity.
--Glenn W. Smith, Seeing with Tucker Carlson's Eyes, 13 Jul 2007
At a time of growing domestic tension and division, at a time of increased awareness of global interdependence, the failure to recognize the place of empathy and friendship in our political relationships is not just an emotional setback. It may leave us with no friends at all.
--Glenn W. Smith, Seeing with Tucker Carlson's Eyes, 13 Jul 2007
They measure everything by the gold standard, men as well as mules. You never hear of Mr. Smith as a good man, or Mr. Brown as an honest man, or Mr. Jones as a Christian, but Mr. S has twenty thousand million and so on. The more he has, the better he is -- and it matters not how he got it, so he has it.
--Joshua Speed, 1876, during a visit to California
Your greatest power is your ability to choose your own response, no matter what the circumstance.
--Debra St. Claire
The government is ordained by God with the right to promote good and restrain evil. This includes wickedness that exists within the nation, as well as any wicked persons or countries that threaten foreign nations ... Therefore, a government has biblical grounds to go to war in the nation's defense or to liberate others in the world who are enslaved.
--Charles Stanley, former two-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, a close ally of former President George Bush, fervent
supporter of the current president's war on Iraq
Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.
--Wallace Stegner, 1986 essay
The men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom, and the more men who survive the war, the higher the number of men who might speak.
--Anthony Swofford, U.S. Marine sniper, from his book Jarhead
The Nazis had a Jewish problem. We have a drug abuse problem. Actually, 'Jewish problem' was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; 'drug abuse problem' is the name we give to our persecution of people who use certain drugs.
--Thomas Szasz
If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
--Thomas Szasz
Love bombing is a coordinated effort, usually under the direction of leadership, that involves long-term members flooding recruits and newer members with flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually nonsexual touching, and lots of attention to their every remark. Love bombing - or the offer of instant companionship - is a deceptive ploy accounting for many successful recruitment drives.
--Margaret Thaler Singer, psychiatrist, quoted in Jesus 'Love Bombs' You, by Chris Hedges, 23
Apr 2007
Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.
--Paul Tillich in the Saturday Evening Post of 14 June 58:
I guess there are some good people - it's jus' that we don' have nothin' to do with them. I see the little kids in the cars and I feel sorry for them, but when they turn 16 they're evil.
--Unnamed U.S. Marine Corp soldier, prior to the November assault on Fallujah, Nov 2004
Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only ONE day, of modern warfare.
--Peter Ustinov, actor, writer and director (1921-2004)
Lincoln had it right. Our task should not be to invoke religion and the name of God by claiming God's blessing and endorsement for all our national policies and practices -- saying, in effect, that God is on our side. Rather, we should worry earnestly whether we are on God's side.
Those are the two ways that religion has been brought into public life in American history. The first way -- God on our side -- leads inevitably to triumphalism, self-righteousness, bad theology, and, often, dangerous foreign policy. The second way -- asking if we are on God's side -- leads to much healthier things, namely, penitence and even repentance, humility, reflection, and even accountability. We need much more of all those, because these are often the missing values of politics.
--Jim Wallis in the 15 Sep 2004 issue of Sojourners Magazine
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
--Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
--Daniel Webster
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied. Real evil is gloomy, monotonoous, barren, and boring.
--Simone Weil, and reprinted in What Evil Means to Us, pg 99
We can expect violence. The head cleric of St. David's Episcopal Church of Topeka, Kansas came out to support me; five hours later his church was burned to the ground. A synagogue where I spoke was desecrated. My home has been targeted by feces and beer bottles; our tires slashed; dead animals have twice been placed on our front porch. The death threats come in ceaselessly. It is not convenient and safe to confront and defy those in power; I know that but I refuse to back down. They may try
to harm me but I will not go quietly; I will be a Jew from the Warsaw Ghetto, not Berlin. I will be an American from Lexington and Concord, not an American from Halliburton and Blackwater.
--Mikey Weinstein, quoted in Holocaust Jokes & Apocalypse Powerpoints At US Air Force Academy, by Bruce Wilson, 27 Apr 2007
In Christian terms, full humanity has never been associated merely with material substance. Declaring that a human soul comes into being fully formed at the moment of conception is logically at odds with its status as an organ of informed choice and goes against the whole thrust of the born-again movement. What I find so curious about the right-to-life position on the fertilized egg is its astounding materialism: A zygote has neither brain nor mind and no ability whatever to accept or reject
the existence of a supreme being. A "person" -- especially a Christian person -- is a being of free will. To extend that definition to a single cell is theologically absurd.
--Margaret Wertheim, Life Begins at 'Want a Cigarette?', 23 Jun 2005
Conservative Christianity's Legalistic Loopholes: Repent then Die
[...]
The message was clear: You can rape, murder, torture prisoners, bomb civilians, order executions, cut social programs for the poor, persecute gays, feminists, or any racial group you choose, and do anything you please for 75 years or more, then simply whisper a few magic words for a first-class seat in heaven, right next to Mother Teresa.
I rejected this as contrary to Jesus' teachings, [...].
--Dr. Teresa Whitehurst, Fundamentalist Christianity Instills in Millions of American Followers a Depressing-and Dangerous-Nihilism, Feb 2005
Not every teen was immune to rapture threats. Some kids took them seriously and developed the kind of nihilism--the "readiness for death" masking despair borne of terror-displayed by the young man who "didn't care" because "the end is coming". One boy developed such intense fears of being left behind in the coming rapture that he stopped playing with neighborhood friends (they could lead him to sin) and stayed safely in his bedroom, rocking and reading the Bible for hours every day after school.
This boy and the other more "obedient" kids prayed constantly, growing increasingly paranoid about committing even the most minor "sins", e.g., not reading the scriptures before and after school, inadvertently leaving someone out of bedtime prayers, failing to ask a classmate if Jesus was his or her personal savior, etc. These kids worried that some day they'd come home to find their parents gone. GONE. Forever.
--Dr. Teresa Whitehurst, Fundamentalist Christianity Instills in Millions of
American Followers a Depressing-and Dangerous-Nihilism, Feb 2005
For a child raised in fundamentalist "conservative" churches, there is no safe haven. Everyone is a potential threat, not just of contamination of oneself--to burn for all eternity--but of causing the child to suffer the more tangible threat of losing his or her parents, siblings, and grandparents.
The rapture film and others like it strike at the very core of normal childhood needs for security and parental love. Those who succumbed to the rapture threats grew up to be legalistic Christians, paranoid and ever on the watch for sinful people. Contamination by Christians of other denominations was to be avoided at all costs. Imagine, then, how much greater the fear of Catholics (considered "a cult", not "Christian" by many fundamentalists), Jews, Muslims, and other "sinful" citizens. In
Purity We Trust.
--Dr. Teresa Whitehurst, Fundamentalist Christianity Instills in Millions of American Followers a Depressing-and Dangerous-Nihilism, Feb 2005
Google "purity" with names of Bush's conservative advisers and "think tank" writers: Notice how they promote this fearsome concept. Hitler knew the power of "purity", and so do today's fundamentalists: Avoid contamination by whatever means necessary.
--Dr. Teresa Whitehurst, Fundamentalist Christianity Instills in Millions of American Followers a Depressing-and Dangerous-Nihilism, Feb 2005
In our brave new fundamentalist nation, it really doesn't matter anymore how many people you kill, or how much of the earth's environment you destroy. What matters is this and only this: If you don't want to come home one day to an empty house and suffer in the lake of fire for all eternity, you'd better hate all the right people, bomb all the right countries, and back your rapture-ready president in whatever hare-brained scheme he comes up with next.
--Dr. Teresa Whitehurst,
Fundamentalist Christianity Instills in Millions of American Followers a Depressing-and Dangerous-Nihilism, Feb 2005
Life itself is a snare, a temptation of the flesh. Your safest bet is to repent and then die young, before you're Left Behind.
--Dr. Teresa Whitehurst, Fundamentalist Christianity Instills in Millions of American Followers a Depressing-and Dangerous-Nihilism, Feb 2005
Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures, peace is our gift to each other.
--Elie Wiesel
Uncomfortable as it makes people to compare religion with dictatorships, the most dangerous dictatorships of the 20th century were also radically socially conservative in regards to family values and sexuality. Whether it was the Motherland, the Fatherland or the Christian Nation, the same rigid moral message of intolerance runs through them.
Like religious conservatives throughout history and indeed, in the present, they used the state as a coercive tool to force their version of a conscience upon the rest of people. While only one-third of people generally tend to be socially conservative, this does not make a difference to those possessed with the compulsion to force their morality upon all others for their own good. This is not to say fundamentalists and other religious extremists are Nazis or Stalinists, but that they hold
very similar views on these 'family values' and sexuality subjects and employ similar language in their positions and propaganda. They represent similar dangers to free societies as they always have throughout all of western history.
--James Veverka
Because of popular cultural myths and the religious right's propaganda, both misinformed and dishonest, most people don't realize that Nazi Germany and Stalin were on the same page as religious conservatives regarding homosexuals. The anti-gay propaganda of both the religious conservatives and the Nazis is nearly identical. One is religious, the other secular, but the message is the same. The views are the same. The doctrines are the same. The blind hatred is the same. Both embrace rigid
patriarchal family views that see women as men-helpers and baby-makers. Both consider their views "virtues". Both are the moral crusaders to save the family in a nation that is supposedly threatened by decadence (Weimar Germany then and counterculture now).
--Bruce Wilson, Social Conservatism As a Coercive Tool Of The State, 29 Apr 2007
Although abortion has been practiced throughout history, and across cultures, there has been no consistent moral or legal position on it. Abortion was widespread through much of the ancient world. An herb called silphium, a variety of giant fennel, was so effective that during Greek and Roman times it was harvested to extinction. It could not be cultivated and grew only in the deserts of Libya.
Yet toward the end of the Roman Empire, the state began to outlaw abortion and contraception. As the Imperial economy slowed, more and more subjects refused to birth large families. The custom was to sell unwanted infants as slaves, but fewer families were willing to do that. At its height, about twenty percent of the Empire's subjects were slaves.
Empires need slaves. They need armies. They need growth. Inevitably, when women have the power to control their reproduction, they tend to match the size of their families to the resources available. They do not breed with conquest in mind.
--Kelpie Wilson, What Moral Values?, 06 Nov 2004
Control of women's reproductive freedom is at once a moral issue, an economic issue and an environmental issue, yet pro-choice supporters rarely frame it as anything other than an issue of personal privacy or freedom. Most people would agree that when moral values are at stake, personal choices are less important. And so, anti-choice zealots, on their high horses, can look down on women who choose abortion and call them selfish or worse.
--Kelpie Wilson, What Moral Values?, 06 Nov 2004
It is vitally important that all who want change recognize that abortion may be the biggest issue that divides us as a nation. We must begin to directly address the true moral implications of abortion, which are these:
It is utterly immoral to force a woman to bear an unwanted child. It is immoral not just because of the impact to women but because of the impact to the earth and future generations. Billions of people today live in poverty on the edge of starvation. The World Wildlife Fund reports that we currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the Earth can produce and that we have permanently reduced Earth's capacity to support life. The skyrocketing curve of population growth is about to meet the plunging curve of resource depletion.
If a woman does not want a child, then the Earth does not want it either. Far better to let a tiny embryo, the merest spark of life, be extinguished, than to risk the lives of so many who are already here. This is a moral choice of the highest order and it is one that all women are empowered to make.
Those who oppose abortion and reproductive choice are the ones who are anti-life.
--Kelpie Wilson, What Moral Values?, 06 Nov 2004
...no one has ever found a 4.5 billion year old stone artifact (at the right geological stratum) with the words "Made by God."
--Matt Young, No Sense of Obligation
There is no way to look too serious when refuting the claims of the Holocaust Revisionists.
As I've said to a few people here, I suspect that the main reason for revisionist thinking is that the revisionists are torn inside. They really want to say that the Holocaust happened, and that they're damned proud of it. After all, they got to kill 6 million Jews and 6 million other "non-Aryans," didn't they? But... ahh... they didn't succeed, did they? The Jews are still here, as are millions of other non-Aryans who Hitler would have exterminated. So, instead of saying "OK, we tried to kill them all, but failed," they say "we never even tried," while wishing inside that they'd been able to finish the job.
But they couldn't. Fortunately, there were enough people of courage then to stand up to what was the closest thing to pure evil ever to walk the surface of the earth, and to stop the horrors. It is now up to people of courage here and now to stop the revisionists from winning a new battle, that which will determine what people are taught about the Holocaust. If we are to keep the memories alive -- if we are, indeed, to never forget -- then we cannot stand idly by when people like this spout their nonsense.
Fools are notoriously immune to the truth, but it is not the revisionists themselves to whom we must direct our attention. We must refuse the revisionist arguments, but direct our statements towards the vast majority of people here who are altogether silent on the matter. We must ensure that THEY, above all, see the truth, and learn about it. Only then will the memories of the 6 million Jewish martyrs and the 6 million other victims of Nazi atrocities be honored and protected.
--Adam Zion
27 November 1993
Knowledge about religions is not only characteristic of an educated person, but is also absolutely necessary for understanding and living in a world of diversity.
--National Council for the Social Studies, and reprinted in A Teacher's Guide to Religion in the Public Schools, First Amendment Center Publication No. 99-FO2A
Christian fundamentalists believe that human beings were divinely created in the image of God. But many religious fundamentalists also believe that some parts of the human body are inherently indecent and evil.
--Progress Report article
(Return to Quotations Files Index)