Victimology

When did it become chic in our society to claim the status of a victim? I know this has happened, because various groups now routinely use words like “oppressed” and “deprived” to describe their general condition.

This instance of victimology is not applied to just one phase of a person’s life or to a particular period in his or her personal history. It has become fashionable to claim that you and your tribe were, are, and always have been victims of great and ignoble forces active in society, history, human psychology, sexual relationships, or some other sphere of interaction, where it has become impossible to name your individual enemies, call them out, and thrash them. Conversely, it becomes all too possible to point toward the nearest representative of some designated über-class and blame him for all your woes.

To my mind, this is a dead end. Going deeper into victimhood just doesn’t work. Good stories and happy outcomes don’t follow from reveling in the state of oppression, deprivation, loss of opportunity, loss of dignity, and impairment of selfhood that the victim mantle bestows. My first question to such a person would be, “Well, what are you going to do to get your own back?” That is, how are you going to repair the damage, reclaim your life, rebuild your fortune, regain your self-respect, punish your enemies, and defend yourself against future attacks and depredations? To me, these would seem to be the next steps in returning to the status of an independent, resourceful, courageous, and fully functioning human being.

To my ear, the status of a victim sounds too much like an excuse … and like whining. “I can’t be a complete person, I can’t be strong, can’t do my job, can’t improve my life, care for my family, learn and grow, because I have been abused, robbed of opportunity, looted of identity, denied good role models, hampered with social pressures, and oppressed by the economic system, by the banks, the patriarchy, the upper class, the one-percent, the middle class, or simply by the majority in society.”

When my generation was growing up, my parents and my various aunts and uncles were not people to suffer complaints and whining from me and my brother and our various cousins. I routinely heard the elders say, “Knock it off!” along with “Go do something! Get busy!” My father’s favorite aphorism was “Those who feel sorry for themselves, should!” And I don’t think we youngsters were ill-used. Their world had just survived a grueling and all-consuming world war, second of two in as many decades, separated by a worldwide financial collapse, and the end of that war had brought horrifying stories of brutality, torture, and genocide. Their generation considered strength, self-reliance, and preparedness in the face of such adversity a cardinal virtue. And no one has told me since then that the world has gotten any kinder or less dangerous.

If you attack me and my family, if you rob us or try to bend us to your will, you will not make us victims—combatants, perhaps, and certainly enemies, but not victims. The only person who can turn me into a victim is me, through my own attitudes about myself. And as I’ve said before, that’s a dead end.

Adopting the mantle of a victim is not a survival tactic. Instead, it is an admission of general weakness and lack of purpose. Moreover, it inspires not pity but, among those without compassion or charity, the urge to attack and finish the job. Why would anyone want to make him- or herself a target of unsympathetic scoundrels? If you know your condition or situation to be weak, the best course is not to advertise that fact but rather to conceal it—and then work hard on improving your condition and situation.

Perhaps those who openly adopt the mantle of victimhood are trying to take on a protective coloration against potential criticism. “I’m not an oppressor! I’m not a scoundrel! Look! I’ve been deprived and oppressed myself!” Of course, this argument leads too easily to comparing and contrasting your hurts and degradations with those of the people you are trying to convince. And that’s another dead end.

Adopting a pose of weakness, of oppressed status and a deprived condition, might seem like an expression of humility. But it’s the false kind. The truly humble person does not deny his or her strengths, skills, opportunities, and achievements. The magnanimous person accepts these things calmly, does not flaunt them before others, but uses them to achieve good ends. He or she also wishes to build a future, to grow and learn in order to achieve a better life, more opportunities, more instances of kindness, and an easier passage for his or her family, community, and society. The person who glories in perceived losses, hurts, and damages is actually exercising a kind of pride, focusing on him- or herself and what others may owe to satisfy his or her hurts. The truly strong person puts aside losses and hurts, attempts to take them in stride, and focuses on building for the future.

I’ve always been a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.¹ One element that has stuck with me is a reference in relation to the Bene Gesserit, which is one of the Great Schools, whose adepts and mother superiors are the interstellar empire’s genetic preservationists and political manipulators. They operate under the axiom “Support strength.” On the face of it, this would seem to be backwards. After all, our human compassion tells us the poor and weak need our support, and the meek need our protection. Our human paranoia would suggest that the strong are more likely to be predators and users, and their prey is the poor and meek.

But I think that in the long view, in taking care of the entire human race and building for its future, the Bene Gesserit have it right. The goal is not to encourage the ruthless and predaceous, nor to increase the number of the weak and helpless. The greater good is to help those who are still learning, growing, acquiring skills and purpose, becoming self-reliant and able to cope, and teaching others by their example. Preserving, encouraging, and teaching poverty and weakness are a dead end for society and slow suicide for those who accept the status of victim.

Those who would live, prosper, and move forward into the future must be strong and resourceful. These are the people with the good stories and happy outcomes.

1. See my blog The Dune Ethos from October 30, 2011.

The Risk-Transfer Society

I’ve written before about why I don’t believe this country is actually headed for a Marxist-style socialist government, with aggressive nationalization of various industries, such as the British undertook in the post-war period.¹ Basically, it is much more difficult, time-consuming, and risky for government agencies to try running complex businesses like steelmaking, farming, and banking themselves. We in the U.S. find it far easier to impose complicated, interlocking sets of regulations on shareholder-owned and professionally managed businesses in order to achieve the policy goals we want.

You see this every day. The government would like to run any unit of the business sector—manufacturing, retail, financial, or service—as both a productive enterprise and as an instrument of social engineering, employment policy, and wealth distribution. But the government would soon run that factory, bank, or business into the ground—or into bankruptcy. Instead, bureaucrats can more easily impose regulations governing hiring and firing policies, payment and benefit policies, work and safety conditions, and environmental impacts without regard to their actual effects on production or the economics of the business. Sure, these regulations start out as a means of correcting obvious abuses and societal harm: banning child labor, eliminating overt discrimination against women and minorities, or keeping toxic wastes out of nearby rivers. But soon the scope of the perceived harm broadens and the scale of impact diminishes to the point that government regulation is used to favor and reward certain groups and activities while discouraging others.

But this is not just the action of a “laissez-majesté” government. Our entire society has become a game of risk transfer and rent seeking.

Take, for example, the differences between a property owner and a renter. Traditionally, the person who owned his or her home has enjoyed certain benefits. The cost of ownership in terms of mortgage payments are generally known within specific limits, so that the only unknowns are the costs of unexpected damage and loss—which can be insured against—and of routine maintenance—which can be forecast and budgeted—as well as changes in property valuation and assessed taxes. On the contrary, the renter of an apartment or house has usually been subject to unpredictable changes in cost and conditions, such as rising rents, unexpected evictions, and deteriorating maintenance, with only a short-term lease contract—typically of six months or a year duration—as protection.

But now in most big cities, and particularly in California, the government has stepped in on the side of the renter against the property owner. Rents are government-controlled to limit raises, despite increasing property taxes and maintenance costs due to inflation. State law severely restricts landlords from evicting tenants, and even the Ellis Act (Government Code Section 7060-7060.7), which allows landlords to take a rental property off the housing market without having to sell it, is under fire in San Francisco. These rules give the renter the kind of security that a homeowner has traditionally enjoyed while leaving the property owner on the hook with the risks of loss due to fire, earthquake, or other catastrophe, along with the responsibility and rising cost of paying for maintenance, upkeep, and taxes.

As another example, the Environmental Protection Agency is continually expanding the scope of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to encompass, respectively, more pollutants, more sources, and more resources. The government does not have to own the land to prescribe how the owner will manage its productive use, and it does not have to assume the costs and risks to productive use of meeting its own regulations. This is one thing when a property owner is banned from dumping raw sewage or toxic wastes into the river bordering his or her property. It’s quite another when federal law imposes development restrictions on a low-lying property that occasionally collects water after a rainstorm and so has been officially declared a precious wetland.

Or consider the grab bag of goodies that our court system and the practice of tort law has become. A plaintiff with any claim of injury can, usually with the support of a self-interested lawyer and a pending class-action suit, identify a “deep pocket” and profit from it. The take includes not only actual damages, if they can be proved, but damages for putative pain and suffering and sometimes punitive damages that are meant serve as a warning to future defendants. I’m not saying that a person does not have a right to seek recompense, have his or her damages due to malice or negligence made whole, and see wrongs corrected, but it’s become a commonplace in our society to envision six figures with every slip on an icy sidewalk or coffee spill by a harried waitress.

And then we have the case of Kelo v. City of New London, in which the Connecticut city forced a private property owner to sell under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment in order to promote private development by a third party and so boost local economic activity. It is one thing to take a piece of property under public domain in order to build a facility designed for public use, like a road or sewer system, but quite another to take the property because you think someone else can make more profit from it and thereby increase the tax base.

In California we have the Coastal Commission, established in the 1970s, which regulates land development and public use along the seashore. Its jurisdiction extends inland from the mean high tide line to a variable distance: some hundreds of feet in urban areas, or up to five miles in rural areas. The commission can establish public rights of way across your private property for beach access. It reviews land-use development plans and issues permits. However, it does not have the power to issue fines or prosecute violations through the courts.

Now, I believe in competition and creative tension. I understand that every disagreement has two sides, and that we can only determine what is right and true when we bring both sides into the open to examine cases, expose facts, and air differences. So the legal struggle between opposing interests such as buyer and seller, labor and management, owner and renter, and other fields of conflict can establish what is fair and equitable in the public view. It would be a sad world if one side or the other automatically took precedence and won every case without contest. That would be a monopoly on the power of justice equivalent to the ancient divine right of kings and their prerogatives.

But still, I sense a movement in this country away from the rights of property ownership, self-expression, and personal interest and accountability. We are drifting toward automatic, reflexive adherence to community interest, public access, and communal property rights. This would all seem to be proper and fair, favoring the little guy and the public interest over the private rights of the landed and wealthy. But I also believe you can take this notion too far.

Since the opening of private land for public grazing in rural 19th-century England, economists have recognized a principle known as the tragedy of the commons. The reasoning is simple: when a resource like open land, productive assets, ground water, the fish in the sea, or anything else that people might value is held as a public good rather than as private property, it tends to deteriorate, be exploited, or become depleted. That’s because people are still rational economic beings who tend to maximize their satisfactions and minimize their burdens. So we see the English commons overgrazed; the seas fished with huge drag nets; public buildings, facilities, and infrastructure left dirty, worn, and badly maintained; and untended property defaced with the impulses of graffiti artists and vandals. People cherish and take care of the things they own personally; they are less careful of property for which they believe others are responsible. It’s a commonplace that some of the greatest environmental disasters have occurred in Communist countries like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic, where all property is theoretically owned in common by the state or “the people”—which means no one in particular owns or cares for it.

Transferring private property to public use through government regulation would seem to be a way around this problem. You simply leave the upkeep and maintenance, the cherishing and the associated risks, to the nominal owner while letting others take what they want or need from the property’s active use. The owner is left holding the basket while everyone else gets to extract the goodies.

The process will continue for a while. But like almost everything else in the universe—except perhaps for the gravitational pulse of a black hole—the situation is unstable. If the owner perceives too little value from trying to run the business, develop the land, maintain title to the property, hold the company’s shares, or otherwise participate in the game, he or she will drop out and become one of the public users. People are not stupid, and they will not go through the motions of playing a losing hand forever.

A society that does not value fairness and equity, and that has no appreciation of the essentials of human nature, will not last long. One can fail on the side of protecting and promoting the little guy and the public interest just as surely as you can fail on the side of preserving the rights of the landed and wealthy. In the long view, one can see the Western World in the 19th century as favoring the top tiers of society and vested interests, while the late 20th century and the start of the 21st now favor the dispossessed and the landless.

These are interesting time we live in, and which way the government and economy of this country and the Western world as a whole will go is now to open to question. I can only leave you with the Buddha’s blessing, which is also a curse: Nothing lasts forever. Not even black holes.

1. See Why Own When You Can Rent? from October 13, 2013.

Building Our World

Five years ago, in a meditation on the speed with which our technological base is expanding,¹ I wrote the following:

“In the 20th century we started another transformation, from mechanics to informatics. Consider that for 100,000 years of human history a tool was a physical object like a hammer or an axe blade. But in the last 40 years techniques like crossfoot accounting, computerized spreadsheets, scheduling programs, risk analysis, and datamining have spawned a generation that uses nonmaterial tools on a daily basis. For 20,000 years, animal husbandry meant taming and working with whole animals or crossbreeding whole crops of corn. In the last 20 years the manufacture and use of enzymes, proteins, plasmids, and antigens has created a biological industry that employs the barest parts of, rather than whole, organisms.”

But that’s not quite accurate, is it?

Animal Husbandry

Humans have been using parts of animals from the very beginning. Hunter-gatherer cultures represent an advanced technology in themselves, and they leave almost nothing to waste. Consider the uses to which the Native Americans put the buffalo—an animal that they neither domesticated nor herded but hunted—deriving meat for their bellies and skins for their clothing and lodges. They gathered other animal parts, from porcupine quills to eagle feathers, for personal decoration. And the Eskimos use every part of the seal and walrus: blubber and meat for food; bones for needles, knives, and harpoon points; skins for clothing; sinews and nerves for cord and thread.

In a cave called Divje Babe in Slovenia, paleontologists have found a 43,000-year-old fragment of a bear femur with holes drilled for a flute. Debate continues whether this was a Homo neanderthalensis or H. sapiens artifact, but it seems indisputable that the holes are artificial and their spacing represents a diatonic musical scale.

Humans in ancient times used bees—hardly domesticated as pets, although they lived in wicker and straw hives of human construction that people placed conveniently close to their planted fields—to obtain honey. Similarly, ancient societies harvested shellfish for a particular shade of purple dye and scraped tree sap for incense and perfumes.

All of these were uses of animal parts in advance of any coordinated effort at domestication, care, and feeding such as humans have given to their dogs, horses, cows, and pigs from prehistoric times. And even domesticated animals have yielded more than their meat, hide, and muscle power. Horse hooves have been boiled for glue from prehistoric times. Sausage casings have been made from layers of the small intestines of sheep, goats, and pigs, while modern edible casings are made of collagen processed from cattle hides or cellulose processed from plants. And various plants have yielded more than their seeds, stalks, and roots for food, too. Consider the antiquity of weaving reeds and grasses into baskets and hats, or flax and cotton fibers into cloth. So people have been using animal and plant parts in industrial processes for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Still, I will stand by the intention of that paragraph above. In the last twenty years or so, especially since we learned to read and manipulate the genotypes of various organisms, our use of animal and plant proteins, enzymes, and antibodies has flourished. We routinely insert fragments of human or animal DNA into yeasts and various cell types of the Muridae, or rodent family, to create targeted proteins used in medicine and research. And laboratories all over the world are now working on genetic modifications that will let green algae produce and release lipids—various fatty molecules—that can be processed in place of oil drilled from the ground. The goal, of course, is to move directly from sunlight to a fuel precursor in one step that can be repeated endlessly with no net addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

And I don’t think I was wrong about the speed with which this industrial adaptation has accelerated. Our chemistry and biology give us a power over the carbon molecule and other artifacts from fossil life of which an 18th-century charcoal burner, a 19th-century coal-tar chemist, or a 20th-century petroleum engineer could barely conceive, let alone envy.

Information Processing

If knowledge is power, then humans have been wielding it since at least the invention of writing.

Consider the ancient Chinese classic I Ching, or Book of Changes. As a system of divination, it was no more accurate than reading Tarot cards or flipping coins, but that’s not the point. The I Ching’s arrangement of 64 hexagrams represent a system of thought, a proposed relationship among human characteristics, everyday circumstances, and the workings of chance. People have been using it to order their thinking and inspire their imaginations and insights for more than two millennia.

Consider Sun Tzu’s Art of War, probably the world’s first and best military handbook. The text is a distillation of principles that, yes, any experienced war leader could probably work out for himself. Like Machiavelli’s The Prince, the teachings are logical and easy to understand and build upward from one concept to the next. Like knowing the rules of chess and studying the most common gambits, reading either of these books in advance of going to war or entering politics gives the practitioner an edge over his or her untutored opponents.

Consider the principles of accounting. Crossfooting—the method of verifying a result by adding the totals across columns of numbers—was always possible and useful when working on a paper ledger in pencil or ink. But the system really took off with the invention of first the computer and then the spreadsheet, where the process became automatic and could be programmed to raise warning flags if the totals didn’t match.

Actually, though, the greatest advance in accounting was probably double-entry bookkeeping, which originated in Venice in the late 15th century. This system simply balances assets against liabilities to track the money and activity in any business. So taking out a loan, for example, puts cash in the asset side of the business ledger and simultaneously enters a debt to be repaid on the liability side.

Another accounting advance was reckoning the “time value of money”—that is, the rate of return that an amount of cash or other asset could earn if it were lent at the current interest rate or converted into some other form of investment over a specified period of time. The time value of money drives businesses to put their excess cash to work and lets the owner compare investment and asset strategies on a reasonable basis. Although this is easier to figure with a computer or calculator, the principle has existed as long as banking and alternative investments have been around, and the formulas for figuring present value and future value can be worked with pencil and paper. The whole realm of accounting is an informational tool that guides the decision-making of alert businessmen and –women.

So, yes, previous cultures have developed and used raw information as a tool. And this tendency only increased when the printing press made paper copies of organized information caches like books, pamphlets, and scholarly treatises widely available. Then it increased again when the computer automated the processing of information.

Still, I stand by the premise in the paragraph above. We are moving from an analysis of simple data patterns—like the movements of armies in the field or the flow of cash through a business—to appreciation of and predictions based on much more complex situations. For example, IBM is now selling a service called Watson Analytics. This is clearly based on the associational algorithms that IBM’s computer scientists built into the brain box called “Watson,” which turned it into a Jeopardy champion that could blend knowledge of historical and cultural references, facility with linguistic and logic puzzles, and human-scale memory recall into an instrument for recognizing and using patterns to obtain answers. IBM calls this “cognitive computing”—which means that the computer can analyze strange data and answer questions about them without a human programmer having to code the questions and the search terms for each step of the analysis.

The future is still coming at us faster and faster, but it all builds logically and progressively on the patterns of human invention that have come before.

1. See Coming at You from October 24, 2010.

The Truth About Personal Honesty

We all believe in personal honesty. That is, we are honest with ourselves about what is real in our lives, about what we know, what we want, what our intentions are, and where we stand in the world. We may tell fibs and lies to the people around us—even to our nearest and dearest—but with ourselves, by ourselves, we are true.

Many spiritual paths such as Zen and self-help programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous require their followers to practice personal honesty. The Temple of Apollo at Delphi, seat of the ancient world’s most famous oracle, had “Know thyself” (gnōthi seauton) inscribed above the doorway. And that should be an obvious hint: when the most rigorous forms of self-knowledge and the voice of a god supposedly telling you the truths of the universe must urge you to be honest with yourself, perhaps personal honesty is not so commonly practiced as we assume.

You would think this was the easiest thing in the world, to know and understand yourself and your aims. After all, we live inside our own heads. Everything that passes through the human mind at some point must, we think, come before our conscious awareness to be recognized, evaluated, and either accepted or rejected. We can pick over our own thoughts and decide for ourselves what is true. So all of us should—at some point of reflection, confession, or intense personal struggle—be able to realize and state the truth about ourselves.

And yet, too often we don’t. Without the help of a Zen master, an AA sponsor, or the oracle of a god, we are capable of living in an almost complete state of denial, delusion, or personal amnesia—usually for years at a time. We can be cruel to people and call ourselves caring and helpful. We can indulge our senses and call it self-awareness. We can hobble our daily lives with nonproductive obligations and thoughtless debts, our bodies with excess pounds and neglected muscles, and our minds with useless habits and unexamined compulsions … and call it a state of freedom.

Why is this possible? I would contend such denials and delusions are a product of the human mind’s function as a story-making and myth-projecting machine. We all tend to make stuff up. We embellish the known facts. We redirect our minds from what we see to what we think we see. And we fill in the gaps when what we see is not a clear or complete picture.¹

In part, this is a survival trait of the human brain and its sensory apparatus, and it operates on many levels. For example, our eyes evolved during generations in which we were both hunter and prey. We use close focus to examine the shapes of things that attract our attention and interest—for example the type composing the words you are reading right now—and then we study the images in that focus for their possible meaning and importance. But we also use the periphery of our visual awareness—by far the greater span—to detect movements, shadows, and hints of anomaly. These may either give us warning of threats, if we are operating in prey mode, or clues to concealed possibilities, if we are reacting as hunters and gatherers. The vulnerable naked human who does not sense and react to a sudden movement in the bushes can be surprised and killed. The hungry human who does not perceive the spots of a faun among the sun-dappled shadows of the underbrush, or react to the flash of color indicating ripe berries among the swaying leaves of the bramble, will eventually starve. In the same way, our ears react to the rustle of tree branches, the rhythmic pattern of footfalls, or the sound of our name in the babble of a crowd. Our skin senses the breeze as a touch, and interprets a touch as either potential caress or imminent attack.

Our brains were shaped to work from partial data, to flesh out vague perceptions, to make interpretations and decisions based on less than full knowledge. Sometimes, this processing goes haywire. A chemical imbalance, arising from illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, can cause a person to misinterpret the waterfall of sensory impressions that pour in continually from the sense organs and are categorized, sorted, and interpreted in certain parts of the brain. Scrambled auditory signals present themselves as coherent voices, and their speech and suggestions are directed by the memories and fears active in the person’s current thinking. Scrambled visual inputs become hallucinations and visions.

Most of the time, though, this processing from partial inputs works to our advantage. A shadow at the edge of our vision, or a sudden movement in the air against our cheek, causes us to duck and thereby avoid a blow.

By extension, we use the brain’s facility in working from partial data and incomplete analysis to make leaps of intuition and understanding when dealing with puzzles and problems, and in trying to understand the world around us. We work from clues to fill in the complete pattern and arrive at actionable decisions. We are all so good at this that we must be constantly reminded to use standards of evidence, rules of logic, and tests of our assumptions when trying to establish the truth about historical, scientific, or legal facts. We imagine and assume so much in our daily lives that we must be restrained when representing “the truth” in more formal circumstances.

One proof that our minds are, at the most basic level, story-making machines can be found in our dreams. In the deepest stages of sleep, the brain begins sorting the day’s impressions, turning short-term experience into long-term memory, salvaging some of the day’s thoughts and ideas, and discarding the rest. During this period, we are not aware of the memory sorting process.² Instead, the brain entertains our dozing mind with made-up experiences, fictitious personal histories, adventures, fantasies, harrowing escapes, and other real-seeming sequences that bear only a distant relationship to our everyday life. Our brains tell us stories while we sleep.

Even when we are awake, our memories are not perfect reflections of actual experience, taking a faithful image like a piece of carbon paper³ or a mirror. Instead, our memories are associational systems. We tend to join together similar things in our memories—which is why mnemonics and other memory tricks work so well. We also edit our memories slightly every time we recall and think about them.⁴ That’s why techniques to induce a “false memory”—perhaps an interpretation of some childhood trauma, or the fact of trauma itself—succeed so well, because a skilled practitioner can lead us to modify our memories to fit a preconceived notion.

With all of this processing and massaging of facts and memories going on inside our brains, is it even possible to be honest with ourselves? Can we separate delusion and imagination from truth? I believe so … I hope so. If not, then life is a dream, meaning is fragmentary, and nothing much is more important than anything else.

But the snares of memory and delusion mean that finding and keeping the truth about ourselves is going to be hard work. It requires effort, self-examination, and a willingness to be stern with the weaker side of our natures and fearless in the face of dangers and strong temptations. But as the Zen masters, the AA sponsors, and the Oracle of Apollo all suggest, our lives are worth that effort.

1. Such is the nature of conspiracy theories.

2. See, for example, Memory Consolidation and REM Sleep at Serendip Studio, Bryn Mawr College, from January 9, 2008.

3. A relic of the typewriting age, “carbon paper” was used to transfer the impression of a striking key from one sheet of typing paper onto a second or third sheet behind it. A typist sandwiched the carbon-dusted paper between the sheets, where it acted like a supplemental typewriter ribbon. Of course, these days we just press Control-C and Control-V to copy and move pieces of digital text from one place to another. I suppose that, in another twenty years, I will also have to explain for the next generation what a typewriter and paper were.

4. See, for example, When Memories are Remembered, They Can Be Rewritten at National Geographic from May 20, 2013, or Your Memory Isn’t What You think It Is at Psychology Today from July 16, 2013.

Getting Real About Water

So California—where I live—is in its fourth year of drought. Snowpack in the Sierra has been meager to naught this past winter, with the high meadows where the official hydrologists take their readings showing fields of brown grass. The system of dams and reservoirs that provide both storage of the annual runoff and hydroelectric power to our utilities is depleted, with water levels down to about 43 percent of available capacity.¹ The aquifers from which farmers and communities draw their water locally are also being depleted.²

We’ve been here before, of course. We had severe droughts in 1929-34, 1976-77, and 1987-92. Weather is cyclical and California has always had a Mediterranean, semi-arid climate. It’s just that, since the Great Depression and World War II, and with the boom time/dream time of the 1960s, we’ve been packing in many more people and expanding our agriculture and industry. More people, more farmers, and more businesses are now sucking at straws that occasionally run dry.

The state government’s solution boils down to encouraging and enforcing cutbacks in water use, perhaps leading to outright rationing. This is the simplest and least costly—for the government—approach to a solution. Frame the people and their choices as the source of the problem, require them to make sacrifices, tell them to figure out for themselves how to do with less, and then use your enforcement power to back this approach.

Cutbacks and rationing are, in my opinion, a temporary fix. They will hold us until the rains come again, as they always do. Then we can all forget about the problem and water our lawns and wash our cars again. Cutbacks and rationing will get us past this—forgive the pun—dry spell until things can even out again, as they always do.

But the trouble is, California is still growing. We keep adding people and businesses. We keep expanding agriculture into dry, sandy areas of the southern San Joaquin Valley which, without that artificial irrigation, most strongly resemble desert. The next cyclical drought will be worse than this one, and the one to come after that will be biblical—all without one bit of change in our historic weather patterns. Of course, in the long run, this is a self-solving problem: when living conditions resemble those in war-torn Beirut, where you take your five-gallon jerry can down to the water truck on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays to get your family’s allotment, people will start to leave the state for wetter places. Farmers who can’t make the desert bloom will give up and sell out. Businesses that can’t get a basic resource they need to operate will relocate out of state. When the opportunists and drifters have left, the state’s water will easily serve the very rich and the very poor who remain.³

In the long run, we Californians have some hard choices to make. Sitting here and hoping for rain is not a solution. Relaxing and enjoying the bounty when the rain does come, then being surprised, shocked, and aggrieved when the next drought arrives is a form or either madness or stupidity—a bit like being surprised by your taxes being due on April 15, or having Christmas suddenly come up and you’ve still not done your shopping.

Personally, I believe in providing people with abundance, not scarcity and rationing. I want them to have more living space, more and varied foodstuffs, more water, more transportation options, more health and fitness options, more entertainments and connectivity, more of everything that makes life good. I’m not in favor of waste or excess, but when someone puts out his or her hand to obtain something, then that something should be made available, in variety, and with options. If it costs money to do this—and if someone gets to make a profit by providing the service—then so be it. That is one aspect of personal freedom, and one consequence of allowing free markets. As Henry Kaiser used to say, “Find a need and fill it.” And where need exists, entrepreneurs will find a way to serve it at a mutually agreeable price.

So I believe that we in California must stop thinking of water as something that comes from the sky, is freely available for every need, and that the only costs or charges involved should be those associated with the utility that gathers and delivers the stuff. When you start treating water as a commodity like steel or wheat rather than a natural resource, you open up the prospects for long-term solutions.

One such solution is to diversify our water systems. Right now, in most of the United States and certainly in California, we deliver clean, drinkable water to residences, commercial buildings, and industrial sites to be used for all purposes. We drink it, cook with it, wash with it, and flush with it. The same water, or near enough in purity, is used to grow crops, cool power plants, and support other industrial processes. And once we’ve made that one-time use of this drinkably pure water, we pour it into the sewer, where all the water is treated as toxic bio-sludge and cleaned up to a level where we can then dump it into the river or the bay and send it out to sea. So one approach might be to separate these uses.

We can perform this separation on a county, community, site, or household basis. Drinking water that doesn’t make it into the glass or for cooking can be captured and recycled for washing. Wash water can be filtered to remove dirt particles and chemically treated to remove soaps and detergents, then used for irrigation. Or it can be sent straight to flushing. Sewer water can, with the application of much infrastructure and energy, be brought back up to drinkable levels, or certainly to the level needed for washing, irrigating, and flushing.

The upside of this approach is that the water we have would cycle two or three times through our homes, plants, and communities before going out to sea—if we didn’t capture it at the sewage plant and close the loop entirely. The downside is that we would have to install double piping, traps, surge tanks, and processing units on both the supply side and sewer side in our homes, office buildings, and plants. We would also need to educate all users in drinking only from certain taps and being responsible for what they put into the kitchen sink, bathtub, washing machine, and toilet. For example, in the kitchen, we’ll have to stop disposing of food wastes by macerating them to puree with the InSinkErator^®; in the bathroom, we’ll stop using the drain pipe to dispose of excess medicines, toiletries, and hairballs. The plumbing work—both at the site level and throughout the community’s infrastructure—is going to be expensive, but not as costly in terms of economic health and the tax base as seeing our property values dive and our towns fold up for lack of water. The personal retraining is going to be annoying and tiresome, but less work than hauling your jerry can to the water truck three times a week.

Another solution is desalination to increase the basic water supply. After all, we live right next to the Pacific Ocean, a huge amount of water that is only rendered non-drinkable because it contains 3.5 percent salt content. We know how to remove that salt relatively easily and in large volumes, either through various forms of osmosis to manipulate the chemical concentration or through distillation to directly remove the water from the salt and other impurities.⁴ Such plants require a large capital cost to build and significant operating costs in terms of energy to run.

In my mind, it’s purely a question of engineering and cost whether we process sewage or desalinate seawater in order to obtain our drinking and all-purpose water. In the end, I suppose, we will do some of both, along with the inter-stage recycling steps described above.

The biggest obstacle to these approaches right now—after questions of planning, lead time, and cost—is personal delicacy. We have a mindset in this country that whatever comes out of any tap should be good to drink. That’s been the case for most of the developed world, but not so much in certain parts of Asia and Africa. We in the West wouldn’t mind drinking desalinated seawater, as long as it was served in a crystal goblet so that we could forget it once was a place where fish poop. We recoil at the notion of drinking our own processed sewage, even if it could be rendered chemically pure and shown to contain only H₂ and O.

We have to get over that. We must trust chemistry to clean up the water we have on hand. And then we must get over the idea that water is a free resource, like clean air. When I lived in central Pennsylvania, the groundwater was “hard” with chemicals like lime and other natural deposits. You could drink it, but it had a taste. You could wash with it, but it didn’t support much of a lather. Families in town had a water softener unit attached to their domestic water pipes, and we paid the “Culligan Man” to come in regularly to change out the filter cartridge for a monthly fee. So our water, though it came from the ground, wasn’t exactly free.

Clean water, whether by desalination of seawater or chemical processing of sewage, ends up being an energy issue. Both approaches require large amounts of energy to operate. That’s one of the reasons the Saudis are the world leaders in desalination: they have the energy for it. However, even with all their oil, they are rapidly turning to solar energy for this purpose.

My own long-term solution, for countries with their own seashore and lots of sunshine, is solar photovoltaic fields that would drive electrolytic cells to separate hydrogen and oxygen from seawater. You could then choose to capture and compress the two gases—using more solar energy to drive the pumps and compressors—as fuel and oxidizer for sale to fuel transportation or generation needs. Or you could recombine the gases on site in a turbine or fuel cell to make readily available electricity, with the only waste product being huge amounts of pure, drinkable water.⁵ The plant would have almost no moving parts, other than pumps to handle and compress the gases and move the water, the turbine shaft itself—if you go that route—and the little robots who would go out to clean the surface of the solar cells and collect salt residue from the electrodes. The plant would only run during the daytime, of course, but it would run for free on the sun’s energy. It’s a solution that requires only money and land to plan and build the plant.

Water in California is not a resource problem. It’s an engineering problem. And it’s high time we stopped wishing and hoping and got down to the business of solving it.

1. See, for example, The California Drought, a research project of the Pacific Institute in Oakland California; and Water Conditions from the California Department of Water Resources.

2. See the ground water elevation (GWE) maps from Groundwater Data and Monitoring by the California Department of Water Resources.

3. And no, I’m not going to get into the argument about diverting water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers for ecological purposes under the code name “Delta Smelt.” That’s always going to be a debate about more or less water, rather than absolute amounts. It will never be practical to draw off the entire river flow for communities, agriculture, and businesses and then let California’s interior waterways go brackish up to Sacramento and down to Stockton. For one thing, it would really mess up San Francisco Bay, which would become stagnant without that flow from the interior.

4. See, for example, the International Desalination Association, which encourages and disseminates information on research, development, and appropriate use of desalination technology.

5. As a scientific colleague of mine once observed, burning hydrogen in an environment of pure oxygen creates “a remarkably energetic exothermic reaction.” If you doubt this, ask NASA how they got the Apollo missions to the Moon or the Space Shuttle into orbit.

Politics and Personal Honor

Our country’s political system—a representative government operated and maintained by citizens who are selected through regular elections that are open to all other qualified citizens—was designed by men of the 18th-century Enlightenment. These men held many views in common: the importance of personal freedom, the necessity of personal rights and responsibilities, the tyranny of an unchecked majority, and the private nature of a person’s religious beliefs. One idea which would seem to underlie and bind all of these others, and yet is not much discussed, is that of personal honor.¹

Personal honor is an old idea. Today, in movies and books, it is most often portrayed as a febrile touchiness, usually associated with the phrase “impugned my honor.” With that phrase, one gentleman asserts that another has said something scurrilous and implied that he is not of good character—having supposedly cheated at cards, insulted a lady, or committed some other social offense—and to relieve this stain upon his honor, the first gentleman challenges the second to a duel, at dawn, with swords or pistols, which will leave one of them dead and the other either exonerated or avenged.² Personal honor in this sense implies bad temper, ill feeling, and a wasteful spillage of blood.

My understanding of personal honor is much simpler: it is the collection of actions and courses to which a person has, either consciously or upon reflection, committed him- or herself. A person determines that he or she will always speak the truth, deal fairly with others, defend the young and the weak, pay off debts, keep honest books, offer courtesy to those who deserve it, or undertake some other commitment the person deems proper. Likewise, he or she will not lie, steal, break laws, pass rumors and idle gossip, damage another’s character or property through malice or carelessness, or—yes—cheat at cards or other games. Personal honor is the set of promises we make to ourselves. It is the watch our conscience sets upon our actions.

Essential to this definition of personal honor is the notion of integrity. Related to the word “integral,” integrity implies a personal wholeness. One is a complete person, the same in all situations³ and guided by the same commitments and restraints, regardless of circumstances. A person who presents one face to the outside world, such as honest businessman and civic supporter, but acts differently in private, such as cheating on his wife and falsifying his tax returns, cannot be said to have integrity. New Age psychology and sociology aside, a person is not made up of independent cubbyholes which may be filled with whatever seems right in the current situation. We each of us have one face and one soul, if you will, and we need to keep it intact and clean.

That face and that soul are what polite society considers to be a man’s or a woman’s character. Character is the reflection of personal honor in the eyes of others. Character is what leads one person to say of another such things as, “I know John [or Jane], and he [or she] would never …” and fill in your own selection of misdeeds. Character is the peek we have past the eyes, through the skin, and into the soul. Character is the internal image we carry of that other person, the map by which we project his or her actions and responses. Character is what we expect him or her to do or not do under any and all circumstances.

In my view—and, I believe, in the view of those 18th-century gentlemen who designed it—in order to work, a representative democracy requires the participation of people who understand and possess a sense of personal honor. And they are needed not just for democracy to work well, but for it to work at all.

Consider the people who run for office. All they can offer the electorate is their platform and their promises. These are nothing but words, written on paper and spoken on the wind, unless they are backed up by the candidate’s personal honor and sense of integrity. Voters may like what they see in the platform and what they hear of the promises, but they will always filter such words through their perceptions of the candidate’s character.

A candidate who has lied in the past, who has participated in fraud, who says one thing to his or her supporters and another to the inner circle of the campaign—and then been found out in the lie, fraud, or deception—has nothing left to offer the public. He or she may give the people an ironical wink, may suggest that everyone lies and cheats, that all of this belongs to some notion of “the real world,” and that no one is guilty because we are all guilty at some undefined level of original sin. But it won’t wash—or it shouldn’t. And voters who care so much about the platform and the promises that they will ignore the character of the politician who mouths them will eventually be disappointed.

The 20th century⁴ gave us the politics of the Big Lie. Deception became, in the words of Frank Herbert’s Dune, “a tool of statecraft.” Madison Avenue and the manipulation of public perceptions became a practiced art. Say something often enough, and people will come to believe it. They will slowly but inevitably replace what they know with the sometimes comforting, but more often angering or frightening, images and suggestions upon which the politician, the marketer, or the political party insists. This will all work for a while. A pleasing lie can usually beat out a hard-edged or uncomfortable truth—but only for a while. In the long run, a platform and promises founded on deception and lies will fall apart. In the long run, people’s common sense and the wisdom of crowds—containing the principles and truths your grandmother told you, founded upon her long and eventful life—will come back around to top dead center.

And then, consider the people who actually win the election and intend to run the government. To be effective, they must believe in something greater than themselves, their personal careers, and their perceived advantages. Specifically, those charged with the public trust must believe in the supremacy of the rule of law and the constitution. They must hold to the truth in what they say and do, mindful of the faith that others have invested in them. They must swear to uphold the law. A person without honor or integrity is unlikely to keep these commitments.

Next, consider the character of the voter. If the actions of government and the laws passed by its deliberative body—Congress, Parliament, or Duma—and executed by its leader and his or her associated bureaucracy—President or Prime Minister, administration or cabinet—matter at all, then the voter must take seriously the choices offered in a free election. The individual voter needs to weigh personal preference and perceived advantage against the public good and the rights of others who may have different preferences and advantages. The voter needs to weigh the pleasing platform and the pretty promises against the character of the politician and make the best choices, guided by sober reflection and the voter’s best sense of how the world actually works and where his or her nation and society are currently headed.

One of the tragedies of the Big Lie mentality is its power to render voters eventually immune to truth. They come to feel that truth and the actual nature of things are either unimportant or indecipherable. That all politicians are liars and cheats, or they are indebted to forces external to the polity—Big Business, Big Oil, the United Nations, or the Illuminati—and therefore not to be trusted. That the system is irretrievably corrupt. And worse, that one’s vote does not count. With such a mindset, the voter will shrug, cast the ballot for a pretty promise, and hope for the best.

The voter must also make certain commitments based on personal honor. These include voting according to the rules and not stuffing the ballot box by reappearing in a different precinct under a new identity. A jaded voter who believes in the Big Lie or doubts the integrity of the system has no reason to follow the rules but may manipulate them for private or ideological ends.

And then, once his or her ballot is dropped in the box, the voter must agree to a abide by the results, live with the consequences, and not harbor thoughts of revolution or political action by other means. For a representative democracy to work, the populace must believe in and support its operation, without reservations or contingencies. Democracy is a fragile system. It works because people agree that it works. When they no longer give that agreement, for whatever reason, then more robust systems enforced by the muzzles of guns will take over.

And finally, consider the people who hold the elections and manage the voting process. They are usually volunteers, not politicians nor affiliated with any party or branch of the government. They undertake a duty to manage the polling place, sign in the voters, oversee the casting of ballots, and stand behind the results. The system of representative democracy requires these workers to demonstrate the integrity of the process and expose rule breakers and unfair practices in order to eliminate them. We require their integrity and personal honor to uphold a commitment even higher than that of the people who would run the government in the name of the voters.

These are the many examples of how we depend on private honor to function in the public space. The 18th-century gentlemen believed it could be made to work. Here in the 21st century, we need to reacquaint ourselves with these principles, or the result will be chaos and eventually tyranny.

1. Although the Declaration of Independence does conclude with a mutual pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

2. Note that it is almost impossible to talk about this kind of honor except in such brittle and antique phrasings.

3. True, people have different roles in life. A man will have different responsibilities and meet different necessities as a business executive than he encounters as a father or a player on the company softball team. Yet the duties and requirements of personal honor lie so close to the core of his character that they govern all situations. A man tells the truth to—and does not steal from—his business partners, his children, or his teammates.

4. In retrospect, a really bad time for the human race.

The Wages of Immortality

Fact is, all of us humans—as well as every other living thing on this planet—will eventually die. Actually, death could be considered one of the defining factors of this strange condition we call life: that it can end. For life is not simply a state of being or a gift of special, magical power, such as implied by the phrase “the spark of life,” or the animating spirit that Rabbi Loeb instilled in the inert clay of the Golem of Prague. Instead, life is a process. Life is a series of relationships fitting together various electrochemical energy potentials, actions and reactions, and feedback loops in a moment-to-moment, cell-by-cell succession that will exist for as long as the organism receives the necessary inputs and will end when those inputs stop or the series breaks down.

I’m sorry to be so mechanistic about this, but whether you are an amoeba, nematode, lobster, llama, cat, dog, or human being, this is what it means to be alive. And the part that you most cherish as “you”—your mind, your memories, hopes and fears, aspirations and achievements—simply refers to the moment-by-moment, cell-by-cell variations in energy potentials, actions and reactions, and feedback loops located in your central nervous system and occupied with processing the visual, aural, chemical, and tactile sensations which your body’s sense organs send into that nerve nexus.

Perhaps, when the brain and those sense organs die, those potentials, actions, and loops will continue processing in some other dimension, driven by some other form of energy. But that’s a matter for speculative physics and metaphysics. What we actually know about biology and the physical self is that it arises from the conjunction of egg and sperm, each of which possesses embedded chemical instructions. The organism develops and differentiates by following those instructions, as well as by gathering nutrients from and experiencing changes in the surrounding environment, and by exercising the decision-making potential of the nervous system to change and improve its relationship with the environment. The body eventually slows and decays through continued contact with that external environment and its insults. And finally, that series of life-sustaining events breaks down, and the organism stops.

We all have this to look forward to. For some of us it’s a terror, because life is so sweet. For others it’s a comfort, because life has become bitter. For all of us it’s a reminder that life is short—perhaps destined to end by accident or misadventure within the next day or two—and our time is not to be wasted.

But how would human life be different if we lived forever?

To know this, of course, we would first have to determine the terms and conditions of this magical gift of immortality. Is it proposed that we might go on indefinitely—no slowing down, no internal decay, no ultimate breakdown written into our genes, with no lysosomes standing ready to hydrolyze our cellular materials¹—unless we meet with an unforeseeable accident? That is, we would live a full and complete life until we were actively taken out and killed? Or is the proposal that we would become not only immortal but also invulnerable, that any injuries might heal immediately, that cumulative injuries would heal even faster, and that the dissolutions of major, decapitating, dismembering, dissolving, disrupting, and destroying attacks and accidents would flash by us or bounce off us like bullets grazing Superman?

In the first case, of immortality without invulnerability, we might become as fragile as Ming vases. If a long and healthy life can be preserved by avoiding accidents, confrontations, and bodily damage, then we would live as prudently as monks.

It is commonly understood that teenagers and young people are risk-takers and death-defiers precisely because they secretly believe or ignorantly presume they are immortal. And who can blame them? With forty, fifty, or sixty healthy years stretching ahead of a person, whose experience is based on a mere fifteen or twenty years of boundless health and vitality, then one can be forgiven for thinking life will go on forever. By comparison with all that one knows, the precious gift of three score and ten more of the same represents an unimaginably long time, approximating an eternity.

But a person who has some experience of living and fully realizes the nature of the magical gift of immortality—an undated lifespan, barring accidents and misadventure—would become cautious. When you have a chance at the gold ring, why waste it on a moment’s excitement in the rush of adrenaline? By the same token, what could be so valuable that you would give your life in exchange for it? Would you trade your everlasting life, this precious gift, for the sake of personal honor? To redeem a loved one? To defend your tribe’s or nation’s power, prestige, and prerogatives? To defend the planet? To save all humankind?

We can perform acts of personal heroism because we all know, deep down, that someday we are going to die anyway. If you are only going to live another ten, twenty, or thirty years—years destined to pass in a boring job, residing on a narrow street, taking care of a strip of lawn, and raising a sometimes quarrelsome and ungrateful family—then to sacrifice that life for love, honor, or all of humanity might be worth it. But to trade immortality? You would have to think long and hard about that. And the longer and harder you thought, the less likely you would be to take action. In the end, a person with an immortal but not invulnerable lifespan could be bought and owned for a whispered threat and the flash of a knife blade. Such a person would choose to live forever on his or her knees, at the behest of a stronger or more ruthless human being, rather than resist and bring it all to an end in a day.

On the other hand, if one could have both immortality and invulnerability, a person would become as a god. You would not only be careless of your own life and limb but of everyone and everything else you might hold dear—if indeed you cared seriously about anything at all. Think of the gods and goddesses in The Iliad. They play at war as if it were a game of football or poker, with no real consequences. They participate in the human war for fun, or motivated by the kind of loyalty you might show to a pet dog, or for spite and jealousy. And when, say, Diomedes wounds Aphrodite in the arm with his spear, she drops her wounded son Aeneas and flies back to Olympus. The immortal gods are fickle because, in a long life where nothing much matters, they can afford to be.

But when a person lives forever—whether by avoiding all accidents or despite suffering any imaginable number of decapitating accidents—he or she still must deal with the nature of time and experience.

Like that teenager or twenty-year-old, for whom the promise of another fifty or sixty years looks like eternity, our sense of time is proportional. When a six-year-old experiences the passing of an hour or a day, it seems like a long time, practically an eternity. This is because his experience and memory includes only a limited number of such days—just 2,190 of them to be exact, if he even can remember them all—with a proportionally limited number of hours. When that same boy grows to be a man of sixty, the years will seem to be flying by, because each one represents a smaller and smaller portion of his time on Earth. Time telescopes, and an hour is never long enough to perform any task in a really thorough fashion, while each day disappears in the three tasks you wanted to finish after breakfast.²

Imagine then, how immortality would further warp this sense of proportion. After a thousand years of life, what would an hour represent? A day? A year? And if we are talking about an immortality that truly approached eternity, and not just some minor doubling or tripling of the traditional three score and ten, what then would ten thousand, a million, or a billion years of experience do to a person’s sense of time? Unlike Einstein’s imagined light wave rider, for whom relativistic time slows down, the immortal mind’s experience of time would speed up, until interaction with other human beings would become nearly impossible. The people around such an immortal human—especially if they were not immortal themselves or of a comparable age—would disappear into a blur of associated memories.

An immortal human, whether by longevity or invulnerability, would be a significantly different creature than the life we know and experience. His or her perceptions, intentions, expectations, and desires would differ markedly from those of mortal men and women. Such a person would be another order of being and, for the rest of us, practically unintelligible and incomprehensible.

1. See the definition in The Cell: A Molecular Approach by Geoffrey M. Cooper (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2000).

2. See The Years Rush By from January 5, 2014.