Neutral pronouns

I doubt that anyone would claim that neutral pronouns will eliminate sexism. However, the simple fact is that it is grammatically unjust – grammatically demeaning - that a male noun or pronoun may signify both men and women, but the corresponding female noun or pronoun may not. If man, men, and mankind can signify both men and women, then why shouldn't woman, women, and womankind signify both women and men? If he can signify either a man or a woman, then why shouldn't she signify either a woman or a man? Justice is an absolute principle that demands strictness. There might be some practical delays in the achievement of justice, but there can be no exceptions in respect to recipients and modes.

Netanyahu vs Obama

No doubt Netanyahu gave a rousing speech. But will the speech have as much impact on the prospective nuclear deal with Iran as it will have on US-Israel relations? And will it ultimately help or hurt Netanyahu's re-election bid?

No one questioned Netanyahu's right or even responsibility to comment on the deal. The only thing questioned was the time and place of his remarks. It was a good speech. Who knows... Netanyahu might even be right that this deal is not wise. (Until a world government is established, we will go on walking through the minefield that is internationalism.) But no matter how things turn out, there will be no way to prove one way or the other that the world would have been better off with no deal rather than a bad deal.

A few days from now, Netanyahu's speech before the US Congress will be largely forgotten. In the meantime, Netanyahu returns home to a country with upcoming elections and pressing domestic issues (housing shortage, economic slowdown, and deteriorating medical services). On top of that, conditions with Israel's most reliable ally have now taken a turn for the worse.

Will Israelis welcome Netanyahu home as a hero and re-install him as their prime minister, or will they usher him into political retirement? To the extent that this even matters, we will know the answer in a few weeks. But while this almost certainly was Netanyahu's primary concern while standing before the US Congress, it probably makes little difference for Israelis as a whole or the people of the world collectively. Political democracy is all smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer – elephants romp, and the grass gets trampled.

A surfeit of sages

Has anyone else noticed that there is an abundance of teachers these days? Rather, there is an overabundance. Nowadays, it seems like everyone and their astral or earthly guide is a guru, a healer, a seer, or a sage. One might almost think that this is a good thing... more teachers, less students... if only this were happening in the public school system. Unfortunately, it is not.

With the proliferation of life-teachers comes the notion that there are myriad paths to perfection. Ultimately, it appears that there are as many paths as there are people. If this were true, it would further entrench the individually and socially harmful notion of moral relativism. But is it so? Can there really be more than one true path? Surely, toward the end of the journey... near the peak of the mountain... the paths must merge. If that be so, then why not merge below as happens above?

When teachers have little or nothing to teach and only their inflated prestige to maintain, humanity is in great peril. And so it is rightly said: Beware of false prophets. At this juncture in history where every Dolly and Hari presents as God's gift to the world, what quality should we look for in a guide? Given that any true teacher is one who instructs by example, I would submit that the most important quality should be a readiness to learn something new. Even if a teacher seems to know everything about everything, still that teacher – to be ideal – must maintain the attitude of a good student.

The rich get richer

While politicians mount their soapboxes to discuss the state of the union, and leaders gather in Davos to discuss the state of the global economy, it's a good time for us to consider the problem of an ever-widening wealth gap.

Consider a large family that eats together from a common kitchen. However, in this family one member eats like a king, nineteen more members manage a nutritious diet, and the remaining eighty members struggle to exist from the leftovers of the other twenty. That is what we have in the world today. And the inequities are getting greater, not less.

A 12-page Oxfam report (Wealth: Having It All And Wanting More) issued a couple days ago, describes the current situation as follows: "In 2014, the richest 1% of people in the world owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet. Almost all of that 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world." The report goes on to predict: "If this trend continues of an increasing wealth share to the richest, the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years... with the wealth share of the top 1% exceeding 50% by 2016."

According to the Oxfam report: "The wealth of [the 80 richest individuals] is now the same as that owned by the bottom 50% of the global population, such that 3.5 billion people share between them the same amount of wealth as that of these extremely wealthy 80 people." Figure 4 of the Oxfam report reveals a steady decline in the number of billionaires required to match the accumulated wealth of the poorest 50% of our global population. In 2010, 388 billionaires were required. In 2014, only 80 billionaires could do it. Making the situation even more stark, Oxfam notes in the caption of Figure 3 of their report: "Wealth of the 80 richest people in the world has doubled in nominal terms between 2009 and 2014, while the wealth of the bottom 50% is lower in 2014 than it was in 2009."

The trends noted by Oxfam tend to substantiate December 2014 observations in an article by the Pew Research Center that the wealth gap between the USA's upper-income and middle-income families is also widening. According to the Pew Research Center, that gap is currently the widest on record. Tracking data from 1983 to 2013, the Pew Research Center demonstrates that the median net worth of American upper-income families is currently at least 6.6 times greater than the median net worth of American middle-income families. With the same data from that period, The Pew Research Center goes on to note that only American upper-income families have made wealth gains over the last 30 years. The Pew Research Center speculates: "[This data] could help explain why, by other measures, the majority of Americans are not feeling the impact of the economic recovery, despite an improvement in the unemployment rate, stock market and housing prices."  

Clearly, in wealthy capitalist countries, only the rich are getting richer. But this situation is not inevitable. Human society could ensure that everyone is getting richer, that everyone gets a fair share of our collective pie. However, that cannot be done within a politicoeconomic environment of democracy and capitalism. Those two structures are easily manipulated to increase the wealth gap, and the wealthy elite are expert in that manipulation. As also pointed out in the aforementioned Oxfam report, the wealthy elite know the sectors of the economy where they can maximize their profits (largely finance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, all areas of great common concern). To keep open their primary avenues of profit, the wealthy elite pour great sums of money into financing politicians and political lobbying (often on budget and tax issues). From experience, they know that they will reap huge personal profits from such political investments.

So while political leaders are busy posing as saviors of the people, let the humanists of the world remember that the true measure of progress for an economy is the improvement of conditions in the poorest sectors of the economy. Indicators like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may tell us something about the condition of the wealthy elite, but they tell us much less about the condition of the impoverished majority and the true state of the union.

Atheist morality

According to CNN, atheists have composed their own 10 commandments...

1. Be open-minded and be willing to alter your beliefs with new evidence.

2. Strive to understand what is most likely to be true, not to believe what you wish to be true.

3. The scientific method is the most reliable way of understanding the natural world.

4. Every person has the right to control of their body.

5. God is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life.

6. Be mindful of the consequences of all your actions and recognize that you must take responsibility for them.

7. Treat others as you would want them to treat you, and can reasonably expect them to want to be treated. Think about their perspective.

8. We have the responsibility to consider others, including future generations.

9. There is no one right way to live.

10. Leave the world a better place than you found it.

So, what do I think? In addition to the uncertain voice for and of the rules, they contain quite a lot of dogma, contradiction, repetition, wishful thinking, and vagueness. An interesting challenge is to encapsulate each of them. Here is what I come up with:

1. Open-minded beliefs
2. Probable truth
3. Scientism
4. Physical autonomy
5. Divine superfluity
6. Mindful responsibility
7. Tinsel catchall (aka Golden Rule rev. 2587)
8. Mindful responsibility
9. Ignore these rules
10. Delusion of grandeur

Let them eat red herrings?

In the past and up to the present day, there have always been food shortages in one part or another of this world. However, it is only in modern times that we can say with some certainty that there is absolutely no need for any human being on this planet to face death by starvation or malnutrition. There is no good reason why that should occur. Hence, I view most of the ballyhoo about population growth as a red herring. Instead of focusing on the fear that human population is expanding at a rapid rate, we should focus on the fact that for the first time in human history we can eradicate hunger. For the first time in human history, we can and therefore we must free humanity from that affliction.

Invisible hands

The notion of an invisible hand benevolently guiding economics comes packed with some unstated assumptions.

The first unstated assumption is that all economic activity is homogeneous. That is to say, regardless of whether we are talking about macro-economics or microeconomics, regardless of the product that is produced and distributed, regardless of how much scope there is for profit, regardless of how many people are impacted, and regardless of how essential a product is for survival or for developing the potential of human beings – regardless of any or all that – each aspect of the economy can only be handled in the same way as the rest of the economy. It can only be planned or unplanned, command or laissez-faire. This assumption is not logical.

The second unstated assumption is that an unplanned economy is good, and a planned economy is bad. Of course, even Adam Smith did not go quite that far. He recognized the dangers of monopolies. The problem is that, in practice for people who promote the notion of an invisible hand,  planning an economy is treated as bad and therefore to be avoided as far as possible. This point of view might also be a corollary of the first assumption that I mention above. If only one approach is possible for an entire economy, then that approach would be good on the whole, whereas any other approach would be bad on the whole.

Most people imagine that Adam Smith's concept of an invisible hand is somehow akin to some natural process. More accurately, it would be a supernatural process, because Adam Smith was talking about an invisible hand of Providence, not Nature. Providence (with a capital P) is just another name for God, specifically God in the role of "sustaining and guiding human destiny"(Merriam Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary). Hence we have a largely anthropomorphic God with a "hand" that is "invisible".

For reference, Adam Smith introduced his concept of the invisible hand in 1759, in Paragraph 10 of Part IV Chapter 1 of the book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Below, I reproduce that paragraph:

And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth by these labours of mankind has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants. It is to no purpose, that the proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb, that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the oeconomy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

In the above paragraph, Adam Smith is quite clear that greed is the main factor at work on the human level. His assertion is that despite the greed, there is an "invisible hand" (of God) that transforms rampant greed ("natural selfishness and rapacity") into social welfare. ("They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species... In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.")

Smith's later - and more often quoted – use of the term, invisible hand, in his 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, is not any different in its thrust. Smith again talks about humankind's selfish greed and states that somehow that greed gets converted by an invisible hand into social welfare. Here is the relevant paragraph, Paragraph 9 from Book IV Chapter 2 of The Wealth of Nations:

But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

Of course, in the above paragraph there is no direct reference to Providence, but there is also no suggestion that the invisible hand belongs to anyone or anything other than Providence. Indeed, because Smith includes the phrase, "as in many other cases", in the sentence where he mentions the concept of an invisible hand, it is highly unlikely that Smith was talking about market forces, which pertains only to a specific case (commercial economy).

So what may we conclude from the above?

First, there are market forces. Those market forces – essentially supply and demand – can be studied and understood. Indeed, that has been a major – and perhaps the major – focus of the fledgling science of economics over the last 200 years. In that context, it is somewhat absurd to describe market forces as an invisible hand. Market forces are not at all invisible (unlike God or God's hand).

Second, and for what it's worth, we should be clear that the concept of market forces is really not what Adam Smith was talking about when he used the term, invisible hand. Adam Smith was promoting a laissez-faire economy (and ultimately British imperialism) by arguing – albeit unconvincingly – that the invisible hand is the most effective mechanism for achieving an equitable or just distribution of wealth.

Third, and finally, while it is true that market forces do exist, it is absolutely primitive and even inhumane to paint every dimension of economics with the same brush. Economics is not unidimensional. People and their various needs should not – and ultimately cannot – all be addressed in terms of the marketplace. Commercial economy is just one dimension of a multidimensional – I would argue quadridimensional – science of economics. Unless we take into account all of those dimensions – unless we limit commercial economy to just one of those dimensions and impose appropriate restraints on and within that dimension – there is no way other than a fully planned economy (and possibly a fully commanded economy) to hold in check the type of  rapacious greed recognized by Adam Smith. The notion that an invisible hand (an agency of Providence) or the workings of supply and demand (market forces) will provide the distributive justice that humanity requires – or even the amount of distributive justice that Adam Smith falsely or foolishly alleged that humanity already receives – is a dogma that must be rejected and exposed by all rational and well-meaning persons.