Baton Charge: “Tar”

January 18

An orchestra, as Lydia points out, is “not a democracy,” but, nonetheless, might it be helpful if classical musicians took the word “maestro” and slung it out of circulation? Does the aura that enfolds it not lie at the rotten root of the story of Lydia Tár? If you worship a maestro, after all, don’t be surprised if you wind up as a slave to the rhythm.
Anthony Lane

The Deification of Donald Trump

The former president posted a video called “God Made Trump” on Truth Social. It begins:

On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.” God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump. …God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”
The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions

Immigration: ChatGPT

January 15

Immigration: ChatGPT

Dear ChatGPT: Assuming widespread agreement, in 800 words or less, how can the U.S. best fix its immigration problem?

ChatGPT

Addressing the U.S. immigration system requires a multifaceted approach, balancing the need for security, economic growth, humanitarian responsibilities, and the preservation of America’s core values as a nation of immigrants. Here’s a comprehensive plan, within 800 words, to address the issue:

Read More

How Politics Got So Polarized

The Robbers Cave experiment suggests another way out. After having nudged the Eagles and the Rattlers toward conflict, the researchers wanted to see if they could be nudged back. They brought the boys together for a variety of peaceable activities. One day, for example, they arranged for the two groups to meet up in the mess hall for lunch. The result was a food fight. Since “contact situations” weren’t working, the researchers moved on to what they called “superordinate goals.” They staged a series of crises—a water shortage, a supply-truck breakdown—that could be resolved only if the boys coöperated. Dealing with these manufactured emergencies made the groups a lot friendlier toward each another, to the point where, on the trip back to Oklahoma City, the Rattlers used five dollars they’d won from the bean-collecting contest to treat the Eagles to malteds.

Could “superordinate goals” help depolarize America? There would seem to be no shortage of crises for the two parties to work together on. The hitch, of course, is that they’d first need to agree on what these are.

Hands of Peace

Hands of Peace empowers American, Israeli, and Palestinian youth to become agents of change.
Our Mission

At Hands of Peace, we share these common values:

  • We believe the future depends on the leadership, education and actions of the next generation.
  • We believe global connections are learning connections.
  • We believe the way to create impactful and lasting change in society is through cultivating young leaders who are committed to serving their communities.
  • We believe in positive peace that goes beyond the absence of violence and builds constructive attitudes and systems that foster equality, freedom and justice.
  • We believe all people deserve self-determination and basic human rights.
  • We believe in the same freedoms for all, including freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom of movement, freedom from fear and violence, and freedom from oppression.
  • We believe the existing conditions among Israelis and Palestinians are unacceptable and there must be an urgent, non-violent end to occupation that leads to safety and security for all.

[read more]

A ‘National and Global Maelstrom’ Is Pulling Us Under

By Thomas B Edsall

…Perhaps the most trenchant comment I received was from Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who replied to my inquiry at the height of the controversy over the former Harvard president Claudine Gay:

I have thought for some time that America was suffering multiple elite-driven institutional breakdowns across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly distressed by it all, including the collapse of core values at my own university (Harvard), that I cannot write coherently about it.

Excerpts from “The Fate of Free Will”

The Fate of Free Will
Kevin Mitchell

Organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says. “Living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing — their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value. And yet…no one would say that (a single cell organism) has will, free or otherwise.

Rejecting the reductionist view does not mean resorting to mind–body dualism—positing some extra, nonphysical entity, like a soul or a spirit. There is no ghost in this machine. “Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physical brains,” Mitchell says. They are the holistic sum of that continuous, dynamic, distributed activity. The brain is material, and its parts are increasingly well understood.

Free will, as distinct from agency, implies consciousness and self-reflection. Yet so much of what we do is involuntary. 

Yet unconscious decision-making is still decision-making. And sometimes we do think. We reflect, ponder, dither, weigh alternatives for some time before choosing to act.

Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes.

Thought involves continual feedback and self-correction, and the individual components cannot be teased apart. Mitchell writes:

The various subsystems involved are in constant dialogue with each other, each attempting to satisfy its own constraints in the context of the dynamically changing information it receives from all the interconnected areas.

Agency is what distinguishes us from machines. For biological creatures, reason and purpose come from acting in the world and experiencing the consequences. 

Reviving Wade’s Wire

Dear Wade’s Wire Subscriber:

After allowing it to lie dormant for more than a year while constructing the Compassionate Humanity Community website, I’m reviving this list. No more than once a day, I’ll share discoveries, thoughts, and feelings here. I appreciate your interest and support.

I just posted the January 2024 Mutual Empowerment newsletter, a publication of the Compassionate Humanity Community. If you did not receive it, you can view it here and subscribe to the monthly newsletter here. If you already have, I apologize for the redundancy.

Wade Lee Hudson

The Holy Thursday Revolution

  • The Holy Thursday Revolution, Beatrice Bruteau

    “Drawing from a wide range of disciplines Bruteau presents a unifying vision of a world that must move from…domination to one of equality and sharing… Presents [jesus’] two teaching events of Holy Thursday — Footwashing and Holy Communion — as entry gates into a new way of living and loving in a world of domination, power, and separation.”

How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It, Carlos Lozada

…But the German-born Hirschman — who in addition to being an academic economist was a U.S. Army veteran, an antifascist resister, an adviser on the Marshall Plan and a consultant to the Colombian government — was too intellectually honest, or simply had seen too much of the world, to stop with the right. The left displays its own unity of certitude, he suggested in the penultimate chapter of “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” and its habit of rationalization is “richer in maneuvers, largely of exaggeration and obfuscation, than it is ordinarily given credit for.”…

(read more) [Posted in Political/Democracy]