Natural Law

This post began as a response to a discussion on an orthodox Jewish web site, Hashkafah. I had suggested that the similarity between legal systems around the world implies that there is an underlying natural law.

One objection to the idea of natural law is that laws regulating human behavior are not really the same thing as physical laws. After all, we derive physical laws from observing the physical world and can not legislate physical laws to tell the planets how to move. I would point out however, the physical law itself comes in many different kinds and we do use a variation of these laws to regulate how we manipulate the natural world. Engineers, for example, determine how to build bridges by using laws derived from Newtonian physics. Similarly, the laws of evolution, for example, while explaining the origins of diversity in living beings, can be used to formulate civil laws as to how we should behave if we wish to preserve our species.

This argument requires understanding that laws can be very different from each other because the realities underlying different sorts of law are themsleves very different. For example, the laws we call quantum mechanics are based on statistics because at the level of fundamental particles there are no certainties only probabilities for such things as to where a particle is or how fast it is moving. Engineers building electronic devices have to use laws that make the desired result very probable, but never certain. In contrast, at a level of mechanical function, engineers can rely on the absolute prediction of Newton's laws.

Skinner posited laws of behavior from watching animals respond to their environment. These laws can and have been used to design educational systems. Skinner, however, went further and suggested that we could derive laws of human behavior, that is laws as to how we should behave, from scientific observations of how humans behave.

While Skinner, along with Marx and other utopians, may hae been overly arrogant, it seems to me that succssful efforts may have already been made. Anthropologists have been studying human societies now for a number of centuries. Wouldn't it be reasonable to argue that the similarity of laws governing human behavior around reflects a collective effort of engineers to optimize human behavior. Does the similarity of these laws imply that there is some kind of underlying reality to human behavior and that we can use that reality or derive better laws about how we should behave?

Dayenu

Dayenu ... on Passover we sing a sing about all the things jews are grateful for. So, I have modified it. After each stanza, there is a word Dayenu .. it would suffice.

1. The French. The French Enlightenment inspired our founding fathers to create the world's first democratic state. The French navy and confrontations with France in Europe provided the necessary military balance for an American victory in the war for independence.

without French ideas it is hard to imagine that the new country of America would have accepted us as ordinary citizens.

Dayenu

2. The English for giving rise to religious sects that found a state church intolerable. also the English for the development of a middle-class and the creation of the industrial revolution.

the absence of the state church and the availability of industrial war were critical factors in the success of Jewish immigration into the United States.

Dayenu


3. The English for losing the American war then teaching us a lesson (poorly learned) in 1812. The same English for standing up to Hitler until we finally came to her senses.

Dayenu

4. the American natives for their generosity and tolerance of all of the newcomers.

Dayenu

5. Chinese workers and Irish workers for a building the TransAmerican Railway. the presence of large numbers of workers of other ethnic groups, was very important for Jewish immigrants ability to enter the burgeoning American middle class.

Dayenu

6. Northern liberals for opposing southern slavery. Southern intellectuals for supporting freedom from religion and freedom from monarchy.

although large-scale immigration of Jews did not begin until after the Civil War, changes wrought by that warcreated great opportunities for American Jews.

Dayenu

7. Canada for resisting American invasions and, in the part of Québec, trading at Montréal smoked beef.

Dayenu

8. Africans for giving us jazz.

Dayenu

9. Lakota, Pueblo, Seminole, and others all of the native resistance movement for giving us all a lesson in bravery. as American Jews support the bravery of the Israelis and resisting the "greater" Arab population, we should be inspired by the bravery... I'll pay it failed effort to do that of the Native American resistance.

Dayenu

10. Jews and Roman Catholics for levening the American church with something other than flat bread. somehow Jews and Catholics occupied the same ecological niche in American society. The KKK hates us both. Real estate covenants restrict us both. we both have too many seats on the Supreme Court.

Dayenu

11. Muslims for holding together the world of the intellect until Europeans progressed beyond barbarism.

Dayenu

12. The Dutch for being the first to support the American Revolution and for creating the model for quarterly government. and the Dutch for providing refuge from the Spanish Inquisition. Sephardim arriving via Holland were this nation's first Jews.

Dayenu
see more at:

www.seattlejew.blogspot.com

Gandhi's thoughts on Israel

http://www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/mideast.htm

Sad comments from before the Holocaust.

Origin of the Dalmatians by Intelligent Design

Moshe Dayan is a bit of an outcast, not show quality because he has a very large ring around his left eye. Otherwise Moshe is a typical Dalmatian with a lot of spots and a great smile.

Aside from the spots and the smile, Moshe is about 99.9% just a dog. Taken to a dog park, he chooses his friends without regard to race, religion, sexual preference, or breed. In fact, I have seen no evidence that Moshe is even interested in another dog's spots.

This lack of interest in one's breed seems to me to be very different from human behavior. Despite the best efforts of our most liberal citizens, integration only goes so far. For example, most students aggregate with others of their own ethnic or raciaol group. How comes it that Dalmatian's are so much more enlightened than we are? I have a theory.

Modern, rational, loquacious hominids, are 60 to 100 thousand years old. Skeletons indistinguishable from modern human, however, are considerably older than a hundred thousand years. Around 60,000 BCE something happened amongst our ancestors. They got a lot better at making tools, their religions became much more complex, and they discovered art. Paleontologists believe that some thing was the discovery of speech. This discovery probably involved a genetic event because the genetic data tell us that we modern, speaking humans are descended from a very small number of people who existed at that time
.
The paleontologists, however, tell us that dogs already existed alongside our hominid ancestors for many hundreds of thousands of years before the "masters" began talking. Early hominids and dogs were both scavengers, living off the table scraps left by more effective carnivores such as lions. I wonder if the modern image of a lion as a brave animal reaches back to some dim memory of our subservient role, cleaning the bones left after the lions' feat. The famous paleontologist Richard Leakey, says that after the canines and the hominids retired from a full day of the scavenging, canine and hominid retired to case where they slept together. It is even imaginable that protohumans and dogs somehow helped each other in the hunt. Leakey went so far as to suggest that hominids and canines are "co-species."

If Leakey is right, man and dog were shaped together by evolution. Natuarl selection may have created our affection for each other. But something happened to canine evolution about 10,000 years ago .. dogs developed into hundreds of different breeds. Despite thos diversity, Moshe simply doesn't care about breed. How did this happen?

Perhaps the answer comes from intelligent design. My theory depends on understanding the meaning of "species." Proponents of intelligent design make a great deal of the concept of "species". The claim is the "species" have not been observed to develop spontaneously or in laboratory studies of evolution. This argument may reflect a lack of understanding of the basic terminology of biology. Biologists define "species" as being sexually incompatible. Speciation, that is sexual incompatibility between otherwise similar animals, can occur on the basis of very small changes in an animals physical or even behavioral traits. For example, distinct species of crabs are found on the east versus the west coast of Australia. The only difference between the two species is in a mating dance done with the front claws. Remove the claws and love unfolds. So, a subtle change occurring because of random mutations WITH NO EFFECT ON SURVIVAL has created two species. It is easy to see how dog breeder might create two species of dogs. I suspect that Chihuahua and Great Dane are already sexually incompatible, at least without resource to artificial insemination and even then it is hard to imagine a Chihuahua dam giving birth to a Great Dane pup.

So it appears that humans, for our own amusement were able to intelligently design dog "breeds", while our own "races" arose by random changes as our Chinese, French, Aussie, and Bantu ancestors migrated away from the ancestral caves? As we migrates, our dogs went with us and we decided to create different breeds. We became the force for intelligent design. Unfortunately, human intelligence is limited and Dalmatians, in addition to spots, have inherited gout. Amazingly, the American Kennel Club Dalmatian Club will not permit breeders to eliminate the gout gene, even though the gene is now identified. The dog breeders want to keep the breed, their intelligent creation, "pure." Since breed is a human creation, dogs have no reason to recognize it.

There's a lesson in all this for contemporary concepts of race. Extremists on the liberal side argue that there is no such thing as race because all humans share a very similar genome. That assertion, while appealing to egalitarians, sidesteps the obvious issue that a very large portion of our species can be a separated even on the basis of visual inspection into the races. Thus race and breed are very similar except that one is a result of Darwin's choices one the other as a result of intelligent design. I also suggest that in humans, because we speak different languages, breeding is at least weakly coupled to a desire to identify with people who "sound and look like us." Thus, the rather limited physical differences between the races arose partly because some ancestral spin-off from the original tribe, decided that a family group would emigrate to a new home. Once that happened, the desire to breed with similar folks combined with the geographic barriers led to racial distinctions. In contrast physical differences between dogs, resulting from intelligent design, are far more stringent but dogs are all culturally alike.

Every dog pound is evidence that dogs, unlike humans, do not have any genetic tendency to racism. Does that prove the canine designer is more intelligent than the human designer?

State of the Union, 2006

Excerpts from the State of the Union Address by President George W. Bush; United States Congress, 2006

All Americans must comply with the law of the land. That is why we worked so hard to be sure that the new Justices of the Supreme Court are all fair and balanced. As you know, in the matter of freedom of religion, the Court has now decided that alternatives to evolutionary theory must be taught as long as they are based in science. This fair-minded decision challenges those who support intelligent design to provide scientific grounds supporting belief.

I am therefore proposing a budget for the coming year of $300 million to be made available for original research proposals in the area of intelligent design. I want to point out the tremendous potential benefits to our society if such research bears fruit. Research, ALL research has benefits , not just conventional research that explores old points of view. Therefore, I call on the enginuity of American scientists to rise to this challenge. I ask the research and development arms of American industry to imagine the great benefits to your country and to all Americans if the search for intelligent design leads to a source of alternative energy ... our cars may one day run on the same principles that created the Grand Canyon!

Three departments will split this modest sum:

Department of Energy:
What could be more intellignet than an inexhaustible source of energy? My experts tell me that research at a Mormon Univeristy on fuaion power has been suppressed. Others claim that research did not work. Perhaps, but the conventional thinkers we can not make a fusion reactor work because they do not understand how to keep a ball of energy together for more than gnat's blink. Couldn't the answer be a need of science to see God in the heart of the tomahawk errh Tokamik nooclear reactor?

National Science Foundation:
Since that time of the Greeks, the basis for logic itself has never been addressed. We're proposing a collaborative effort between politicians and geologists to determine the original cause of logic.

National Institutes of Health:
In collaboration with the theology departments of the Vatican, Oral Roberts university, Notre Dame university, and the Detroit Wahabi Mosque, the NIH plans to attempt to mutate HIV to a benign virus. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Photography from Iraq

Why do we see so little of this? Because all the western photographers are imbedded? Can't el Qaida afford a digital camera? Anyhow ...try this link from Slate magazine. I found the images a bit disappointing. They lack content other than the simple gore of war. Is there no feeling in this war?

On the Bushie side, surely there must be some good news? Students going back to school? Hospitals operating? Kurds running their own lives????
The lack of good news photographs frightens me even more.

Try this blog for some good photography: FiftyCrows - Social Change Photography

A Phrase

Is there some reason to be Jewish if all that being Jewish means is living for oneself? I am not worthy of such an honor.

Visiting Morehouse

I just came back from a visit to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. The purpose of my visit was to interest students at this prestigious Black college in applying to the University of Washington for graduate or medical school.

In some ways my feelings for the African-American culture approach envy. African-Americans at their best have the kind of immigrant vigor I can remember from my own parents and grandparents. This kind of thing is disappearing from the contemporary Jewish community.

Despite these feelings, something bothers me not just about Morehouse. This school and other black schools I have visited seem insular, like the walled commutes I saw in Brazil. In Sao Paulo, I stayed with a middle class family in a modest home ... part of a development surrounded by a high wall, guards and guard dogs. Designed to protect these ordinary people from the realities of the Brazilian majority.

The Black campuses don't have guard dogs and the folks inside the walls certainly don't feel a need to protect their TVs and furniture from the milling masses. Still a wall seems to exist, or at least I felt I was living in a walled community. Like the walls in Brazil, this is a wall of choice, marking Morehouse off from the larger society. Choosing to attend Morehouse is an ethnic choice. The students and faculty have chosen to declare themselves different from the surrounding society.

I think this wall is present in all Black culture .. just as it is an any ethnic culture. Its existence alone proclaims a pride in African-American identity. There are, of course the expected tokens of ethnic and Morehouse pride. African themed pictures are present in some classrooms and bulletin boards reflect distinctive African-American cultural activities. I suspect this is great for kids who may have never before felt their world was controlled by people like them.

There is another side of living behind a wall. The Brazilians I met were Jewish and had much the same Israeli art in their homes one sees in US Jewish homes. Jews in the US, however do not need walls. Similarly, the feeling of being inside a wall at Morehouse makes me worry about the need for isolation to protect something important to the Morehouse community. Is Morehouse an expression of pride and confidence of an expression of the need to be protected?

The sense of isolation if heightened because this is an all male school. Indeed, the first night I stayed on campus I witnessed the emigration of female guests at curfew time. This was truly a strange scene, hundreds of coeds milling their way through the narrow gated exit from the Morehouse campus. Most of the girls did not have far to go. Spellman College, an all-black all girls school is immediately next-door. The Spellman girls go out one gate and in the other. I did not notice in the emigration of black guys from Spellman toward Morehouse. Are there walls within walls?

I don't understand the concept of an all-male college. Somehow all-female schools makes more sense to me. Women, after all, have their own culture that is threatened by the dominant male society. Girls being girls is probably a lot easier at Wellesley that it is at Harvard. Boys being boys somehow seems less important. Or is it that I think of boy schools only n terms of military academies? Morehouse is anything but a military academy Without the marching and hazing, "boys being boys" makes me think of athletics. Morehouse, however, has at best limited athletic pretensions. The only other model I can think of might be a Catholic seminary. Are there still Catholic colleges for boys other than seminaries?

I asked some of the guys about their choice of all-male school. Their answers added to my thoughts about insularity. The answers had something to do with the special needs of the "black male." I am not entirely sure what these special needs might be, or what the students think they might be. For some students it may be simply the freedom from sexual distractions, just as students at a military academy or a seminary "need" to be free of female distractions. No one told me they went to Morehouse out on a sense of male pride.

Walls aside, I suspect it would be of great value for more Americans to learn about Morehouse. That raises a thought. Is Morehouse a tourist destination in Atlanta? I did not see any sort of commercial activity around the campus. Come to think of it there is no tourist access at Brandeis either.

Back at my purpose, the UW does poorly in recruiting American students to our grad. programs despite the pre-eminence of the University of Washington in NIH funding for research in molecular pathology or vascular biology. My hunch was that few Morehouse students know much about the Udub. I hoped was to find American students with the kind of drive needed to succeed in graduate school. The kids I met certainly qualify. Their choice of Morehouse, clearly reflects a commitment to academic success. If some of the students choose to come to the University of Washington, I will look forward to learning more about student life at all male, all-black school.

One thought, just occurred to me. There are a small number of American Jews who are also African-American. I wonder if Morehouse has any Jewish students? a Jewish chaplain?

The Chinese Aren't Jewish (anymore)

In 1954 the Chinese government ruled than no ethnic Chinese person could be Jewish. At the time only 50 Jews remained of the few thousand that had survived for the previous two millennia, so China simply saw it as inconvenient to allow so few people the privilege of having a distinct nationality. China's problem is understandable. There is no widely accepted definition of Jewishness despite the best and worst efforts by the Southern Baptists, the Nazis, the American government, the Catholic Church, the Chinese government, and the state of Israel.

The simplest definition I can imagine is: "a Jew and is someone who chooses to be a member of the Jewish people and who has fulfill the criteria of one or more bodies of claiming the authority to confer membership in the Jewish people."

This definition intentionally excludes those whose Judaism is defined by others. Many people who died as Jews in Hitler's campus would not qualify under this definition. Madeline Albright, although a Jew by Jewish law is not a Jew simply because she chooses, instead, her white-christian heritage. Similarly, Lani Guanier, the Harvard civil-rights law professor, chooses to celebrate her father;s skin color rather than her mothers Judaism. In this sense American Jews are part of an increasing community identifying themselves as multiethnic or claiming to be able to pick and choose from assorted ancestral connections. Such people, exemplified by Tiger Woods with his African-American and Thai background, may choose to emphasize one culture over another often based on their physical appearance. At the other extreme, Native American tribes in Connecticut have obvious African American physical features, but any attraction to the heritage of Dr. King and Magic Johnson was overbalanced by the financial benefits coming from their Foxwood Tribal Casino.

At this point it is obvious that we are not discussing Judaism as a religion. Presumably the census taker looks badly upon those Americans who might choose to select "African-American" despite having blond hair and pinkish flesh. There is no official body that confers blackness. Judaism is like a religion in allowing, even celebrating the convert. Akiva, the great rabbi of the bar Kochba revolt was a convert as were David's mother and Moses' wife. Jewish conversion, however, is different from conversion to a religious faith. The convert to Judaism accepts the responsibility for the genetic inheritance of Judaism. As strange as this idea may be to a Christian, the children of Jewish converts need no baptism or special ceremony to be Jewish. If your mom is a yid you is too. Thus, the great grand daughter of a convert, assuming consistency of the maternal line a Jewish, would be as eligible to enter Israel as a Jew as the child of the head Lubavitcher Rabbi who claims descent from David himself.

On most religious matters, Judaism does not have an opinion. Jesus was not the son of God. You want heaven? OK, You like angels and the devil? OK, too. Messiahs, sure .. and many different kinds of messiahs too. Lots of choices, but one matter is clear ... there is one and exactly one God. The God tolerates no other gods nor does he make incarnate, personal manifestations. It is not conceivable that this God would personify himself to impregnate a virgin or give birth to a demigod. Thus Jesus worship is inamicable to conversion to Judaism. In contrast, while Judaism rejects the triune godhead, the Jews for Jesus Christian cult includes members who claimed to be former Jews. Not surprisingly, this discovery exempts such people from acceptance by the Jewish community. Still, under Jewish law a Jesus believer or a convert to Islam remains a Jew by birth.

In contrast to acceptance of the Christian deity, rejection of all gods is generally more acceptable to the modern Jewish community. I think the ability to tolerate atheists is a result of monotheism itself. Judaism is surprisingly vague on the nature of God. A simple way for Judaism to escape the blame directed at God as the permissive force behind the Holocaust is to put God's actions on a plane that is inexplicable to man. Jews, for example, are generally proud of Einstein as a Jew and definitely do not consider the hirsute mathematician to be an atheist. Fortunately most of us will never understand Einstein's math so it is OK for his deity to be inexplicable too. It would be difficult to assign blame or seek relief from Einstein's sense of wonder in the orderliness of the universe.

All this leads up to a question:

Why don;t more people convert to Judaism?. After all isn't monotheism really common in today's world? Many Christian sects have assigned the son of God to the lesser role of wise man in a troubled time. Their Christianity seems like Judaism .. stripped only of the membership in the Jewish people. I guess for most folks there is not much to gain by such a membership.

One wonders whether Palestinians, in particular, might not undertake mass conversion?

Photography Art and Poetry

Some 60,000 years ago, deep in a cave on the coast of South Africa the first human discussion occurred. Earlier humans, anatomically identical to the discussants, had a few words, maybe they even made sentences but the discussion, the too and fro of ideas had not yet appeared until that long ago day.

How do we know this? We have no records, the discussants did not have a secretary written language would not exist for another 50,000 years. Paleontology doesn't help, bones from that era are not distinguishable from human bones a good hundred thousand years before then.. The humans in those caves created objects too complex to be the idea of only one person. We have their paintings, tools, sculptures, and jewelry. The art is most important Art, to be worth making, must somehow be appreciated by another individual. Cave paintings imply communication. Perhaps the first discussion was about the weather, but the need to make art left a more enduring record.

Speech is not necessarily verbal. Helen Keller, spoke with sign language. We all speak with the written word. The cave paintings represented another form of speech. "Look, this is a horse!" The effects of the daguerreotype, invented 600 centuries later, would be much the same. "Look, Pierre has created a picture of a horse!" The two acts, however, are very different. The painting is not quite real .. maybe Gron just imagined the horse? Maybe his "speech" is just telling us what horses look like, rather than showing us a real horse? ,A least potentially, the human brain is capable of imagination and creating things that could never have existed. Photographic objects, by definition, have an apparent relationship to real objects.

Perception that an image is "real" can be a very important part of a painting. When one looks at van Gogh's image of farm workers in the field, the harsh sun light MUST represent something van Gough saw. The quality of a painting that conveys reality is not at all clear to me. David Hockney paints in a " photographic style". Yet there is something very unreal and... to my taste... boring about Hockney's work. On the other hand Ansel Adams, a photographer managed to produce images that seem very, very unreal. It is a good idea when looking at one of Ansel's images to leave aside any necessary connection to reality. While a naive viewer may see a photograph, Ansel's images were heavily manipulated by filters, selective exposure, and chemistry of development. And yet we know there is a reality underlying every Ansel Adams print. Put another way an Ansel Adams print is made up of objects taken from reality.

The discipline of working only with the element sof photography implies that photographers work with a vocabulary of real objects, Poets, like photographers, also deal with a limited vocabulary. That vocabulary of sounds, when compared to the sounds available to musicians, is very limited. The poets challenge is to use these words provoke our thoughts. The photographer's challenge is very similar. We work with the lights and darks, the shadows and bright areas that comprise a moment in time.

Back in the cave, today's discussants are trading photographs.