The Nature of Belief

MLK Day

King’s most famous quote, in his most famous speech, was an audacious, in-your-face challenge to white people.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The message is uplifting, yes, and is also laced with righteous anger, bitterness, and sarcasm. “I have dream,” indeed.

The reaction to that message still reverberates. Today, after a half-century of advances and setbacks, King’s challenge to white people is as stark as in 1963.

At the August 28, 1963 March on Washington

The 2016 presidential campaign was all about character. About being consistently poised and respectful, despite differences. About answering difficult questions directly and honestly. About doing your homework and knowing what you’re talking about. About listening and remaining persuadable in the heat of argument. About being protective of those who need protection. About speaking one’s mind, and standing up for what is right.

Those elements of character were the core appeal of the Democratic candidate—much more than mere ideology.

And it was a turn-off for many voters. For many white voters, that is.

Here’s what I’ve learned from being white: The existence of white supremacy, with the very real advantages if confers in status and opportunity—constitutes a moral hazard. Because it is all too easy to substitute white privilege for the very difficult effort of cultivating good character.

And the less one has accomplished through real effort and real accomplishment, rather than skating by on white skin, the greater the hazard.

The moral hazard of white supremacy can lead people to stay in economically hopeless backwaters rather than face the rigors of urban life. To stick with fading livelihoods rather than learning something new. To substitute the falsity of homilies and heritage for authentic development of one’s individuality. Enough years of this avoidance will, almost inevitably, cause a whole community to suffer hopelessness, which can be measured in rising substance abuse and mortality.

Many will also suffer anger, and resentment, against “elites” who live in a multiracial, diverse, challenging, and forward-looking world. And they may feel they are being judged and excluded for lacking the elements of character that are, more and more, indispensable currency in that world—urbane poise, open-mindedness, sensitivity to others, attentiveness to knowledge. (These elements of character are often derided as “political correctness.”)

Part of Trump’s appeal is that he offers a comforting reassurance to white people that, in America today, those “elite” character values can still be sidestepped. All you need is white skin and money, and you can be coarse, ignorant, racist, and successful. Without the money, you’re still OK.

So, Dr. King’s dream that his children (and ours) should be judged by the content of their character—that is still a dream. As we continue to pursue it, we would do well to remember that it is not just a “dream” in the sense of a high-minded aspiration, but a dream full of righteous anger at white supremacy.

January 16, 2017 by The Nature of Belief 0

Private Property

The fog burned off in the late morning, and by 3pm it was sunny and in the upper 50s. I decided on an hour’s walk around the neighborhood.

I tried McPeak Road. On the map, it starts just the other side of the Hacienda Bridge and winds up Hobson Creek.

I was aiming for some late-afternoon sunshine, but I didn’t get that. The creek is in a fairly deep canyon and it was wet and gloomy in there, although the creek was roaring and burbling, still high from the past week’s rains.

I was also hoping for some woodsy peace, but I didn’t get that either.  There was a profusion of “No Trespassing” and “Keep Out” signs everywhere, and those always put me on edge. Like I’m feeling these folks don’t want outsiders walking up their road.

Even though it’s a public road.

I walked on, deciding that those signs were referring to the land on either side of the road, even though they were kind of aimed to be seen by someone coming up the road, like me. As I walked further up the canyon, I passed the last of the reasonably well-kept houses, and pretty soon I was traversing what seemed to be someone’s personal garbage dump, with disused recyclables and rusted equipment scattered all the way across a yard, to the edge of the road, and then piled on the other side of the road, leaving only a narrow passage to get through.

Soon after I came to what looked like a standard county gate, something that would be installed by a public agency, except that it had a “keep out” sign right behind it. So I kept out, and walked back down the road toward home.

There wasn’t any sign that said “end of county maintained road.” Since I’ve been living part-time in Sonoma County I’ve noticed instances where someone had staked out a portion of the public right-of-way (between their fence line and the pavement edge, for instance) for their private use. So I’m left wondering where McPeak Road ends, and if the public right of way continues beyond that gate, and whether I’m curious enough to go look at official county maps and records to find out.

And I’m also shaking my head at the decrepitude of these properties, here in the midst of a lot of wealth and a critical lack of housing.

January 14, 2017 by Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

What Xmas Means to Me

I was raised strict atheist. We had a Christmas tree and gave gifts. We admired seasonal revelry in a Currier-and-Ives kind of way, without taking much part in it.

In adulthood, I learned to appreciate the blend of ritual and melancholy captured so well in the original lyrics to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I can’t say I’ve ever looked forward to the Christmas season, but I have sought, each year, to find some transformative moment in it. I’ve found that moment, sometimes, while walking alone on a crowded shopping street, or hanging an ornament on the tree, or just sitting in a warm armchair and listening to medieval carols.

At 50, I fathered a child. My new relatives are assimilated Jews. I’ve done seven Christmas Eves their way; I’ve felt more and more each year that something was missing.

So this year, I started to explore various meanings of Christmas.

I should say: By this time in life, I’m a lapsed atheist. I still discount the truth of religious doctrine, but I don’t discount the value of faith.

My exploration was helped when I read this piece by Bill Muehlenburg, who seems to take his Bible straight up.

He says Christmas is about incarnation and redemption. Now here are ideas I can wrestle with. I mean, Christmas is also about finding light in the darkest hours, and it is about fully experiencing joy, and while it is not a given to achieve either of those things, I don’t question their value, or the value of trying.

But incarnation? The existence of God in human form, who walks (or walked) among us, like an ordinary man? I need to think harder about that.

As an evolution of belief, I like it. It’s way better than believing in a God who doesn’t walk among us. I can squint and appreciate Jesus in an immanentist way, as the experience of the divine in the mundane. We all could use more of that, I think, in a time when people tend to act as if their own fate, and the fate of the world, are things to be trifled with. We could have a little more awe, and conduct ourselves more as embodiments of spirit, and be less reactive to what gets served up daily in the earthly vale.

The idea of redemption had me digging a little harder. Even if we are non-believers, we can be attracted by concept of God’s unconditional love. Again, as a belief, it’s way better than believing in an Old Testament God, who is the kind of prick who smites you if he doesn’t like your looks (and even if you’re his biggest fan, invites you to kill your kid to demonstrate that you really believe).

The unconditional love thing looks easier than it really is, because to accept and fully experience unconditional love, you also have to accept yourself, just as you are, you sinner you. That’s hard, but once you achieve that self-acceptance, your relationship to God has to change, and I think that change must be profoundly liberating.

Which brings us back to the problem of belief. The great good deal, according to Christian doctrine, is that you get that unconditional love, along with everlasting life—and all you have to do is believe.

I don’t believe, and I look askance at the idea that one believes what one wills to believe. That idea is all too common, and you and I would do well to reject it. Like I said, I don’t discount the value of faith, but just up and deciding to have faith, to get the benefits it provides, strikes me as cheap and easy, and cheap and easy is not what I want at Christmas.

So here’s what Christmas means to me, at least for now: A celebration of the divine in everyday life. An awe of what it means to be human, and of the gifts and responsibilities that come with that. A time to stretch myself to accept myself and to accept others, and to revel in the changes that practice brings. And a little melancholy as I look at the passage of another year.

December 24, 2016 by Personal Status The Nature of Belief 1

Earthy Day

I still have mixed feelings about Earth Day.

In 1970, I was in seventh grade, having already been suspended and about to be expelled for political activity—which was largely, but not entirely, in opposition to the raging war in Southeast Asia. I’d seen the Life magazine pictures of the massacred old people, women, and kids in the ditches of My Lai.

This Earth Day idea—that we all needed to take personal responsibility to do something about pollution—seemed like a clever political diversion.

The school administration decided it would be instructive to have us pick up litter on a hot North Carolina roadside. We had some classroom discussion afterward. I suggested most pollution was coming from factories, and that big business was responsible. It didn’t go over well with the teacher.

I hadn’t seen, until today, that on that first Earth Day the great I.F. Stone was making some related good points in a speech at the Washington Monument.

Forty-five years later, I think a lot of the participation in the environmental movement comes from a perspective of doing your part, taking individual responsibility, and feeling good about it. With age, I’ve come to be more tolerant of that perspective. However, I still think it is a diversion from the pressing need for political action to challenge the military-industrial complex.

April 22, 2015 by The Nature of Belief 0

Stormwater Utility

Today I listened with interest to a presentation on efforts, by a broad coalition of local government entities, to make a modest change to California Proposition 218. The 1996 constitutional amendment requires a 2/3 popular vote to create or raise fees—the add-ons to property tax bills local government uses to pay for schools, parks, and other things people need.

Proposition 218 exempts water, sewer, and garbage fees. The logic of the exemption is that these utility fees are for are services provided directly to the property owner, and are in direct proportion to the cost of individual service.

Local governments would like to add stormwater to the list of exemptions. The proposal presented today foresees the creation of local stormwater utilities that would fund flood control, storm drains, and stormwater pollution prevention programs—and could create raise fees to pay for those programs without a 2/3 popular vote.

As much as I hope this effort succeeds, I think the analogy to water, sewer, and garbage collection is flawed.

The rain that falls, and the runoff it creates, are things communities hold in common. Keeping that runoff unpolluted, controlling it so it doesn’t flood our neighborhoods, maintaining the habitats it nourishes—every benefit runoff provides is a benefit to all of us. We all live downstream, as the saying goes.

As we get ever deeper into the business of protecting and enhancing urban watersheds, we realize that our work is entwined with every problem and benefit that makes up a City. Our rain gardens are play areas; our streams are places to escape to and explore, but can’t be trash-free until we solve homelessness; our streets carry the worst floods, and we must be conscious of runoff when we wash or fix our cars, or do any work outside.

Stormwater is exactly the kind of problem a City is (to use Jane Jacobs’ phrase), which is to say it is a common problem, a shared problem, the kind of problem that the Proposition 218 authors deliberately want to make government too starved and weak to do anything about. When Grover Norquist said he wanted to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub, he chose his metaphor well.

March 18, 2015 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention The Nature of Belief 0

Learning from Zoe

While imbibing our morning stimulants (coffee, coffee with milk, milk, prune juice), family discussion turned to getting teased at school. Zoe’s buddies Josie and Iliana have a few months on her&#8212and they’ll be four before she gets there&#8212and they’ve been reminding her about it. At mention of the teasing, Zoe’s little face crumpled. She buried her head in her arms and put her butt in the air.

Parenting moment: What to say?

Nothing, I decided, except to acknowledge her feelings and share that yes, sometimes it doesn’t feel good to be teased.

Here I am at work thinking about that moment, and about the practice of letting feelings wash over and through you, and the wisdom that comes from it, and how badly I’ve needed that wisdom this past year, and how much I hope to gain from it in the year to come.

January 4, 2013 by Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

The stupid, it hurts

Four days after the Newtown massacre, I’ve had all I can stand.

The radio pundits, the listeners calling in, conversations on the street&#8230 pontificating, speculating, hand-wringing, making the same old tired points&#8230

Mass shootings, as horrifying as they are, and as frequent as they have become, are rare events. That means (in all probability) no valid trends, no valid comparisons, no valid generalizations.

Which isn’t going to stop all the talk about video games, or moral decay, or mental health, or being male, or a loner, or bad parenting, or (God help us) school &#8220security,&#8221 any of which may or may not have had anything to do what happened in the individual and incomparable events in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek, or with what might have prevented any or all of them.

You want to look at consistently pervasive social factors that are closely correlated with violent tragedies?

Let’s start with stupidity, by which I mean the inability to tell the difference between fearful hand-wringing, idle speculation, fantasy, and moralizing, on the one hand, and thoughtful, dispassionate analysis, preferably backed up by actual data, on the other. Stupidity keeps us from addressing social problems and human suffering, and it is spread, avidly and without attention to consequence, ubiquitously and twenty-four-seven as we like to say. So if we’re going to go on about video games and moral decay, let me put in an oar and say that yes, it was stupidity that killed those kids and keeps us stuck in a social condition where more massacres are inevitable.

Of course, if you want a better kind of stupidity&#8212the &#8220keep it simple, stupid&#8221 kind that states the obvious in attempt to bring about some clarity&#8212then I’ll offer that common factors in all these incidents were (1) that they were horrible, tragic, and senseless, and (2) there were, um, you know, guns involved.

December 18, 2012 by The Nature of Belief 0

Outputs and Outcomes

As noted in this post, our regional group of regulators and municipal stormwater permittees is moving away from quantifying trash loads and trash reductions.

That’s a good thing, but we seem to be stuck with assessing success by documenting outputs (for example, frequency of street sweeping, or portion of the drainage system equipped with capture devices) as well as documenting outcomes (for example, less trash on streets or in creeks).

Documenting outcomes is hard, and results are uncertain. A municipal permittee could try like hell to clean up the trash but trash could still increase because of factors beyond its control (for example, a demographic change, or windier weather). Or vice versa: There could be less trash over time, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the local trash reduction program. A municipal permittee’s compliance shouldn’t be subject to vagaries.

But the assessment of success shouldn’t be about compliance. It should be about continuous improvement.

To solve a problem iteratively, you need to first guess a solution. Then you need a way to tell whether you are off, and in what direction. Measuring outcomes at least gives you a chance to figure out whether what works and what doesn’t. You might give yourself a bum steer (because of vagaries), but you can at least try to consider the context and make sense of the results. In contrast, measuring outputs shows that you tried, but there’s no way it can help make your efforts more effective.

November 21, 2012 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention The Nature of Belief 0

Similar and Different

How do we measure success?

In a meeting this past week, a group of municipal staff, Regional Water Board staff, and consultants reviewed a framework for local trash reduction plans. Each of 75-odd Bay Area cities, towns, and county governments will need to prepare these plans to reduce and eliminate&#8212by 2024&#8212trash in stormwater.

Back in 2009, most of these same folks worked on requirements for interim (short-term) plans to reduce trash by 40% by 2014. Those plans have been in effect for 3 years. What have we learned (or not learned)?

Here comes the crazy: We all know those numbers can’t be met. They certainly can’t be met in the places with the toughest trash problems, and not in the midst of a recession and financial crisis.

We could make some progress, though. We could make a difference, if we marshaled what resources we have and agreed to learn as we go along.
Even that is hard, because we also need to uphold the fiction of those numbers. For Water Board staff those numbers are a bulwark from political and legal pressures brought by environmental advocates and by other regulators. For local governments, the numbers are protection from enforcement actions and lawsuits.

Beginning in 2009, we created &#8220baseline&#8221 estimates of existing trash and ways to credit activities&#8212like street sweeping, public education, and creek cleanups&#8212toward the 40% goal. Recently we’ve agreed it didn’t work because the estimates are too imprecise.

But that’s not the half of it. There’s also a conceptual error here, one that goes to the core of what scientific understanding is all about.
Things are similar; this makes science possible. Things are different; this makes science necessary. (Paraphrasing from here.)

Urban trash is similar and different. Trash in storm drains is correlated to land use and to average household income. Sweeping streets more frequently does, ceteris paribus, pick up more trash. But the correlations aren’t strong enough to be the basis for directing local cleanup efforts. You’d be taking shots in the dark.

Generalizing from particulars is fine. But assuming any and all particular instances conform to the generality? Unless the correlations are very tight&#8212something that doesn’t happen much in nature or in stormwater&#8212that practice will yield wrong results much of the time.

Wrong as in creating perverse incentives to sweep streets that are already clean, to install capture devices where trash isn’t, and to overlook obvious trash sources that weren’t anticipated and weren’t assigned &#8220credits&#8221.

November 21, 2012 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention The Nature of Belief 0

Whatever the hell

Hunter is consistently the best read at DailyKos. Bitter, sarcastic, and self-amused, his satire seems a perfect balance to the jaw-dropping outrages that are politics and media in the US today.

Today he comments on birtherism (the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States). Noting the prevalence of this belief dropped in April 2011, after Obama released his long-form birth certificate, but has now increased again, Hunter writes:

&#8230releasing actual factual information about something only changes public knowledge about that thing for a short period of time, then folks go back to believing whatever the hell they want to believe.

Exactly. It would be harder, I think, to identify the set of conditions under which public knowledge could actually be changed by presentation of facts.

July 13, 2012 by The Nature of Belief 0