The Rich Get Richer

There is always something of moral panic when we see growing income and wealth disparities because the rich get richer. The rich, for their part, see themselves as working for it - attending to their investments of time and money and care. I think the moral panic is because wealth per se is not an enjoyed good; it isn't food or drink or fine living or helping people or knowledge or any other good thing itself. People whose astute investments and good ideas make them money which they re-invest or spend are actually fine.

People move along through life. The rich get richer, the fat get fatter, the well-read read more. If we want to arrest this, one part is a need for metanoia - for life direction changes. There is no solution without solving this problem.

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Arson

Simone at AnotherSomething's school was burned in an arson attack. I am something of a pessimist, and while I totally sympathise with the loss and the insult, I couldn't see it as hard to understand - in fact I would think this sort of thing is almost over-determined.

The first candidate is the arsonist, looking for a mostly wooden building that will certainly be empty in the middle of the night, and which people care enough about to notice the attacks.

The second candidate is the person for whom school functioned as a giant, long-running hell of having 'not good enough' stamped on them by the adult world of the state and by their peers. If they have hated us, we need to remember that they think we hated them first.

The third candidate is perhaps the dux or the prop of the first fifteen at an elite private school, celebrating the end of their academic year with a hearty 'sod the proles'.

Each of these may be present in a single person - they seem to me to draw energy from resentment, from a self defined by weakness and lacks.

Nations

Newt Gingrich's 'invented nation' gibe is yet more evidence (if any were needed) that he is a big fat idiot. Nations in the nation-state paradigm are invented or instituted. Many African 'nations' were invented in the colonial era, and have been invented again to get to the post-colonial organisation.  And of course, America.  No nation is more invented than America.

Real common language, common descent, common culture nationhood is something everyone wants, because it gives the self something to hang its hat on, some essence that is in other people and validates how we are. But, as Benedict Anderson points out, we have to make do with imaginary compatriots, because
a. We can't possibly know even a representative sample of our huge modern nations; and
b. If we did know them, we'd know they are not what we hoped for and that we have much less in common than we thought.

Nation-building is not a job for other nations - its a job for people and messages.

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Republicans and Government

The Republican party benefits when people are frustrated with the government of America, because they allegedly want to reduce the size (in practice, this belief of themselves means they don't ask whether they REALLY need a new super-fighter, aircraft carrier, subsidy program for their favourite voters, and often grow government's part in the US economy considerably. Of course they really need it - the party of small government can judge a REAL need when they see one.)

So in dark economic times like these, obstructing legislation, focussing on long term problems and seeking short term solutions (debt ceiling), pretending low taxes for the very rich create widespread demand and that any tax increase will be to blame for the further collapse of the economy substitutes very nicely for government - actually trying to rule over problems and end them.  Then they can say 'look at all the money you lose to government, and then honestly, nothing happens with it'.  Andrew Sullivan puts a couple of good quotes together here.

Their approach to government for, of and by the people parallels that of General Melchett on the important place of kindness.

Ohh, those christians...

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has a piece at the Atlantic that tries to critique Rick Perry's christianity with recourse to some fairly simple bible reading. The comments are terrible. It has immediately degenerated into reasonable atheists vs absurd christians apparently hoping to establish forever which is the one true faith.

Her point, which would be my point, is that their are ample resources from within the Christian tradition to critique attempts to identify with Christ to win votes.

For a very long time in parts of the US, the church teacher has had the biggest opportunity to educate regular christian people, but they themselves don't have to know tooo much or be too intelligent. Their higher education is conducted at seminaries and specialised education institutes - of widely varying quality. The great universities of the world started out to train people for ministry, so its not essentially undignified.

Somewhere, I feel the theological colleges confused politics and theology. Theological liberals don't stand on the bible text and may give very little credit to the articles of the traditional faith. Theological conservatives stick to what the bible texts say and the traditional way they have been understood. Fundamentalism started as a reaction to 19th century theological liberalism, which has now been so far improved upon as to show the 19th century biblical criticism as invalid. These days though, fundamentalists are crazy people who insist on the King James Version and the Schofield bible, neither of which are good scholarship any more. So the reasonable rage of an internal schism among christians has somehow been powering a debate between economic conservatives and social liberals, and committing christians to interpretations of the bible that don't stand up.

Finally, i will just note that the cheerful demolition of God by rationalists is quite different from the abdicating God Zizek would prefer. The absence of God, his nothingness, still leaves all humans equal. Without that absence, the same self-comparing narcissim will have to attach to other people, or social superstructures. I seriously think Neitzsche called it and Nazism and Stalinism bore him out.

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A non-laugh Riot

Why should I be the last person on earth to pass interpretative judgment on the rioting youth of Britain? There are two judgments, quite well united in Theodore Dalrymple's item in the Australian - the Youth are Revolting, and have been for a very long time, because the leaders in Britain have led mainly for themselves and not for the led. The home and family and place of employment have all been decimated to economics, and these are the results.

The only other notable observation is the pathetic empty materialism of the rioters, mirroring the pathetic empty materialism of their (our) society.

Being poor in England is oppressive. When we lived their briefly, we rented a modest 3br house in the middle of the toxic wasteland that is bedfordshire, and paid about £7500 pa. I would regularly see advertisements about bus driving, hair-dressing or receptioning that offered barely £10,000 pa, and sometimes less. Meanwhile, sectors of society are ostentatiously rich.

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American Religion

Slate carried an article on the fervour which greeted Texas Govenor Rick Perry's prayer meeting for the nation. I don't know much about him except that in fine Texas fashion, he presides over a lot executions, a lot of money being made, and not much social support.


It makes me think of Isaiah 1:12ff (ESV translation):

“When you come to appear before me,  who has required of you  this trampling of my courts?  [...]  1:15 "When you spread out your hands,  I will hide my eyes from you;  even though you make many prayers,  I will not listen;  your hands are full of blood."  Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;  remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;  cease to do evil,  17 learn to do good;  seek justice,  correct oppression;  bring justice to the fatherless,  plead the widow’s cause.

Other great reads on God in politics at ABC Religion Online:

Stanley Hauerwas
Slavoj Zizek 

Debt Ceiling Inaction Plan

I am watching with amazement the debt ceiling drama unfolding in the USA.  It is weird to think what a credit downgrade might mean for the reserve currency of the world - USD. Many international financial mechanisms (as I understand it) are built on the USD. The world will face a choice of trying to keep them going with a bad currency, or trying to rebuild international institutions from scratch on alternate bases, or giving up.

In essence, the situation of the US government is not unlike my household with a new child.  We have gone from two full-time incomes and no idlers, to one full-time, one-part time, and one unemployed. (All he does is eat and sleep.  He pays no taxes. He contributes nothing.) The choice we face is to either:

• liquidate our assets (realising a hefty loss) and move to a lower cost lifestyle, 
• moving to a lower cost lifestyle by eating less, driving less, turning off the heaters and lights and doing no washing, not seeing the doctor, not getting immunisations done, making no progress on our existing debts (paying interest-only), although it is unlikely that all this can be brought under our current income, or
• accepting that we will earn more in future years, and increasing our total debt for the moment.

We are choosing the last.  The first two are panicky reactions that would almost certainly be significantly injurious long-term.  To some extent, we could have been wiser, perhaps in years gone by - in the house we chose and so on.  But from where we are now, a little debt is very affordable.

I saw reports of a freshman Congressman hoping aloud that the Lord would bless the economy measurably when his side, the 'No Increase' Tea Partiers won the contest.  If they do win, the Obama Administration will have to administer the obligations of the US Government with insufficient funds - anything up to 40% too little week to week.  I recommend an 'across the board' approach:

• All military members, recipients of social security, welfare, medicare, medicaid and members of congress go in a lottery and 40% of them get nothing.  Maybe if their ID number ends in 6,7,8 or 9.
• US Government Bonds the same.

These are the ridiculous options that the Obama Administration is going to be forced into. It's like me having to sell the house and not take my wife to the doctor and put her back to work in a couple of months to avoid adding $5000 to my mortgage. It's just a pity there is no instrument to default on recipients of the Bush tax cuts.

As I said to a friend this morning, the hope that the Lord would bless a move that forces welching on obligations to debt-holders, to employees, and to aid recipients because you believe He is first and foremost against 'socialism' is a position so confused that I hardly know how to undo it.  First, he is pro-socialism.  He invented it - look at the redistribution of wealth in the Jubilee laws, and then again the practice of the early church. Second, a vote against the debt ceiling increase is a vote against the sick, the poor, the unemployed, and the rich who have opted to do business with you on your terms. He is the Friend of all these categories.

(My one small hope in this calamity is that it may punish Wall Street for its irresponsibility. In the Old Testament, God's judgement against one nation is usually meted out by an even more rabid nation, and Wall Street has got away with being clever and reasonable and offering excellent deals after damaging the global economy with terrible judgment. It would be good to see Terrible Judgment disable them.*)

*pun intended.

It's a bad world

Today, a report of a man fighting off a toddler for a life jacket in the Christmas Island boat tragedy.

There is a good, selfish reason to be generous, to refuse to be defensive about border protection. The sight of human indecency is shameful - and I think that reaction is there because there is never nothing to be done. Primo Levi talks about the suspension or transvaluation of morality in a Nazi concentration camp. Those who had real virtue quickly starved by sharing with the even hungrier. Then as now, the earth produced more than enough food for its inhabitants.

Primo Levi - (Wikipedia translation)

If...

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about.
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts,
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

I would be interested to know whether this is consciously against the Rudyard Kipling 'If'. The fact is, there are, for all of us, circumstances that have us clutching, that reduce us to the fierce amoral animal, old man. Come new man.

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On the other hand...

Gawker has a story about Richard Dawkins weighing in rather unpopularly on a bit of behavior within the skeptic community.  A man, at the end of a long conference party, slipped into the same elevator as a woman and invited her to come back for coffee.  The woman was married, had given a talk about sexist behaviour in the 'skeptical community'.  She rebuffed him and he went away.  Then her mild complaint was taken up by a horrified geek chorus, and then the Dawk weighed in, trying (very clumsily) to make the point that there probably needs to be space in the skeptical community for bad manners to be practiced without them causing injuries. Society is a rough and tumble place, he could have said.  This man might be a creep, but unless you want him to ask your father, husband or older brother first, this kind of experience might be the price of sexual freedom, and its impact depends entirely on your willingness to accept that you are powerful enough.  If you are seeing yourself primarily as vulnerable, then this sort of thing is going to be terrible.  If you're not, then this sort of thing is yet another reminder that you're better.

This, I suspect, is at the bottom of a lot of men's worries about feminism.  If a man thinks he's equal to another man, he doesn't set up a lot of special conditions for his entry into the contest.  He's equal. If women are so equal, why all the special pleading?  Go for it - compete and win.  Do excellent work, share solidarity with each other.  Axiom of this position: Power cannot be given, only taken. Power given is power that can be rescinded.  (I think this is the reason that Bob Ellis and Scott Adams both seem to react to societal expectation of respectful sexual behaviour as if it required cutting their johnsons off.)

No one can look at the vulnerability of women and think it is the same as that of men. A woman and a man in an elevator are not equal.  The woman is probably not as strong as the man.  They can be equal in Adorno's 'bios' political life, but not in physical 'zoe' existence.  (The man, of course, can't bear children or inspire 4am sex pleas, and is vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation and social pressures, to karoushi (working to death)).  It's like saying Rock and Paper are equal.

The other problem, of course, is that there are no agreed standards of behaviour.  This strategy might have worked several times before.  It might work in a less defensive community than the skeptical community, which is defensive from the ground up.  (These are folks forming a huddle to beat the intellectual stuffing out of astrology together. They will spend days at it.)  If this was a well-defined solecism, it might be easier to get a conviction, but if you're going to define that as a solecism it might be difficult to maintain properly casual sex for the young atheist.

Us men don't like this civilisation one bit

So Bob Ellis, retired labor speechwriter, has a bee in his bonnet (bat in his belfry?) about how left wing politicians are always being destroyed by sex scandals, and it seems so unfair that only feminism can explain it. Idiot.  A longer critique by John Birmingham here.

He is in company with Scott Adams, who drew fire for his 'Pegs and Holes' blog post about how men can't get no satisfaction because of society as constituted, and that this makes them unhappy. In fairness, Scott is making the same observation that Freud made in 'Civilisation and it's Discontents', and pushing back (as Freud pushed back) against 'unrealistic' expectations gaining moral force. If he had read Freud, or thought about it at all, he might have realised that there is more to being a satisfied man than having a satisfied penis.

The problem for both these doofuses (doofii?) is that these expectations became expectations because of the moral force, not the reverse. The problem is not feminism, it is of creating and sustaining a just society. Keeping one's pants on is the creation of, and a sustaining of, the kind of trust that can enable anxiety-free sex. Don't let anyone say it can't be done by any man; but don't think creation of something this good will be easy.

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Men and Women II

Following from earlier posts (the difference, Nietzsche), I have some more experimental ideas on sameness and difference.

First, there is always a distribution, but our brains stereotype so that we can retain our sanity in the presence of people we have not previously met. Sometimes this sanity means caution, sometimes friendliness, sometimes offers of help, sometimes requests for help. The stereotype ('das man') even affects assembly of prefab furnniture. I (and many peers according to my wife's antenatal circle) see inconsistencies between what i want to do and the parts i have as evidence that ikea (or whoever) have screwed up. I improvise and 19/20 times, prove only that they were right all along. So stereotypes with the diversity eliminated are never going away.

Second, small differences get big, or perhaps, there are no small differences in society. There is a lot of feedback in the social system, a lot of space for prejudice/stereotype confirming events to be created by the stereotype. One notable experience of difference goes into the stereotype. One notable feature of the stereotype then causes changes in a lot of behaviour, expectation. If Hegel (and Dennett, and Vygotsky) are right, we depend on others for our first self-concept. How others see us becomes how we see ourselves.

Third, there are at least small differences physical and mental, between men and women. Men are, on average, larger and disproportionately strong / hardy. Women have superior peripheral vision and a better sense of smell. (These differences too fit a type - which is that men look like predators and women look like prey. The hideous pregnancy of live caterpillars with wasp larvae is not so far from human pregnancy after rape.)

Amanda Marcotte on Slate's DoubleX Blog spends a lot of energy pointing out the insidious prevalence of this stereotyping. She is right to be suspicious that this traps us in inauthentic behaviour, blindness to the reality of men and women. But the stereotype is psychologically vital - it is a basis of life. Perhaps trying to direct one's stereotypes toward the finding women and men in our time 'fascinating' or 'surprising.' That might be a step forward.

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Scalable Society

The Onion has some great headlines: US Economy Failing because US built on Ancient Indian Burial Ground is a corker.  (The video itself is less brilliant than the title.)  Australia too, is built on bones of former occupants.  I have sometimes thought that a land really takes on a new people as they plant their bodies in it. In general though, lands are won and held in less romantic ways.

As society advances its store of techniques and tools (technology), the individual members gain powers.  At any time I wish, I can strap myself into 400 1250kg of steel and throw myself across the land at speeds that no human two hundred years ago had ever reached and survived.  (This, I think, is a pattern likely to be repeated: 'personal' powers spread widely and quickly.  Common powers (big power stations, hospitals, education systems) are slow and difficult, dependent on a lot of common understanding and compromises.)  The growth of ease of being  is not uniform.  I have the ability to trade my intellect (yes, absurdly, this same one writing this hotch-potch for you now) for money, actual money, that can pay for that car.  But I don't have the power of car: I can't get a car without recourse to a large industrial system.  That system needs a lot of people with skills I don't have.  It uses a lot of non-sustainable energy. It probably uses a lot of people without skills I don't have, as raw labour power.

Because of this technological economic base, and because of the social values that make 'personal' technology common, more people are a threat to our way of life.  It is not a sustainable way of life - it is not a scalable way of life.  More people are not going to be able to instantiate and extend our way of life.

If we had a sustainable technological economy in which the powers of production could be bestowed on people freely, there would be less need for anxiety about the strangers.

(This is a little like the mid-tech solutions in Anathem.  There is something to think about here, but I have a couple of threads and they're in some confusion.  At least one of the threads is probably better expressed in Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, an appeal for a human-scale socio-technical base - economics as if people mattered. You can read a little about him here.)

State of Repentance

You will recall Gen Liu Yuan's statement (surely picking up some top-spin in translation) that 'a nation-state is a power machine, made of violence.' And von Clausewitz's 'War is a continuation of policy by other means' is quoted so often it has almost lost its impact. The two are not so far apart.

A nation is 'an imagined community' in the words of ... Benedict Anderson. It is a group of people holding together by a mental image of what 'we' are like, an imagining that is more for our own comfort than a way of truly recognising / handling the multitude. In the hayday (heighday? Hey?) of the Labour Movement, this thin social fabric was challenged: 'workers of the world , unite!'


A state is the institution a nation clothes / shapes itself with - a manifold of laws, customs, authorities, disciplines - all the institutions.


All the foregoing applies pretty well regardless of the national character or the type of state instituted. I am interested, though, in the chafing I and many others feel in applying these definitions to western democracies. All nation-states, of course, evidently possess these attributes, and have picked up a good deal of speed and power, often through violence. The chafing is that, at heart, we think the nation-states we're part of aim to embiggen the smallest man, that they (the states) have been humbled again and again since magna carter, cromwell and restoration, glorious revolution until stable constitutional democracy is left.


Liberal means not putting too much weight on our personal definition of nation - in fact, being so sceptical that everyone in your land is a neighbour, however different.  Democracy means not putting too much weight on the state - in fact throwing the bums out regularly. Australia, as a liberal democracy, is a repentant state, the best kind.

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Obama's Oresteia

Aechylus' Oresteia is a three-play account of the end of the curse on the house of Atreus. Plagued by tragedy and murder, revenge for revenge for revenge, their plight is finally resolved by the Gods, and is found to have mirrored a rupture among the Gods.

Rational Apollo, bright sun, is ascendant, and all of Greece has turned his way. The Furies, older Gods, bloodier, more passionate, earthier, more feminine spirits are resentful - they are no longer esteemed, no longer hold a place in Athenian minds and hearts.

A similar predicament faces Obama. Rational, doing all for the best, he has given no breath to the darker passions, the selfish, prideful, properly possessive, protective furies. Palin is almost an ideal voice for this force, irrational but strong in defensiveness, shrill in pride, secretive but self-publicising. And not defeated by rationality - so Obama has no weapons against her.

His major success against this energy is the death of OBL, demonstrating and satisfying some of the dionysian/demoniac energy in the furies. But I think he needs more.

The Oresteia asks the Furies to attach their pride to Athens, to its laws and Government. The current obsession with American exceptionalism, religion and the Constitution are fascinating correlates, but somehow Obama is unable to be Mr America in a satisfying way to people. I think he needs an account of himself as a tragic hero of rationality, doomed by Dionysian reality.

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The nation state is a power machine made of violence

Yesterday's front page at the age quoted this lovely expression translated from a senior chinese general. I couldn't have put it better myself. Of course, it's easier for him - he lives in China.

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Constitutive Exceptions

Giorgio Agamben has caused some excitement with his political theory of the exception.  The political world is one of bio-power - of cooperation and competition among persons.  But underlying that world is the real world in which a person is also just an intelligent animal.  This is the condition of bare life, and Agamben ties it to homo sacer , a special class of condemned person in ancient Rome.  The conditions on homo sacer were rather like those on Cain after he killed Abel - no longer part of society, yet unable to be killed, living a-politically.  (Cain of course, marries a woman from another city, in a verse that has caused a lot of literalist christian fibonacci calculations.)  Agamben's framework can be interestingly applied to Guantanamo Bay and my wife tells me of some work applying it to elite cyclists, where their rights are almost completely surrendered to training, anti-doping rules and competing.

I have been interested in the other end of the scale.  Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan argue that there is something healthy about having a human being as your constitutive exception - that humans need to honor political power, and that it is safest to reserve the greatest honour for unweilded, unweildable power like that of a constitutional monarch and leave those responsible for actually getting things done trying to earn glory by getting things done.

I'm sure this is not a very original connection, but the Queen of England is something of a homo sacer, especially in relation to the machinery of government.  Being England, she is not ever permitted in the House of Representatives - practically, to prevent her or her heirs from taking over power.  But more importantly, to prevent a breakdown of the symbolism of the throne.

This reminds me of something from Lacan that was covered in Tim Morton's lectures - that we all have a store of imaginary dreads stored up from the terrible time of total vulnerability in our infancy - and that what is so destructive about torture or sexual abuse is not that they make real what is supposed to function symbolically in imagination.  Similarly, pure, directly elected democracy is a recipe for mania and despair, for unjust meritocracy, while the constitutive exception of a monarch at once enlarges and bounds the world.

Secularity

ABC Religion Online has had a number of articles debating the value of chaplains in schools and special religious education in schools. Generally they either argue that 'Secular means separate from religious content' or 'Secular can include religious content'.  Most recently, the editor Scott Stephens (SS) has posted to say that he thinks that the church is compromised when funded by the state, and suggested that we should be weaning off this particular teat.  I am inclined to agree, to some extent, but I think there is a problem with imagining that a line drawn between sacred and secular could be drawn justly by the non-believing part of the community alone. Part of the problem is atheism not being properly thought through and each atheist thinking that since he or she and all his or her friends assume the same value system, it is the 'natural one' which cursed stupid Christians deny.

Secularism assumes that if you strip away the religious layers, you can regain and share a common humanity, that there is a grounded human ethic to be found. It sees secular space not as a worthwhile but procrustean compromise to help us live together, but as the dominant, positive ethic of our society.

Funny old fellow that I am, I think secular space needs to be humble space - our community includes a lot of people who believe that the real answers of life are 'religious' and the secular part of our life needs to be modest enough to allow those answers.  The Secular is a great invention ( Jesus endorsed it when he said 'render unto Caesar that which is Caesar and to God that which is God's).  Secularism can become an ideology that would exclude religion from every part of public life if it could.

George Orwell - 1984

Christopher Hitchen's mentions George Orwell in a new essay in Vanity Fair, and argues that 1984 references the totalitarianism of the Catholic church, finally disrupted by James I authorisation of the King James Version.  I am not erudite enough to get into that particular debate - it interests me though.

When I first read 1984 in my teens, I read it as a straightforward attack on Christianity. In Christianity there was the control of history in the canon and acceptable doctrine drawn from it, the assertion of the power of miracle (as claimed by O'Brien later in the novel) in the teeth of reality, the inverting worldview in which the perfect love of God becomes a perfect hate of everything weak, unbalanced, selfish or distorted about you.  The Ministry of Peace is responsible for maintaining permanent war at the borders, in a perfect sectarianism,  like the militant creationism and uniform critique and condemnation of everything in society - things I thought defined Christian thinking.  Minitru has its unquestionable story which has always to shift to accommodate the present, and yet claim to always stay the same. Miniplenty promises all we can ask or imagine, and indeed reports that we have already received it. In Miniluv society is held together as the nonconformist is punished forever. In Miniluv there is no darkness at all, just the exhausting beat of light, light, light, and never a moment's rest.  (CS Lewis has a poem about the beating of the gaze of God that is not dissimilar.)  Even Big Brother is an apt name for Christ, the 'firstborn of many brothers' - 'the unseen listener at every conversation' as a piece of terrifying Christian Kitsch has it.

The final lesson of the mutual betrayal between Winston and Julia engineered by the Party, is that perfect fear casts out love.  And it is at that point that I think I depart from finding this novel a convincing work of art.  The truth may be that there is a lot more imperfect love than perfect fear.

Boat arrivals

Ted Lapkin has taken a stand in an article headlined 'How many more must drown, Julia?'


Ted's point seems to be that people flows occur because of a gradient between their expectations of fair treatment as someone in a politically dangerous situation in (for example) Afghanistan and their expectations in Australia. 

The solution offered by John Howard (and loved by Ted) is to ensure that Australia offers treatment that is about as unfair as being dragged from your home in the middle of the night and shot: for example, year after year of mandatory detention with a succession of DIMIA show trials in which no one makes any effort to understand your story as your mental health (perhaps already injured by oppresion and war in your homelad) spirals down the toilet. As long you can expect that unfair treatment regardless of your claim, the boats have no reason to come.

Even if this explanation for boat numbers is true (and plenty of knowledgable people believe it is not), it is amazing to think we could accept it and stand the sight of ourselves.