Religion, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.

This is about the present demolition of Gaza by Israel in response to the atrocities of 7 Oct 2023, but lets be real, this is about me, having thoughts, and most of my thoughts come with some Bible in them, so there will be some bible stories.

'Indigineity' is often claimed by Israelis and Palestinians as a source of basic rights to the land.  In my context, Australia, indigeneity claims come with evidence of very long-term societies adapted to survive the peculiar rigors of places, and, I think, a kind of sovereignty deriving from long-term heritage - "you can be here and do your thing now, but we'll see who's still here and how they're living in a thousand years."  While Jews and Palestinians have very old connections to their land, something that I, a white guy descended mainly from British losers (mainly Scots) who retreated from their homelands, got coopted by / wormed their way to power in the British Empire project, and settled in Brisbane and Far North Queensland and who now lives in Melbourne probably don't understand, I don't think indigineity is the right category.

Although archaeologists are (as I understand it) not able to verify much about the famous origin story of Israel (slavery in Egypt, Exodus etc) there's a bit in the bible that is interesting and relevant:  God told Abraham who lived in Ur of the Chaldeans to go to a new land and live there, so he did.  But when he got there he found it was inhabited, and his household (which was fairly large) and livestock became unpopular; when he dug new wells, the locals filled them in. Abraham was not unable to put together a war band (see battle of the 4 kings) but he didn't - he moved, trying to find lands where he could live. When his nephew Lot needed space, he let him have the pick of it. In the story, Abraham's family prospers until the time of Jacob's children and the story of Joseph in Egypt.

Another big Abraham theme is hospitality - Abraham welcomes three visitors who, it turns out, are Angels, and one of them the Angel of the Lord (Christians usually understand this as a special appearance of Jesus.)  They bring hope of a son, and from his descent, a future for all the nations on earth.  When these visitors suggest they will stay in Sodom, Abraham begs them not to, and when they do and find it inhospitable, they destroy it.  The law of Israel includes a lot of protections for 'sojourners' - people of other nations who have had reason to live in Israel, often refugees from war or famine, political exiles and so on.  Israel is to remember that was them (and will be them again, it turns out).

The third big theme that I think is relevent is exile.  Joseph becomes a pathway for the family into wealthy and sophisticated Egypt where the story says they became numerous and successful until the Egyptian's feared them and enslaved them, leading up to the Exodus narrative.  Then for a long time with lots of ups and downs, they live in the Land, until they are thoroughly conquered by the Babylonians, which liked to reorganize their conquered peoples to limit their power, so the Jews got redistributed into the cities of the Empire, especially Babylon. This is complicated and by the end the Empire is the Medo-Persian empire.  (I read the book of Lamentations recently and the experience of the Gaza is not new, this has all happened before.)  But in the time of the exile, the message of Jeremiah is:

Jer 29:7  "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

The thing that few leaders in the history of Israel/Palestine (or anywhere in the world, really) have been able to do is get out of tribalism, to make peace and to make the flourishing of other people a priority. When Yitzak Rabin tried, an Israeli settler shot him.  In the Israel/Palestine conflict, I think it's been especially acute because of the religious aspect - both sides have a power resource in the 'Imaginary' that make just walking away hit harder than any material losses. The monotheisms will do that, but so will Buddhism and Hinduism if the politics demand it. 

At the same time, as totalising systems they can be used to destroy universalism, common humanity.  The incredible cruelty of people in moral conflicts develops when normal defeats are not experienced because of the power of the ideology.  John Searle argues Germany might have been back at Nazism without the psychic intensity of the 'strategic' (targeting civilians) bombing and being overrun (with all the attendant violence) by soldiers.  Hegel says 'man is recognition', describing the way my identity is bound up in how others see me which is bound up in how I see them; if I know the lens I'm being observed through has a lot of reservations about me, its deeply unnatural not to defensively modify my perception of that perceiver.

Christianity became a religion for the dispossessed and demoralized in need of new life is grounded in a reality that when God came to Earth he got killed rather than lead an army of redemptive violence, and created the hope that we might all get something better than justice.

Everyone on Earth could have done more for the Palestinians.  Everyone on Earth could have done more for Israel.  We all deserve (to varying degrees) to lose our land to newcomers, to have to exercise hospitality. If we don't make room we're left with nothing to do but to tow the boats back out to sea to sink, build prisons from which no one will be release, promote our most treacherous sociopaths to be our government until we meet a bigger bunch of psychos and learn that could be us.  That could definitely be us.

The war of all with all

Many of the early philosophers of society (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau etc) tried to understand society as arising from the relations of humans in the state of nature.  Sometimes this meant the natural authority of fathers  would justify as natural the authority of Kings.  Sometimes it was assumed that the natural state was war of all with all, which could only be restrained by social contract or (internalized) subjugation.

I think the famous 'Prisoner's Dilemma' problem is a very nice source for considering these issues. Two prisoners have committed a crime, but prosecutors will need evidence against them to establish a full conviction.  Hence they will cut a deal if you default on your partner and give evidence against them.  Formalised, it assumes that by cooperating, both parties can benefit, but by defaulting while the other cooperates your benefit can be even greater, and their penalty large.  The penalty for both defaulting is equal, but less severe than the individual penalty.   Suppose this table gives outcomes - negative numbers are penalties for years in prison.  So if you dob and your partner doesn't, you go free and they get five years.  If you each dob, responsibility is split and you get three years each.

                    Cooperate      Default

Cooperate         -1 / -1              0/-5

Default             -5 / 0              -3/-3

The game theory analysis of this situation is that you should always dob, because cooperating is a dominated strategy - that is, your expected results are considerably worse playing 'cooperate' than playing 'default' regardless of what your partner plays. If you partner cooperates, you wish you'd defaulted. If your partner defaults, you wish you defaulted.*

This game theory solution always makes people anxious.  In real life, the person defaulted against will get out eventually, and may be able to penalize defaulting. They may have powerful friends. These stem from the idea that there is some continuity, and in fact you can change the game by playing indefinitely.  (Interestingly, if you play a fixed series, there is an argument via backward induction that you won't be able to sustain cooperation, because at the last turn, we both know we'll both default, and therefore the decision point moves to the turn before last. The turn before last becomes the chance to default against and so on.)  If you don't know when the last turn will be, and the probability is low enough, the potential benefit of a series of future cooperations may begin to outweigh the loss of being defaulted against once after which you default against your opponent every turn.

I think the cooperate / default choice is foundational for society and that philosophers have tended to come down on one side or the other without consciously / explicitly considering the payoff table.  Society works when you can find games in which 'cooperate' is not strictly dominated by default. You can start structures that will increase the penalties of defaulting and increase the benefits of cooperating - contracts and so on.  Nietzsche has a whole thing about the value of conscience and the construction of beings with the right to make promises, that (I think) is an attempt to undercut the distinction between cooperation and default and an attempt to revalue the two.  In this he is motivated by a justifiable suspicion that the structures that work against 'default' will become a way for indecent power to overcome legitimate power.  That is, the government / law / elders will be motivated to eat the benefit of cooperation and begin to use the penalties of default - thus defaulting in their way, against their society.

A wise old jewish friend took exception to this model applied to marriage, because of the assumption that there is always a solution of defaulting against a cooperator that is better than cooperating. I think it depends on the units of gain and loss, the concept of marriage.  If marriage is a cynical money-making scheme, it may pay to marry Mel Gibson and have a child with him, and then divorce him.  If marriage is a cynical sex-maximising scheme, it might make sense to have an affair or visit prostitutes.  If marriage is a scheme to be known and loved, default cannot increase the bottom line.

*   This changes if the payoffs are different, of course. You can imagine a weakly positive payoff from being defaulted against. You can imagine a game where being defaulted against is still not as bad as both defaulting it. 

scared straight

Like most contemporary men, I sometimes believe (or subconsciously subscribe to a pattern) that the answer to the question 'How much sex does a man need?' is 'More.'*

The 'relationships' columns at Salon.com have scared me straight, though.
+ a lesbian woman who had hooked up with guys lately because it was easier, the relationship equivalent of Homer eating the dirt under the bleachers.
+ a polyamorous girl hoping to bonk a hot coworker from a different generation, who thought he might not get what that relationship would be. Who has the psychic energy to create and manage the turbulent sea of sexual relationship on a case-by-case basis with everything to be negotiated every time?
+ a woman whose relationship with her partner might have gone better without his kids, but after it broke down and the kids grew up, missed them terribly. Just sad, but written with a tone of surprise, as if it was news that every 'yes' says a thousand 'no's, and so there are some advantages in making it the biggest 'yes' you can.
+ a columnist writing about a hookup with her favorite male porn star and how it was too overlaid with performance to be as flat out enjoyable as she'd imagined.
+ the gay guy who was checking out a neighbour on grindr and gradually realised he was quite sick with sex addiction.

The men who have sex most (more than 20 times per month, which sounds exhausting) are almost exclusively doing it with one partner (who is also having a lot of sex) in a relationship. Although there is a lot of whining about how difficult a well worked out, committed relationship is, I think the alternatives are short-term easy, long-term bad for you.

* JP Morgan reference. He was talking about money. I linked a long time ago to an article about this. I, at that time, suggested that Nietzsche's reprehensible epigram alleging that pregnancy was the answer to the question of female unintelligibility was equally applicable to men. It was awesome.

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