The Love of a Free Man

Every child has a right to Mother and Father.

Every child has a right to good food, clothing, and medical care.

Every child has a right to opportunities for improving itself (i.e. education).

People are fond of making statements like these, statements that sound nice but carry some very poisonous implications (in my opinion).  The problem with all these rights arises when other people see how I am failing to provide them to my children. 

What happens when my family lacks mother- and father-figures that meet with somebody else's approval? 

What happens when my idea of what constitutes good food, clothing, and medical care conflicts with somebody else's?

What happens when my idea of what constitutes a good education for my child isn't yours?

In the modern world, this is more or less what happens.  A bunch of busybodies see my family and are terribly offended by it (seeing its existence as an attack on theirs).  Responding to the threat posed by my existing with relationships that don't look enough like theirs, these busybodies get together and organize protests.  They make flyers.  They create memes on Facebook.  They make all kinds of holy noises about things like "grassroots politics," "the moral majority," "family values," "progressive values," and whatnot.  They form PACs.  They gather donations.  They write angry letters to their clueless representatives in some august body of government bureaucrats pretending to be responsible lawmakers.  The bureaucrats get ants in their pants and do what they always do--form a committee.  This committee sits down and determines to establish once and for all (1) what a good family looks like (what constitutes an acceptable Mother and Father for all Americans?), (2) what good healthcare looks like (what constitutes an acceptable diet for all Americans?), and (3) what a good education looks like (what constitutes an acceptable education for all Americans?).  The committee is very precise and deliberate.  It must be practical.  It cannot make room for all kinds of silly exceptions to general rules.   It has to lay down the law--for everyone, for all time.

And so what happens when my little family isn't up to snuff?  What happens when the committee isn't impressed by my fathering skills, or my wife's mothering?  What happens when it notes that I don't feed my kids a USDA-approved diet--of poisonous denatured crap marketed by profiteering companies whose deep pockets make them much more interesting and persuasive to bureaucrats than I will ever be?  What happens when the committee doesn't like the education I have chosen to give my kids?  Nobody knows.  But one thing is certain: I will be under scrutiny, and I might lose the right to even have a family, if the committee decides that I am not worthy of such an honor (or deserving of such a responsibility, if you prefer).

Who limits the committee's jurisdiction?  Nobody really.  The bureaucrats answer to their loudest constituents--a bunch of punks who want to micromanage my life to make it look like theirs--and to other bureaucrats, some elected and some not, who tend to think that the answer to all society's problems is letting more of them get a lick in.  ("Just let us handle this one, kid.  We'll take care of your problems!")  Inviting these clowns into your life is easy: getting them out is really hard (no matter what political party they belong to or where they worship on Sundays).  Combine the bureaucrats' inherent love of absolute authority with their busybody constituents' insistent demand that all human relationships be micro-managed to meet their finicky tastes, and the result is a perfect recipe for enslaving me.

I don't give a damn about gay marriage, one way or the other.  If you want one, go for it with my blessing.  If you don't, I would never force it on you.  I am not an angry guy.  But there are ways of making me mad.  I get mad when punks want to bring bureaucrats into my home (into my bedroom, for God's sake) as some kind of absolute authority pronouncing judgement on the worthiness of my personal relationships--"defending" my marriage (or my diet or my education) by forcing me to make it according to the arbitrary determinations of some stupid committee.  I resent this "defense."  I see it as a direct attack on my religious freedom, not the legitimate defense of anyone else's.  (You want religious freedom?  Get the heck out of my house, out of my bedroom, out of my larder, out of my career, and out of my life.  Go and live your own.  You don't have to solemnize my gay marriage, or say only nice things about it.  You don't have to eat steak.  You don't have to go to school where I do.  You don't have to bail my business out when it fails.  You don't have to buy healthcare for me.  Your religious freedom doesn't include the right to make me live the way you do.  I have religious freedom too, punk, so go eat the poison you like and leave me to the ones I prefer.)  

Just so we're clear: I will marry whom I damn well please, of whatever gender or age I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will eat what I damn well please, in whatever quantities I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will send my kids to school where I damn well please, for whatever reason I want.  I don't care if I am not the best qualified person to marry or make dietary choices or educate kids.  I will not sign my marriage, my diet, or my kids over to some committee (not even if the chair of that committee affects the titles or trappings of deity: the real God sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike and doesn't give a damn about making results fair--in this life or any other that we know anything definite about).

The committee and the busybodies it represents can cite me statistics all day long, proving (1) how my marriage would be better if I were a rich, white heterosexual with a partner of the opposite gender (so we'll just seize the kids of poor single parents, or force them to marry someone of the appropriate gender and socio-economic class right away if they want to keep their children?); (2) how my diet would be better if I followed USDA guidelines (get your heart-healthy whole grains while they're hot, suckers!); and (3) how my kids would be better off if society took them away from me and gave them to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama (think of all the rights and opportunities my children don't have because I'm not a millionaire!).  I don't care.  Maybe the committee should sterilize me while they're at it.  Heck, they could cut all the fuss and bother and just send me straight to the gas chamber.  (Yes, Godwin, I embrace thee.  This is the Internet, after all.)  What a load of crap.  Not only does it make no sense as an idea (religious freedom means that I have the right to make you my bitch! this is precisely what the founders of our republic wanted, as anyone who reads the Federalist and/or Anti-Federalist papers will agree), it would be a practical disaster (creating far more confusion and suffering than it could ever hope to alleviate).

Love is not a human right. It is a human opportunity (that can never be granted by committee). You should leave people as free as possible to find and express it in whatever circumstances life gives them. Sometimes, those circumstances will make somebody's love look poor and mean and worthless to other people, but that is no reason to take it away, to deny its expression, to replace it with the love of others who are more fortunate, or more aesthetically pleasing to some committee of busybodies too busy interfering with others' lives to manage their own.  (Don't you people have something else to do?  A budget to keep?  Drones to send against Pakistani women and children while you agonize over some American woman's decision to remove a few cells from her uterus?  A beam to remove from your own eye, maybe, before you go poking around for the motes in mine?  Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites.  If you are reading old Judaeo-Christian scripture, this is what you are.  If you don't read scripture, then pick up any book you like on Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Mao's China, or Lenin's Russia: these are your heroes, the shining beacons of moral purity that you want me to follow to a better future.  Even if you are right, I don't want to come to that future.  I would rather go to the gas chamber.)

In conclusion, if I ever sit on a committee charged to consider the institution of marriage as it exists throughout humanity (in my country or any other), this will be my contribution: "This committee has nothing useful to say when it comes to prescribing the nature of people's personal relationships. As long as they are not killing each other or inflicting criminal damage, people can have whatever personal relationships they want. They can register those relationships legally using any language they please, and they can participate in society however they find opportunity."  See?  I actually believe in religious freedom, unlike the punks (conservative and liberal) who want to make everyone live as they do.  (What would Jesus do?  He would make you live like me, obviously.  What would Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King do?  The same thing!  Everyone must be good the same way!  We're all going to march in lock-step to heaven on earth!  Not with me you're not.  I am never going to board that ship, not matter who or what stands at the helm.)      

My New Church?

Judging from this podcast, my ideal church might be a gym.  I would really like to participate actively in MovNat, at some point in the future.  (And I already wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago in minimal footwear: Julien Smith beat me to it, of course!)

In Search of Human Ethics

Marvin Harris.  Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures.  1977.  New York: Vintage, 1991.  ISBN 067972849X.

Daniel Quinn.  The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit.  New York: Bantam, 1996.  ISBN 0553379011.

Losing the perspective brought by Mormonism meant losing the ostensible purpose of my life ("I am here to serve God and his church in whatever way I may decide and/or church leaders may require").  When I no longer had this as my ultimate "reason" for everything (the final "because" to the toddler's "why?"), I had to take a step back and ask myself why I did things.  What was I trying to do?  What were communities (like the church) trying to do?  Part of my faith crisis involved looking intensely at human communities and discovering that they exist to perpetuate themselves (not fixed moral codes); this became problematic when I realized that the church was no different: its leaders said what they said, did what they did, so that we would all keep on "keeping on" as members, regardless of what Joseph Smith really said or did (maybe he was a bit crazy, but that's not worth looking at too carefully), or what the reality of man's destiny was (your purpose is to build our society with work and offspring: don't get distracted by other stuff).  Unfortunately for me, I really cared about these things (especially the latter), and found I had little interest in the LDS church without them.  So I was left wondering why people do what people do (i.e. create societies that must go on and--ideally--get bigger to the point that they fill the earth)?

Enter Marvin Harris.  My interest in human fitness led me eventually to the "paleo diet," the premise of which was that the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years ago paved the way for the introduction of many anti-nutrients into the human diet, leading ultimately to the set of "civilized" diseases currently plaguing much of the world (metabolic syndrome, diabetes, auto-immune disorders).  Knocking around the Internet in search of "paleo" information to flesh out this thesis, I found the immense website of Ricardo Carvalho, which is named after Harris' book title (translated into Portuguese).  (Carvalho also recommends the book on his extensive Amazon reading list, which I have consulted several times when searching for good reads.)  I was intrigued and checked the book out from my local university library.  Its thesis is relatively simple: human societies shape their behavior to match the quality of the resources available to them, changing behavior as the surrounding environment succeeds (or fails) to supply what they need to survive (adequate food, shelter, and reproductive possibilities).  Most interesting is his explanation of Aztec cannibalism, which he traces back to a chronic lack of animal protein (a precious resource): in the absence of domesticated herds or wild game, the Aztecs were reduced to eating other people.  They did not eat people because they were any more "wicked" than others; what they needed was not "repentance" but food.  Contrary to everything I would have thought in my life as a Mormon, their problem was not one to be remedied by civilization (the "gift of the gods").  Instead, civilization (and the exploding population that has always accompanied it since the agricultural revolution) was the problem (Harris, Cannibals and Kings, 165):

Mesoamerica was left at the end of the ice age in a more depleted condition, as far as animal resources are concerned, than any other region.  The steady growth of the population and the intensification of production [two things that always come with civilization in the wake of the agricultural revolution] under the coercive managerial influence of the classic highland empires virtually eliminated animal flesh from the diet of ordinary people.  The ruling class and their retainers naturally continued to enjoy such delicacies as dogs, turkeys, ducks, deer, rabbits, and fish.  But, as Harner notes, the commoners--despite the expansion of the chinampas [floating gardens]--were often reduced to eating the algae skimmed off the surface of Lake Texcoco.  While corn and beans in sufficient quantity could provide all of the essential amino acids, recurrent production crises throughout the fifteenth century meant that protein ratios were frequently depressed to levels which would have biologically justified a strong craving for meat.  In addition, fats of all sorts were perennially in short supply. 

Mesoamerican cannibalism was just one extreme example of the kind of crisis of availability that has defined human civilization from the agricultural revolution.  (As an aside, the astute reader will notice that this protein-starved Mesoamerica looks very different from anything in the Book of Mormon, whose theories of cannibalism and "Lamanite" life in general are clearly folklore from nineteenth-century New England.)  The crisis works as follows: (1) a society produces crops (usually some kind of grain, i.e. grass seed); (2) grain production allows for a higher birth rate; (3) more numbers provide the resources necessary to take over more land, dispossessing people and animals living in a less "civilized" (and more ecologically sustainable) way; (4) the cost of having more people is that many are under-nourished, especially as the rest begin putting major dents in the best non-agricultural food sources available; (5) in the end, society is either saved by technological revolution (a farming break-though that allows us to sustain the burgeoning population) or falls prey to warfare (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people) or famine (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people).  Basically, Thomas Malthus was right (though he did not know that grain is poisonous to humans individually as well as collectively).

Harris' thesis was a compelling analysis of human community, for me, but I was left rather stranded by it: after several thousand years in living in constant debt (to the earth, other species, and ourselves), how are we supposed to transform ourselves back into productive mode (a way of living that does not inevitably kill everything around us)?  Harris was the doctor who informed me that I had an incurable disease, dissecting the disorder minutely when all I could really hear was "incurable."  In addition, I now had way too much "technical" information to share whenever people asked me about my increasingly odd opinions regarding diet, religion, and politics.  A simple question deserves a simple answer, not a litany of jargon.  I had a worldview that made sense to me logically.  What I needed now was a simple narrative for relating to it more personally (and pro-actively) and sharing it with others: in short, I needed a myth.  Enter Daniel Quinn.

Quinn tells an engaging story, a fictional account of a modern Catholic priest sent to Europe to spy on someone who may be the Antichrist.  Upon making contact, the priest discovers that the Antichrist (a mysterious character called "B") is preaching against civilization (the agricultural revolution and everything that has followed from it), which he regards as a disease inasmuch as it reduces complex, beautiful reality (life) to simple, ugly reality (death).  The book is extremely interesting (with an ending which I will not give away), and I will not attempt to summarize it here.  Instead, let me offer one of my favorite passages (Quinn, The Story of B, 159-161):

Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis.  When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky.  They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable.  I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis.  I really don't.  But they're not our problem.  I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods.  They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are.  If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are.  The gods are here...I mean here.  Among the Alawa: here.  Among the Bushmen: here.  Among the Navajo: here.  Among the Kreen-Akrore: here.  Among the Onabasulu: here...

This isn't a theological statement they're making.  The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods.  Nothing of the kind.  They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.'  They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods.  The gods are to be found among them--living where they live.  The god is what animates their place.  That's what a god is.  A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world.  A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god.  All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider.  Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.

Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis.  Can you imagine that?  Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled.  Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin.  Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished.  Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again.  Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons.  The god knows how to take care of that place.  It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before.  It doesn't need to be what it was before.  You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived.  This is nonsense.  What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time.  There is no such form and never will be any such form.  Everything here is on the way.  Everything here is in process.

Quinn's solution to the problem of civilization posed by Harris (and Malthus) is conceptually very simple.  Stop increasing human food supply every year.  We already produce more than enough for everyone; our problem is not lack, but something else (the inevitable inequality in distribution created by civilization).  Quinn illustrates his solution with a story about mice.  A population of mice fed more than it needs to survive always increases in number (even as some mice starve to death because others don't let them at the food), while a population fed no more than it requires to survive inevitably (without any form of birth control whatsoever) remains stable, replacing itself without growing any larger.  To top things off, you can slowly cut down the overall population of the mice by gradually decreasing food supply, without starving any of them (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):

Someone says, here's what to do.  Yesterday five hundred kilos of food went into the cage.  Today we'll reduce that by a kilo.  Oh no, another objects.  A kilo is too much.  Let's reduce it by a quarter of a kilo.  So that's what they do.  Four hundred ninety-nine and three quarters kilos of food go into the cage.  Tension in the lab as everyone waits for food riots and famine--but of course there are no food riots and no famine.  Among sixty-four thousand mice, a quarter of a kilo of food is like a flake of dandruff apiece.  Tomorrow four hundred ninety-nine and a half kilos of food go into the cage.  Still no food riots and no famine.  This procedure is followed for a thousand days--and not once is there a food riot or a famine.  After a thousand days only two hundred fifty kilos of food are going into the cage--and guess what?  There are no longer sixty-four thousand mice in the cage.  There are only thirty-two thousand.  Not a miracle--just a demonstration of the laws of ecology.  A decline in food availability has been answered by a decline in population.  As always.  Semper et ubique.  Nothing to do with riots.  Nothing to do with famine.  Just the normal response of a feeder population to the availability of food.

To me, this looks like the most painless way to accomplish what we are already doing anyway.  If we do not find some way to keep our civilized growth in check, we will run out of food eventually.  We can wait for nature to fix that problem with diseases, real famine (sudden withdrawal of all sustenance), or something worse, or we can put ourselves on a diet (and get back to something like health: I have a feeling Quinn is right to say that involves a radical transformation in the way we live, the things we value, and ultimately what it means to be human).  This does not mean that we should all begin living in caves, hunting wild animals for food, or going naked all the time (though some of us might choose to do this: good luck to them--they'll need it in spades).  What we need is a way forward, a road that leads beyond agricultural civilization rather than back to whatever existed before it.  Quinn provides a very easily accessible account of the best route I have found to date, proving that all other alternatives are really just so many ways of ignoring the same problem: civilization, or modern life as we know it since the agricultural revolution, is killing us, de-stabilizing our moral values, destroying our homes, and inexorably taking away with one hand what it pretends to offer with the other.