ParisTampaBlog

Sander van der Leeuw during a Slate Magazine interview is asked: So what is resilience, exactly?

He has this to say, among other things, in reply:

“Any system, whether it’s the financial system, the environmental system, or something else, is always subject to all kinds of pressures. If it can withstand those pressures without really changing its behavior, then it’s robust. When a system can’t withstand them anymore but can deal with them by integrating some changes so the pressures fall off and it can keep going, then it’s resilient. If it comes to the point where the only choices are to make fundamental structural changes or to cease existence, then it becomes vulnerable.”

Well, I said to myself, the public schools, that’s a system. What about it, is it robust, resilient, or vulnerable? In answer and at first blush, I would say, well, yes, it’s robust. For in spite of extraordinary and constant pressures, both from within and from without, the system hasn’t really changed in 100 or more years. More kids than ever before may be attending school through high school but the system, all of it, the school buildings, class schedules, classroom sizes, subject matters taught, and all the rest haven’t changed significantly during all those years. Robust it is.

How about resilient? Throughout the 100 years or more there have been constant pressures for change, meaning for school people an endless series of reforms, initiated at one time or the other by one or more of the various players, —the parents, the community, the school administrators, the politicians, and even the teachers and students themselves.

But all these reforms, or attempts at reform, have not so much changed the system as softened or lessened the pressures for change, allowing thereby the system to more or less continue intact. So, yes, also, the system is resilient.

Then we have those moments in the history of our public schools, when loud, well positioned and authoritative voices cry out that unless something is done about the failure of our schools to educate, our country will fail to compete and maintain its now dominant position among the countries of the world.

Although not the first of such moments there was Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet launch of the very first artificial satellite in history and representing to the whole world our failure and the Russians success in the space race, implying thereby the failure of our schools, and the success of theirs?

Then in 1983, during the administration of Ronald Reagan, there appeared the “Nation at Risk,” a Reagan commission report that warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” And of course this meant that our schools (again?) had failed to educate our young people?

Finally, at this very moment we have the report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations and chaired by former Secretary of State Condie Rice and Joel Klein, a former New York City schools chancellor, warning us that “the education crisis is a national security crisis,” Why? Because too many schools are failing to adequately equip students for the work force, and too many schools have even stopped teaching the sort of basic civics that prepare students for citizenship.

So is the public school system no less “vulnerable” than robust and resilient? And could it be, somehow, all three at the same time? Those voices crying out that our nation is at risk because of the failure of the schools, aren’t they saying that the school system is vulnerable and that unless we make structural and substantial changes to the current system it may very well not survive?

Sander van der Leeuw may very well be on to something. Systems do seem to be robust, resilient, and vulnerable. But he doesn’t seem to recognize or realize that most systems are all three and all three all at once. For couldn’t all systems, including those of you and me, our bodily and mental functions, be characterized in this way? Isn’t it the nature of any system to be robust, resilient, and vulnerable, at least as long as it’s alive?

What we may legitimately argue or differ about may only be which of the three terms at any given point in time would best describe the system in question. When, for example, is the system best described by robustness, resilience or vulnerability. The army is vulnerable, the special forces robust? The U.S. Postal Service, and the public schools both vulnerable? These are the arguments we’re having, at least as long as these systems are alive.

For most of us in our own lives all three terms will apply. We begin our day by being robust, impervious to any blows that will inevitably strike us from the environment. But while we take in stride anything and everything that comes along, and don’t fall down or even way from the blows, we do adapt to the punches, witnessing, as it were, a morning robustness becoming an afternoon resilience. By evening we will see ourselves as being less resilient, a bit vulnerable even, and will return to our home base, deriving charge and new courage from food and drink and the company of friends and family, while awaiting the coming of the night and for sleep to restore us again to morning robustness.

I agree with Roger Cohen when he says in a Times op-ed piece, The False Iran Debate, that it is not now and will never be in Israel’s interest to attack Iran unilaterally, and that the Jeffrey Goldberg led false Iran debate in the Atlantic is only wind, or as Cohen says, “huge gusts of words.”

But I don’t agree with his opinion that, if Iran were ever clearly to pursue the bomb, no longer try to hide its intention to become, as Israel and Pakistan and India before it, a regional nuclear power, that it would obviously be our responsibility, right along with Israel, to stop them by any means.

Would it? Would it ever be our responsibility, let alone in our interests to go to war with Iran over their possessing the bomb? Cohen says it would be and he states categorically that a nuclear determined Iran would “face assault from Israel and the United States together.”

Why is that? Because, he says, neither we nor Israel could “permit such a decisive shift in the Middle East strategic equation.” Again, why not? He doesn’t give us a reason. Other than he seems to know somehow that President Obama had to have meant it when he said, during Netanyahu’s recent Washington visit, that “containment of a nuclear Iran is not an option.”

Didn’t we at an earlier time, in regard to Israel itself, and Pakistan and India, quietly adopt, without a single word of discussion, a policy of containment? War with any one of the three was never a possible action? So why is it now?

I hope he’s just as wrong about our country’s intentions and ultimate action as is Jeffrey Goldberg about Israel’s intention to attack Iran’s nuclear installations unilaterally, in its “own defense.” Containment seems to me now, as in the past, just the right policy, given an Iran fully bent upon and eventually becoming a nuclear power.

Actually in Iran’s case containment should be easy. For Iran, no more than Israel, is crazy enough to risk by whatever action it might take, devastating reprisals that would probably mean the loss of its land and centuries old civilization. Probably not even the Afghans in possession of the bomb would take that risk. In any case if we can “contain” Pakistan, and prior to that, the Soviet Union, Iran is a piece of cake.

Bombs only become risks in the wrong hands. In our world that means in the hands of terrorists, those who, apart from lunatics, are probably the only ones who would ever use them. Iranians are not terrorists, nor are they mad.

Sure we would like to limit the number of countries in possession of the bomb, but mainly because of the increased risk, when more countries are nuclear, of a bomb falling into the wrong hands. In that regard, in respect to one of its nuclear arsenal being unaccounted for, Russia and Pakistan probably represent much greater dangers to us than a nuclear Iran.

On the other hand our attacking Iran would definitely bring on unimaginable suffering and hardship to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, including the population of Israel. In addition our attacking Iran would trigger any number of terrorist attacks within Europe and the United States. Also our own attacking forces would suffer the loss of probably hundreds, perhaps thousands of  lives.

Finally, unless at a future date we were willing to permit a renewed effort on the part of Iran to obtain a bomb go unopposed, we would have to remain in Iran as an occupying force just to prevent this from happening. And we’re all too familiar with the failure of similar occupations that have been tried, by us and others, in the recent past.

I’ll leave the final thought to Ari Shavit, who says that the Iranian response to an Israeli attack could very well set Tel Aviv ablaze and kill thousands of Israeli civilians, that which would oblige us to intervene. We would then become the captive of an out of control Israeli-Iranian war, and just after getting out of the Iraqi mud and while trying to exit from the Afghan desert, we would become bogged down by a new and even more costly war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Does Roger Cohen really think that this is preferable to containment? I can’t believe, certainly don’t want to believe that our President does.

Ari Shavit in a loud, almost crying wolf op ed piece in today’s Times is saying the world peace that we have mostly enjoyed since the end of WWII, is near collapse. And the collapse, he says, will come about during the next nine months in one of two ways, either by Iran gaining possession of the bomb and as a result becoming a deadly threat to its neighbors with all that would mean, or by Israel, ostensibly seeking to prevent this from happening, unilaterally attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

All our fault, he says, the fault of the West. For neither did we apply, when we could, sanctions tough enough to stop Iran, nor did we provide sufficient security guarantees to Israel to prevent it from ever acting unilaterally in its own defense.

In the following list of six points I have summarized his argument:

1) An Iranian atom bomb will force Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt to acquire their own atom bombs.
2) In fact, An Iranian bomb will bring about universal nuclear proliferation, even the Third World joining the club, and the 60-year-old world order that guaranteed world peace will collapse.
3) An Iranian bomb will give radical Islam overwhelming influence, through the union of ultimate fundamentalism with the ultimate weapon.
4) If Israel strikes Iran it will change our world no less, dragging the US into another war it can’t win.
5) The cardinal strategic challenge of the last decade has been how to prevent two threats: (an Iranian) bomb and (an Israeli) bombing. Yet the West failed to rise to the challenge in time.
6. Within nine months the Iranians will be immune to an Israeli air strike. By Christmas, Israel will lose the military capability to stop the Shiite bomb. As it will be existentially threatened, the Jewish State will feel obliged to take action….

So the summer of 2012 now seems to be the summer of last opportunity.

Wow! Is he crying wolf? Or is he correct, and the wolf is out there? How valid are his six points? And should President Obama immediately seek to impose much tougher sanctions on Iran, while giving Israel our guarantee that any attack on their territory would be treated as an attack on the United States.

Actually, long experience, including long experience with sanctions, has taught us that neither choice, tougher sanctions or solid gold guarantees, would be the right choice for President Obama. For don’t we know that sanctions, anything less than an invading force, will not keep Iran from developing the bomb? And Israel, even if President Obama were willing to accept Netanyahu’s security demands upon us, is not (yet?) a state of the United States.

There’s absolutely no way that we could or would honor, probably Israel’s ultimate security demand upon us, that we in their defense accept being dragged into a costly war not of our own making, and not in our own interest —as if they were one of our own. They’re not.

So, what to do? Nothing. We should do nothing at all. In spite of what Ari Shavit would have us believe, he doesn’t know, nor do we, what would be the behavior of the rulers of Iran if they did have the bomb. In fact, it could turn out well for everyone.

Unequal relationships are much more threatening than those where the opponents are of equal strength. The Soviet Union thought this was the case throughout the cold war, whether or not it was true (it wasn’t) that we were somehow equal, in our both having the bomb. This, perhaps, more than anything else prevented us from going to war with one another. Why would Iran and Israel, both in possession, be any different?

Ari is giving us his nuclear version of the domino theory. Well if country A gets it, then so will country B, and C, and on and on until everyone is nuclear and the chances of one or more of all the bombs out there somehow going off will have risen exponentially. But this doesn’t have to happen. Iran’s getting the bomb may be, for all those Arab and Muslim countries without the bomb, just enough to enable them to remain without, knowing one on their side is in possession.

So it just may not be true as Ari seems to believe that Iran’s having the bomb will bring about universal nuclear proliferation. Nor is there any basis to say, as Ari does, that an Iranian bomb would give Iran overwhelming influence in the Middle East. Israel has had the bomb for at least a generation and its influence in the Middle East hasn’t been helped or strengthened thereby.

In fact, Israel probably has as little influence now as it did before having the bomb. And also, it’s probably less its having the bomb, that its close friendship with the United States that has most protected it throughout all these years.

Finally, there is one place where I find Ari Shavit convincing. This is where he describes the truly far-ranging and devastating effects of an Israel attack on Iran. I would say that this is what we should seek to avoid at all costs, even more than Iran’s nuclear capability. Nothing good could possibly come from it. And in some important respects the bomb itself would be less destructive that the chain of events sure to take place throughout the Middle East, Europe, and probably even the United States, following an Israeli attack on Iran.

Nearly 20 years ago, actually January 18, 1993, I wrote the words in italics, below, in my journal of the time. Evidently I was writing a ‘to do’ list for our new President (Bill Clinton who would take office in January 20, just two days later) telling him, perhaps, what I would do in his place regarding some of country’s most talked about and pressing problems.

Encourage strongly if not compel our “allies” to start carrying their own weight.

Withdraw support from:
—Israel until that country agrees to sit down with the PLO and negotiate a real sharing of power based on the relative sizes of the Israeli and Palestinian populations—
—Kuwait until that country sets about establishing an open and democratic society—
—Egypt until that country starts addressing the plight of their large poor and jobless populations—

Invite:
—the Serbian leaders, and their Russian supporters to the U.S.
—the leaders of the fundamentalist Islamic parties and countries to a conference in N.Y.

Put himself up on the “bully pulpit” and talk about all we have in common with our “enemies,”  our
—being of the same species,
—living on the same earth,
—adhering to, although not the same, quite similar family, community and religious values.

Finally, negotiate directly with Saddam Hussein and all the other “evil” rulers in the world, and while doing so try to influence them by bringing to light all the advantages that would come from cooperation between our countries and peoples.

What would I want to say now, if the “now” were January of 2013, just prior to Barack Obama’s second inaugural. I am assuming his re-election because I can’t believe that our country, in spite of the high number of the mindless among us, would ever choose either Mitt Romney, who can’t make up his own mind if in fact he has a mind of his own, or Rick Santorum, whose mind has been made up for far too long and is clearly not touched, let alone changed, by the contacts it can’t avoid having with reality.

Well, now, just as then some 20 years ago, our allies, Western Europe and Japan, are not “pulling their own weight.” And now as then there is the Palestinian-Israeli conundrum, maybe now even further removed than then from any possible solution.

Regarding Kuwait, Saddam, and the ‘bullying” Serbs they are now mostly history, but Egypt, fundamentalist Islam, and “evil” rulers, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, are still very much with us, still problems for us.

And there’s the new bad, things that weren’t on our radar then. At the present time we are experiencing the near collapse of three countries, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, all hanging on to nation status by a thread, and into all of which we have made irresponsibly huge and irredeemable investments of our own people and material resources and have little if anything to show for it in the way of profit, to these three nations or to us.

And in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, we have an even more complicated equation now with the addition of a new variable, Iran, this country threatening to become nuclear and thereby threatening the fragile “peace” of the Middle East.

Also, in that same Middle East, there is the still active movement we call the Arab spring. But it is not at all clear if this is a spring or new beginning, or simply a return of the old in new clothes (Egyptian generals as the new Mubarak, President Assad as the new President Assad). In regard to all that we are still awaiting, as it were, the fall of that second shoe.

However, the principal problem we are confronting today is the economy. Then the Recession of 1990-91 was over, and joblessness was falling. We are also just out of recession, but the economy has not yet fully rebounded, is not yet providing jobs and homes for more and more Americans, including all the new Americans from Mexico and Latin America, awaiting their turn to take their legitimate place in the life of the nation.

If President Obama is not elected to a second term it will certainly be because of a sputtering economy, an economy that refuses to rebound strongly, and a still high jobless rate.

So what would I say now to the new President? Well in important respects pretty much the same thing I said 20 years ago. I would advise the President to withdraw support from both Egypt and Israel until they agreed to address the crisis concerns and needs of their own populations, in Israel the millions of Palestinians without fundamental freedoms and a land of their own, in Egypt the millions of young men and women who also are without fundamental freedoms and rights and unencumbered paths to education and jobs.

I would advise him, as I did President Clinton, and President Bush to no avail, not to confront our enemies directly, with threats and certainly not armed conflict. I would even have him ask our enemies “over.” Over here, and often, to the United States, to New York and Washington, to talk. Especially those who are most different from us, many of these representing a militant form of Islam. Hamas and Hezbollah in the White House? Why not?

In any case our enemies are no longer those who could destroy us militarily. They know this as well as we do. We need to communicate with them other by with threats, make them see that they have much more to gain by cooperation, the Palestinians with the Israelis, the Arabs of Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, and the Maghreb with the Europeans, the Iranians with the Israelis and with us.

For among our enemies, even those now in power in Iran and North Korea, there will be those others who will in good time reject the absolute negativity to all things Western of those presently in power. Think China.

Of course I wasn’t listened to 20 years ago. And what was then done by the new President Clinton, and later by the second President Bush, while doing little or nothing to solve any of our problems, did do a lot to create new ones.

Especially President Bush who while ignoring the deficit continued to grow substantially our unfunded obligations, and at the same time, absolutely, mindlessly, lead us into un-winnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrible waste of which is still very much with us, and makes me want to cry and never stop crying.

So again, what would I advise now? Regarding the “evil” men in power in Iran and elsewhere, the President ought to invite these men to the United States for direct talks, unending talks if necessary, all in the attempt to work directly with them, our enemies now but not necessarily forever, to lessen, turn down the heat on whatever they and we found threatening, the one to the other.

And, in fact, why haven’t the leaders of the Muslim nations of the world, the leaders of Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Muslim India, Egypt, Bangladesh, the countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania), and the Arabian peninsula, et al., why haven’t they been to Washington to talk with President Obama? Perhaps arm wrestling, table tennis, or chess in the Oval Office, to replace yet another, a 14th., aircraft carrier?

All my advice so far is mostly about the unfriendly forces, enemies if you like, evil men if you prefer, confronting us in the world today. What about the other big item on anyone’s list of the nation’s problems, — the economy’s slow growth, the high level of unemployment, especially among our young men?

Here I probably have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said by those much more knowledgeable than I. In a later Blog I’ll try to summarize what has been said, and is still being said, that which these others would certainly say if they could to the new President Obama, about the things that he would need to do as President if he would do his part to get the economy moving again.

About health care William Easterly once said that this could not be “a fundamental right, like, say, those of freedom of movement, speech, association, equal protection under the law etc.”

Why not? Because there would be no reasonable end point to that right. When, for example, would one have received all the care that could possibly improve one’s physical or mental health? There would always be another test one might undergo, another new treatment one might try, another medical opinion one might seek. And if no reasonable end point no end to the cost (that which seems to be happening to us right now).

Could one, I would ask myself, make a similar argument about education? There is certainly no reasonable end point to education. We don’t ever reach a point when we are educated, do we? Indeed, life long education is certainly what the schools say is the real goal (end) of schooling. So doesn’t that mean that there is no end?

Yet, you’ll say in response, but who would ever question the state’s right to provide an education for its citizens? Actually the state, by providing an education for its citizens, is doing what is absolutely necessary for its own survival. A right to an education? Rather the state is teaching, or trying to teach the children about the state, what it means to be a citizen of the state. Because by that means it would assure its own survival and continuation.

Does it make any sense at all to talk about the child’s right to an education. Isn’t right to education better understood as being much the same thing as right to life? Because education, in as much as education is learning, is really what life is all about. And it is no more given to the state the power to accord or take away learning, “the right to an education,” than it is to give or end that life itself.

Why are these “idle” considerations of mine of any importance? Because children by being told that education is their right might then expect and await for it to be given to them. It won’t be because it can’t be. Children ought rather to be told that learning comes right along with life, and that it is entirely up to them how and what they learn, no less than it is up to them how they live. The two may differ in that life was given to them, whereas what they do with that life, what they experience and learn, is primarily their own, not the teacher’s or the school’s, responsibility.*

Finally, why do so many schools fail, probably all of them in fact? The simple answer is that children go to school expecting to be given an education. They may be given words and numbers to memorize but what they end up knowing of what’s important will be what they have struggled with and learned mostly by themselves and often through that struggle. Give me a school where kids don’t struggle with their assignments and I’ll give you a failing one.

But I’m not at all saying that we learn primarily through some kind of great effort, through suffering. In fact, having raised children and grandchildren of my own I know that children learn even more from play than they do from work. Probably adults, too. Why is that? Because most often play is where they, and we, want to be, where they most commit themselves, and work is probably more often not. Although it doesn’t need to be that way.

The conclusion, remove from our talk about education, talk about rights. And hold onto the idea that there is no necessary connection between education and the school building, and that the school itself, being too often a distraction, may in fact bring a stop to learning.

Finally, education is what life is all about. Have you ever known, I’d ask, a child or young person who was not mostly learning all the time? Yes, I’d say, and he was in school.

*A footnote. The absurdity of grading the teachers on what the students learn, or don’t learn in school, —that’s going on right now and is being supported by our tax dollars.

What’s missing in Washington? Well it’s not rent seekers. There’s no scarcity, no limit to the number of those who are asking and receiving favors from our politicians.

What’s missing in Washington? Well I would say that it’s truth tellers. In Washington it does seem to be that no one is telling the truth.

Certainly among our politicians themselves, there’s no one. And certainly no one of the tens of thousands of hangers-on and lobbyists is telling the truth. Perhaps among the press corps?

We might on occasion attribute bits of truth to one or more of them, Robert Samuelson, George Will, for example, but here my “truth tellers” would probably not be yours.

Now jump with me to the world of Shakespeare’s plays. And imagine this world without its truth tellers, a world where the actions of the powerful kings and princes are never seriously questioned or contradicted, where the powerful are all powerful. This of course is not Shakespeare’s world. But it is the world of Washington.

Shakespeare’s world has its truth tellers, be they clowns, little people, common soldiers, lunatics, or fools, a Lear or other King with a Fool alongside, a Kent or Cordelia, an Antony with an Enobarbus, a Mistress Overdone or Pompey in Measure for Measure, in other words, an endless array of truth telling characters who prevent the all powerful kings and princes, the lords and ladies, the high and mighty, from being taken too seriously, either by themselves, or by the reader.

Well, Washington has nothing of this. In Washington the mighty and powerful simply take themselves very seriously, and worse are taken seriously by others, are all puffed up with their own importance.

Who in Washington is ever heard saying in the presence of the President, or Senate or House leader, as the Fool when speaking to Lear, that “Truth’s a dog that must to kennel?” Or, as Enobarbus when speaking to Antony, “That Truth should be silent I had almost forgot?”

Now the Washington politicians, including the President himself and the president’s men, are men themselves and consequently by their nature possess their own versions of the truth. But whatever these are, whatever they may believe and believe it the truth, we never hear it directly from them. What we hear is by and large what they think we want to hear, or what is the same thing, what they think will get them re-elected.

Too bad that there can’t be the truth telling “fools” in Washington as in Shakespeare. Too bad there can’t be those that would speak out when their betters are silent, those that would tell the truth about what’s really happening.

And there are many truths that these Washington “fools” could tell. Truths that are never said by our elected representatives. Here are just a few of them, and perhaps by speaking out now I’ll play the part of the fool myself.

Take Thomas Jefferson’s words, those about all men being created equal. The truth is that we are not equal, and if we would really do something about the various inequalities among us we would do well to start from this fact. There’s probably no chance of changing anything for the better if we go on ignoring it. The “inequalities” will only get worse.

Take Immigration, that word calling to mind the millions of the now mostly Mexicans along with other Latinos from Central and South America, many of whom are either here already, or continue to come here, illegally. The truth is that we, all of us, and all our forbears of the past 2 or 3 hundred years, were at one time or another either undocumented or illegal immigrants ourselves.

And the truth is that these people, the millions who came here in waves in the past, are not too different from the Mexicans who are coming here today, they came here looking for better lives for themselves and their families, and have made this country what it is today, that meaning for many of us, that they have made this country great.

And we want to stop this from happening, we want to put up a fence? Where is the “fool” who could tell this truth to our politicians that they listen?

Take education, and all that is being said of the failure of our public schools, and the need for reform, for national standards, for more testing, for holding teachers accountable, and all the rest. Here the truth is that schools don’t and never have worked. Schools have almost never helped kids to realize their own individual potentials, to grow into what they could be.

How could they? Twenty five kids or more, all of the same age, together in a classroom with a single adult teacher for some 40 to 45 minutes, a situation repeated hour after hour, day after day, year after year, until the kids turn 18 and can leave school, get a job, vote, serve in the armed forces, whatever, until they themselves can be a part of the real world that school has kept from them for so long and without good reason.

Actually there have been “fools” who have said this, but probably not in Washington, and not within the hearing, or more important, the understanding of our politicians. Fools who have said that learning is not something, anymore than drink, that can be imposed on someone from without. Knowledge of languages, of mathematics, actually knowledge of anything does not come from being in a classroom, even from being a good listener, from being obedient, from doing what one is told to do.

Real knowledge of these things, of anything, is always the result of individual effort and probably most often an individual and private, rather than team or communal effort. For without that effort, without being motivated, interested, and most of all without hard work, new skills and greater knowledge will not come.

That is why so many who spend their youth in school classrooms can show so little knowledge and understanding of the subject matters that they have been supposedly “taught” during all this time. By and large they never made that private, individual effort.

While this truth is not being said in Washington, at least within the hearing of the President and his education advisors, it has been said, and in my own experience, over and over again. Why hasn’t it been heard? Why didn’t someone tell George Bush and Ted Kennedy, when they fashioned the No Child Left Behind Act, that this reform, no more than an interminable succession of earlier school reforms, wouldn’t change anything at all?

Why weren’t the Senator and the President told that school itself was what was wrong. But only the “fool,” because he is kept out of sight and mind and not listened to, could have said that.

Finally, take health care. My last example of truths that are not being told. Put simply the cost of health care, at least of all the care that is currently available at some price to alleviate ill health and sickness, especially during old age, is just more than the country can afford.

And the cost is probably much greater than any amount of new taxation of the rich and even the upper middle class could meet. We have to do with less, and that’s a truth that no one wants to hear. In Shakespeare’s world that truth would be told. In ours it’s not.

That’s one truth about health care. There are others. Here’s one that relates to what we were saying about education. Just as learning only comes about through individual effort, motivation and interest, so good health probably only results from the same. Schools and hospitals are only sterile venues. Compared to what the individual can do for himself they contribute little to that person’s acquisition of knowledge or good health.

The truth is that we have come to rely too much of on being governed, being educated, being brought to good health, and not enough on ourselves. If there were more tellers of this truth in our world, as there were in Shakespeare’s plays, forcing the high and mighty of his dramas to look deeper and question themselves, perhaps we might look more closely at ourselves and begin to find solutions to some of the problems that we face, all of which now seem beyond our reach, especially beyond the reach of our politicians in Washington.

From Chapter One of Wilson’s book, The Moral Sense, first published in 1993.

Since daily newspapers were first published, they have been filled with accounts of murder and mayhem, or political terror and human atrocities. Differences in religious belief so minor as to be invisible to all but a trained theologian have been the pretext, if not the cause, of unspeakable savageries. Differences in color and even small differences in lineage among people of the same color have precipitated riots, repression, and genocide. The Nazi regime set about to exterminate an entire people and succeeded in murdering six million of them before an invading army put a stop to the methodical horror. Hardly any boundary can be drawn on the earth without it becoming a cause for war. In part of Africa, warlords fight for power and booty while children starve. When riots occur in an American city, many bystanders rush to take advantage of the opportunity for looting. If people have a common morals ensue, there is scarcely any evidence of it in the matters to which journalists—and their readers—pay the greatest attention.

A person who contemplates this endless litany of tragedy and misery would be pardoned for concluding that man is at best a selfish and aggressive animal whose predatory instincts are only partially and occasionally controlled by some combination of powerful institutions and happy accidents. he would agree with the famous observation of Thomas Hobbes that in their natural state men engage in a war of all against all. In this respect they are worse than beasts; whereas the animals of the forest desire only sufficient food and sex, humans seek not merely sufficient but abundant resources. Men strive to outdo one another in every aspect of life, pursuing power and wealth, pride and fame, beyond any reasonable measure.

But before drawing so bleak a conclusion from his daily newspaper, the reader should ask himself why bloodletting and savagery are news. There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing. Our newspapers would mainly report on parents who sacrificed for their children and people who aided neighbors in distress. Amazed that such things occurred, we would explain them as either rare expressions of a personality quirk or disguised examples of clever self-dealing, The second reason that misery is news is because it is shocking. We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters. Though in the heat of battle or the embrace of ideology many of us will become indifferent to suffering or inured to bloodshed, in our calm and disinterested moments we discover in ourselves an intuitive and powerful aversion to inhumanity.

This intuition is not simply a cultural artifact or a studied hypocrisy. The argument of this book is that people have a natural moral sense, a sense that is formed out of the interaction of their innate dispositions with their earliest familial experiences. To different degrees among different people, but to some important degree in almost all people, that moral sense shapes human behavior and the judgments people make of the behavior of others.

What is most responsible for the present state of the world, for the way things are? Isn’t it science and technology? For isn’t it true, as Steven Pinker reminds us, that “…the sciences have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles like smartphones, genome scans and stunning photographs of outer planets and distant galaxies. No historian with a long view could miss the fact that we are living in a period of extraordinary intellectual accomplishment.”

In other words isn’t it science, coming to most of us in the form of its principal creation, technology, not religion as in earlier periods, that now dominates our lives from birth to death? If we now number some 7 billion individuals and counting, and are able to adequately feed this many mouths, isn’t it because of the miracles of modern science?

The New Testament miracle of the five loaves and the two fish, when Jesus, looking up to heaven and giving thanks, broke the loaves and gave them to his disciples who then fed more than 5000 men, women and children with the broken pieces, is now an everyday reality. Now the “disciples” of modern agricultural miracles are feeding billions of people and have not come close to reaching the end of the food in their baskets.

At earlier times, probably at all times before the advent of modern science in the 17th century, things were different. Among the deeply spiritual Sioux of our own Great Plains, among the religious monastic orders of the European Middle Ages, the Franciscans, Dominicans et al., among the Shaktists, the Vaishnavites, and the other Hindu religious communities of ancient India, in fact among most people alive on the earth, religion was dominant, vital, almost like air, water,  and fire, to their lives.

No longer is this true, now science is dominant. Science, is now what is clearly most vital to our lives. Religion, as well as the houses of religion, the churches, mosques, temples et al. are things of the past, at best, perhaps, museums, points on tourist travel itineraries.

So why do we go on acting as if this were not so? Why hasn’t its proper place in the order of things been given to science?  And in fact it is science that we turn to for clean air, clean water, and for harnessing fire. Not religion. In fact religion never had this kind of power.

Why, say in our schools, do we relegate science to a list of subject matters? Science, fully understood, would and should be what all education is about. Science texts ought to be read in the Madrassas instead of the Koran. Talk about change in the Islamic world. This would do it overnight.

Why are so many so far from making this happen, from giving science its rightful place? For doesn’t everyone want the benefits of modern science, in fact, doesn’t everyone already profit from those benefits? And in so many regions of the world it is science, not religion that saves. Why don’t our leaders act as if this were so?

The theories of modern science are the very best descriptions we have of our world, of the earth, the solar system, the universe. We are a part of that world and if we would play our part fully and correctly, if we would realize our individual potentials in our own brief lifetimes, we ought to try to become, to the extent that we are able to, familiar with the world that science is describing.

The writer and biologist, Richard Dawkins, has written a book, almost with all this in mind. For him, as for many others, science is not only the best description we have of our world. Science is also, no less than religion before it, about wonders, about miracles.

But science, unlike religion, directs us not towards another life, but towards this life, towards reality. For when properly understood, as by the brilliant creators of modern science, the ultimate miracle is the “Magic of Reality,” this being the title of Dawkins’ book.