THEREFORE I AM

George Burns is credited with the line, “Age, it’s just a number.” but someone else said it first. The “. . . just a number.” thing is Word-play; it makes us feel clever but the calendar doesn’t lie and it is more than just a number no matter what they say. What Burns did say was, “You can’t help getting older but you don’t have to get old.” Burns word-play was about the way one sees themself and how being relevant supersedes age. I am 85.586301 years old today. Tomorrow I’ll be 85.590141 years and those are just numbers. I used to have a schedule and you don’t want to be late for an appointment or a duty but as I’ve grown older I have more time to think about things than I have things to do. If it had been just me a career as a full time student would have been awesome but it wouldn’t pay the bills. But now I can study history, language, human behavior and how the brain works. It’s easy with the internet. I can take notes and then study my notes, review and connect the dots. I can study the scholars who write the books and judge for myself if they are pretenders who distort a kernel of truth to promote what they want me to believe or the real deal scholars who follow the crumbs wherever they go and my heroes are real deals. When I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep I can review my notes, study again. Kids are supposed to experience the joy of discovery between the 4th and 7th grade but I was preoccupied. The joy of discovery, what a profound idea. I didn’t have to be told but then I was a 25 year-old kid in Biology 101, couldn’t help myself and I’m still hooked on learning and a high probability of knowing and I want to know. 
I take after René Descartes or at least I like to think I do. I think therefore I am and that is a good start. So I study, read and reread before I take notes then reread my notes. It’s like juggling and I need to keep at least 3 ideas in the air or I forget. In graduate school I wrestled with Statistics 401 but it left me with a healthy respect for standard deviations and numbers with lots of zeroes on either side of the decimal point. If I don’t keep working with them it’s easy to lose the handle. How do I get my head around a trillion raindrops from a single cloud or a membrane 0.001 mm thick?  
        In the USA there are about 6.5 million people age 85 or older which works out to about 1.75% of the total population. Staying relevant is a lot like pushing a rock up the hill since most of my century-mates don’t expect much from me. Many if not most of these 85+ seniors are tucked away, warehoused in facilities for those who are aging out. I have not been warehoused yet and I don’t really like the idea but maybe it’s the price we pay for living a long life. 
How can I know anything for sure; maybe it’s too much to ask but given the variables we can calculate probability down to a simple ratio, either yes or no and I can burn as many zeroes as it takes. I have a wonderful education over roughly 31,237 days of both formal schooling and life-experience so in the spirit of René Descartes, when the probability of something happening turns out to be either 0.99:1 or 0.009:1 then I can know with some confidence whether or not to hold my breath.
But if I’ve learned anything it is that people respond to (passion) strong feelings long before they resort to reason and logic. I fall into that same trap and I suffer the consequence. But I know better. It may not keep me from taking the bait but if I keep repeating thee same life-lesson, eventually I default to reason. It means I have to change the way I feel about the way I feel. 
If I want to boil this life down to a few absolutes I would begin with the Golden Rule. Every known religion on the planet has a premiss that equates to the Golden Rule which tells me that religion is not going to save us. Religion simply lumps us into groups who discriminate between who we reward and who we punish and it uses that leverage to manipulate its own followers. Government is a mirror reflection of religion that preaches, ‘To the victors go the spoils’ in lieu of the Golden Rule.  

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE TRUE

      Looking back through old posts for something else I stumbled across this one from January, '23. It is so much better than anything I could put together today I am recycling it. I still wonder what Andy would say. 

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE TRUE

This blog was born in August of 2012 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since then its following has remained a sparse few folks who either Googled their way here by mistake or already knew me and for one reason or another kept coming back. Thanks! I appreciate their dropping in. It keeps me working on vocabulary, being concise which is not easy by the way, and knowing when it’s alright to just throw words at the page from a meandering stream of consciousness. 

I like to identify with Andy Rooney, a writer featured on the CBS program, 60 Minutes. He passed away over a decade ago at 92 but when I feel writer’s block and ideas stay stuck down in a neural wrinkle I still default to, ‘What would Andy Rooney say.’ He took ideas from the Common Sense pool and turned them upside down which, sooner or later offended nearly everyone. In his own, self-assuming style he insulted or provoked people of every color and ethnicity, every LGBT, every belief. The network pulled him off the air but their audience switched to another channel until they reinstated Andy, which they always did. In hindsight, what separated Andy from Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher was that the pundits spoke from their own self appointed authority, “Believe me, I know!” but Andy kept asking, “How does this work?” Andy wasn’t selling a canned belief system or an unholy scheme, he was sharing his search for possibility and meaning. When his readers swamped him with complaints he responded with; “When so many of your friends disagree with you so strongly it must be time to rethink your own position.” His disclaimers and apologies were pointed and contrite. When he redefined his thinking and apologized it was convincing, not (Bill Maher or Bill O’Reilly) propaganda and double talk that changed the subject without addressing the issue. 

Andy Rooney surfaced at the peak of white male privilege and that explains a lot. It was a cultural constant, like the air we breathe and our mother’s embrace. I came along twenty years later and to some extent we stumbled over that same self serving prejudice and we both asked similar questions like, “What is wrong here?” Finding fault within one’s own culture and peer group is difficult. Challenging it in public is asking for a rebuke. That’s enough reason for me to liked Andy. On his best day he reasoned that he could be wrong, that he was often wrong and that occupying a credible balance was preferable to the comfort of partisan privilege. 

My reading list now includes scholars like Yuval Harari (Sapiens) and Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind). I never needed convincing but human’s evolutionary history and behavior patterns are consistent with the animal kingdom. We are animals. We are more like pelicans, whales and monkeys than we are different. Our claim to fame (that we cannot take credit for) is a weird shaped mouth and larynx that can shape sounds to make consonant and vowels, to make syllables and words. Add to that the tools in our tool box. We have imagination and we can tell stories. With Story humans can self identify in time and space, reflect on the past and ponder what comes next. Humans have been begging the same insightful questions all along; where did we come from, how did we get here and why? 

Paleolithic people were smart as can be but they didn’t know their own backstory (evolution) and their most scientific tool was the naked eye. So they made up Stories that they could understand. It had to make sense of a complicated, dangerous world. We call those primitive stories, ‘Myth’. In that complicated, dangerous world we required knowledge and a skill set for survival, replication and reproduction; to not go extinct. From mountains to seashore, culture to culture, different groups of people did survive and reproduce sufficiently. We are the flesh & blood evidence. What Harari points out is: People don’t all share the same myth, never have. But if they work it doesn’t matter. 

Harari has opened Pandora’s box. Take every mythical belief and the behaviors they provoke, put it together with how those groups conform and then consider what they think it means. That would be their collective Story. All of it: what you experience, how it affects individuals, the clan or tribe over the short term and/or the long haul, how people connect Cause and Effect relationships, what they reject and what they believe, it is their Story. Remember that one tribe’s Story could be very different than another tribe’s Story. The environment affects everything in the human saga; climate, availability of food and water, dangerous predators, competing with other tribes. Altogether we inherit a well framed Story that has taken, (who knows how many) generations to formalize into myth, your Story (history, beliefs & behavior) doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work (replicate, reproduce, carve its own niche in the environment and sustain the species.) 

Speaking for myself, Harari’s ‘It Only Has To Work’ observation is a profound revelation. I am not selling his book or professing my discipleship but the door has opened and the tide has turned in my thinking. E.O.Wilson (R.I.P.) condensed the idea down into a simple sentence: “The trouble with Homo sapiens is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” So said, I want to follow up on that idea as I move on into 2023. I can refer to this January 7, 2023 post and move on with the premiss, It doesn’t have to be true. It only has to work.