Education, Values, and Bringing Up Children

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The America that we know is so diverse that almost any generalization anyone makes is likely to be largely untrue.  This is particularly true with statements about Education, and about bringing up children.  There are thousands of people out there who have what I think is the right attitude towards Education, either because it worked for them, or because they brought it here from The Old Country: Education is good.  But for many, Education will make me rich, maybe, and that's all they care about. 

Modern America is based on two principles: Simplification, and Generalization. These principles have worked well for such a long time that when they stop working we’re not really able to recognize the fact. Precisely because they do work in so many instances, applying the generalization principle, we go on the assumption that they work in all instances. Yet it is only human to try and simplify one’s dealings with a variety of things, be it situations, people, or produce: we sort them into broad categories, and use rules of thumb.  This is called stereotyping, when people want to denigrate it, but who can do without it?

So when I say that people today do a very poor job of bringing up their kids, I’m making a big generalization, and I’m sure practically every parent will claim that he or she is an exception.

When I say that education today is (somewhat of) a failure, that too is a broad generalization that is likely to have just as many exceptions, but people are likely to agree, simply because it is human nature to point the finger at another culprit rather than to take some of the responsibility ourselves! But, in my opinion, the failure of education is partly a result of our failure in child-rearing.

Why have things come to this pass?  It all began in the early part of the twentieth century, with the introduction of the assembly-line, mass-production, and the economies of scale.  Standardization is a good thing in many ways ---consider that we can use any compact disc in any stereo--- but, again, the weaknesses of generalization rears its ugly head. Using industrial methods to mass-produce educated citizens has some negative consequences.

What do we expect out of education? Clearly the expectations vary wildly from person to person. The most common expectation is that education will result in a well-paying job. That may be true, but actually, it is the converse that holds: if you have a well-paid job, you probably had a good education. (Or your dad might own the business.)  A moderately good education certainly increases the chances of a young person being suited to a more responsible position, which in turn might bring a higher salary. Another expectation of education is that it fits a person for a productive role in society. Unfortunately, this doesn’t resonate with rugged individualists. They don’t want their kids fitting into anything; they’re not happy with society, and they don’t want a bunch of commies making their kids just like every other kid in the country. But some of us realize that the world is a complex place, and whether one likes it or not, a person’s interaction with society is complex, and cannot be reduced to a simplistic equation of dollars and cents.

As far as I’m concerned, education is also about values; all parents want their children to learn certain values. And they want those values taught in school: don’t have unprotected sex, learn how to drive safely, learn how to eat sensibly. Be respectful to people that matter, and don’t get tossed around by hoodlums. As you can see, all these expectations are very relative, and in extreme cases, rather crass. These values are better taught at home. There are other more important values that must be taught by both parents and teachers in concert: how to work well with teams and groups; how to lead where needed, and how to graciously take instructions from competent peers.

The job of a school, and of teachers, has evolved greatly over time. As society’s expectations of schools changed, their methods changed, to process a larger number of mediocre students quickly and efficiently. This has not been all bad. From a high-school drop-out rate of around 70% in the decade of the 1950s, we now have a drop-out rate of practically less than 10%, depending on how you count it. But we have given up a great deal to achieve this: the needs of both exceptional students, and particularly difficult students, tend to be neglected in favor of the needs of students of average ability. But, of course, every parent insists that his or her child must be taken care of first, and this demand is backed up by administrators, and so a teacher’s job is very difficult. To top everything, teachers are usually poorly paid.

Let’s turn now to the question of values and bringing up children. We don't anymore consider sex to be a mere means to conceiving children; rather, there are those who regard children as a somewhat regrettable by-product of unplanned sex. No matter what our conscious opinions are, we’re hardwired to take pleasure in children, both our own, and those of others. In recent times, it has become fashionable to consider children a sort of property, and therefore to consider other people’s children absolutely none of our business. People such as teachers, therefore, find themselves living a sort of contradiction: the children in their classroom are, on the one hand, none of their business, and on the other hand, entirely their business.  As far as I'm concerned, all children are everybody's business, but obviously I'm not going to waltz into someone else's home and tell them what to do.  I'm doing it here, instead .

The five day week was a tremendous victory; one would have expected that with the progress of society and more efficient means of production, we would have come to a four day week sometime in the twentieth century. It didn't happen. In fact, people are working harder than ever, working overtime, and working second jobs. Many of the necessities of life have become so costly that we need to earn more than the increase in the cost of living would explain. (One reason for this is that it is better business sense for a company to hire a few people, and work them hard, than to hire a large number of people to work shorter hours, even if they’re paid less. Another reason is that Business and Industry has decided that there must be a small leisure class --- wealthy stockholders --- and the working population must work very much harder to support them.)

The consequence of this is that we do not know how to bring up our kids, most of all because we haven’t had the time to figure it out. Bringing up children is not entirely an instinctive skill. It has to be learned. In fact, it has to be taught. But it is too important an enterprise to be left to the tender mercies of school teachers, wonderful though they might be. We must regard our own children as future parents from the word go. Every interaction must be something that that child can draw on in the future, when interacting with his or her own children.

The most important things a parent can convey to a child are: (1) be willing to take on unpleasant things, for the sake of the good it might bring. (2) Be considerate. (3) Set a good example to the younger people in your circle. (4) Value education, even if the benefits of particular aspects of it are not immediately obvious. (5) Be respectful of your teacher, even if your friends regard her as an idiot. She’s working under almost impossible conditions, because she believes in what she’s teaching. (6) Stay away from anything that will endanger your long-term health. (Additional values, such as being involved in the betterment of your community, must come from example.)

As you can see, a lot of what has to be conveyed is what anyone knows, but it is also precisely the sort of stuff that we have been conditioned not to talk about, so in this very article I’m violating a whole lot of conventions!

But shouldn't stop there.

It used to be the province of the local priest or minister to lay this sort of thing on the people. Once religion got seriously discredited, people jettisoned the priests and ministers, but had nowhere to go to be reminded of the commonsense axioms that they had to fall back on in the heat of the daily battle. Parents began to insist that teachers should do this. This means that education experts would have to come up with a new subject, like Sex Education, which might be called something like Not Being an Idiot. It is not the business of teachers to impart family values! A teacher who is a preacher as well loses a lot of credibility with the kids. Teachers do it, even if they get little thanks for it. But it is the responsibility of parents, regardless of how overworked they are. If you are a parent, remember you’re teaching for two: these lessons are needed for your kids. But they’re also needed for your grandchildren. They’re both content, and methods, in Education jargon.

Some extremists believe that Education should start at home, and end there as well.  I don't believe that.  Education is a social endeavor, and that is its glory.  But some things are best taught at home, not least among them being how to bring up children.  A child is never too young to learn the art of conveying values, by example, and with delicacy and imagination.

Afterword: I got so carried away I almost forgot to emphasize one of my main points: one thing that must be taught at home is to value and respect school, and teachers.  A child must not be taught that a teacher must earn his or her respect.  The respect must come first, both from the child and the parent, whether or not the teacher has demonstrated that he or she "deserves respect."  One must start with respect, and only proceed to loss of respect under desperate circumstances.  A teacher simply cannot function if he or she is faced with an array of skeptical faces.

Supply and Demand, Competition, and Free Enterprise FOR THE CONSUMER!

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A somewhat anti-price-control cartoon...

I had a brilliant idea recently.

Let's examine some of the axioms of the Free Market.

A.  The Free Market is good for everybody.

B.  If you build a better mousetrap, the World will beat a path to your door.

C.  If you're a business, you can charge "anything the traffic will allow."

D.  The price of a product or commodity will settle on something proportionate to the demand for that product, which, in turn, depends on both its quality, and its scarcity.

E.  Scarcity not being a factor, the better product will sell at a higher price.

Half of sample?  How did they pick which half?

[As I have pointed out before,] many of these axioms either assume that the public (a.k.a. The Market) has instantaneous information about all products, or that products are sold without alteration for long periods of time.  Even if you are a complete believer in the flavor of Market Economy that is in force in the USA ---and I know no other flavors of it--- you have to agree that this is the weak link in the logic of the Market Economy: people do not learn about the weaknesses of a product right away, and manufacturers and retailers continuously fiddle with the products, so that no one knows enough to make an informed judgment on the value of a product.

For instance, take a new model of sneaker.  It is a while before the word gets out that it tends to encourage, say, twisted ankles.  Meanwhile, thousands buy the product, only to find that the company has made its money and quietly disappeared.  The general response to the phenomenon is that the Buyer must Beware.

OK.  There are other things: the Law requires that published descriptions of products and commodities must be truthful and factual, but in practice there is a great degree of latitude.  Businesses often lie like thieves, and can get away with it if they can prove that there is some basis in fact for their claims, no matter how tenuous.

The idea of Bait and Switch is kind of complex: you're not allowed to aggressively advertise a particular product, but not have it available at your outlet.  It used to be common for businesses to draw unsuspecting customers in with a description of a fabulous product at a fabulous price, and then offer either an inferior product, or a far more expensive product.

The Bait-and-Switch concept recognized, for the first time, that the time and the distance between one aspect of Marketing and the other has negative consequences for the consumer.  But there is a tacit agreement that businesses can indulge in a certain level of deceit, and consumers must allow for it.  Advertising must be allowed on any commercial medium.  Advertising need not be completely truthful.  If a particular business, or manufacturer or brand name is too deceitful, the public (it is believed) will deprecate their product.  If an advertisement is even more deceitful, lawsuits can be brought against the manufacturer or seller.  But ... that's business, as everyone loves to say.

If businesses are allowed ---even encouraged--- to be less than candid about their products, why can't consumers be deceitful in our own interests?

Providing information
A large proportion of manufacturers require you to register your product.  As a result you're bombarded with advertising for other products, some of which are completely unrelated to your initial purchase.  I think it is in the interest of the consumer to actually provide disinformation, so that the manufacturer actually has to improve their product, without simply making it superficially attractive to their perceived market.  So, instead of making, say, an Iphone a popular color, like chartreuse, they must actually make it work better.  A huge amount of manufacturer effort is channeled towards making products superficially attractive, and not attractive in the essential way it performs its function.

If you call them on it, they will actually show you research that proves that people tend to buy products that are superficially attractive over products that are effective.  In other words, their perverse development procedures are our own damned fault.  This is all in line with students selecting colleges that have successful athletic programs over schools with good academic programs.  Evidently, Dad wants his kid to go to a good football school, while Mom wants a school with more Mom-ly characteristics, e.g. better food and more attractive shrubbery, and if someone had the guts to check out this suspicion, it will be proved true.

For years I have provided false information in the questionnaires that came with most products.  I pretended to be a 19 -year-old single mother of three, or whatever weird idea popped into my head, and filled in preferences that would make them thoroughly confused.  But now I suspect that they have automatic ways of filtering out obviously bad data, such as a blind, homeless quadriplegic that belongs to the NRA, and so on.

Providing disinformation about product demand
The greater the demand for a product, the higher the price a manufacturer will set.  (Some of them are canny, and set a low price initially, to make it harder for the competition to get their products out.  This is what Kelloggs and General Mills did, successfully putting smaller companies out of business.)  But companies don't really measure demand directly; they try to assess demand by doing sampling, and surveys.  Unfortunately, I suspect that many manufacturers keep an eye on publications such as Consumer Reports, and use any favorable reviews as a basis for pricing.  If manufacturers don't do it, retailers certainly do.

I have walked into an auto dealership, and asked to look at a particular model.  "Let me show you what Consumer Reports says about this car," said my herder at once, and hustled me towards his office.  But when I pointed out that the manufacturer's wholesale price was thousands of dollars lower than the sticker price (the actual price on the car), I was told that, well, the business has to make a profit, and they employed thousands of people, and there's an enormous amount of overhead, and yakkity yak, blah, blah, blah.

OK, sure.  They have expenses.  But the expenses are not as high as they make out.  (And the salesmen don't make as large a share of the profits as they would like, and if they sell a car for less, they get a smaller pittance than they would get otherwise.  It depends on the dealership.  The owner of the dealership usually goes home with most of the money.)

Consumer Reports advises prospective car buyers to be capricious and unpredictable.  Above all, they advise, do not fall in love with a particular model.  In other words, they've stumbled on the principle that customers can strike back at businesses by offering disinformation, at least about their attitude towards a prospective purchase.

Disinformation about Demand
Can we be usefully deceitful about the demand for a product?  Is there some way we can subvert the manufacturer's research about product demand?  If anyone can think of a clever way to do this, please, please let me know.  (How about buying 20 copies of something, from different places, and returning all but one?)

[To be continued.]

A Festival Devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach

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 Today is the birthday ---or the birth anniversary--- of the composer whose works I like the best: Johann Sebastian  Bach.

The reason Bach's name is usually given with all three of his names is because the name Johann was very common in his family, which was based around a part of Germany that once belonged to Thuringia, in Saxony.  (Or vice versa; I'm not sure of the historical geography of those parts).  So Johann Bach's abounded there, and in fact it was Sebastian, his middle name, that identified him more uniquely.  (Subsequently, of course, there would have been a lot of younger Bach's named Sebastian, I assume, but he was The Sebastian in his lifetime, and for a while afterwards.)

While I certainly admire the man, Bach, I admire his compositions more.  The Catalog of his works contain opuses numbered as high as 1090, but on the one hand, a number of items in this list have turned out to be by others, attributed to Bach by accident, and it is believed that a number of his works have been lost.  So we have an approximate estimate of around 1000 compositions, some of which were compound compositions, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, which has some 48 preludes and fugues, two each in every major and minor key, including very unusual ones.

I have written about practically every sort of composition by Bach: the Concertos, the Orchestral Suites, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Passions, the Oratorios (at least the Christmas Oratorio), and I believe a chorale-prelude or two, and a Cantata or two, at least a couple of movements from them, and the Trio Sonatas.

Some of the most well-loved of Bach's compositions are very simple pieces for keyboard; today we would play them on a piano: I'm talking about the so-called Two Part Inventions.  There are fifteen (not 22, as I mistakenly wrote before), and they can all be found at the  International Music Score Library Project, also called the Petrucci Library.  (Ironically, though the composition is certainly in the Public Domain, various printers and publishers continue to claim copyright, which each individual must decide whether or not to honor.)

In the time leading up to that of Bach's, collections of pieces were often made with one in each "common" key, starting with C major.  The Inventions are like that:
C major,
C minor,
D major,
D minor,
E♭ major,
E major,
E minor,
F major,
F minor,
G major,
G minor,
A major,
A minor,
B♭ major,
B minor.

These are the keys in which any fair musician can play a scale.  (I would have trouble with a few of these, and I can do a couple more on a good day.  The Well-Tempered Clavier was one of the first collections to use every scale.  Some black notes, such as A Flat, have two names: A Flat and G Sharp.  Bach picked the easier one to use, and so there are twelve preludes and fugues in all twelve major keys, and so on, and another whole set.)

Not everyone is familiar with every one of even these fifteen Inventions, but they are well worth getting to know.  The C major one is an unpretentious piece, with a very sedate feel.  It is easy to learn, and worth the effort.  The last several bars are a neat and clever ending to the piece.

The two-part invention in D minor was made famous by Walter Carlos in the original Switched-On-Bach album released around 1970, played on the Moog Synthesizer, one of the earliest synthesizers built.

I know the F major 2-part Invention particularly well, because I used it as my telephone ring tone for five years.  It is a jolly piece, especially if it is played at a brisk speed.  This, too, was in Switched-On Bach by Walter Carlos.  As you have learned already, Walter Carlos underwent a transgender operation, and took the name Wendy Carlos, and she had a big celebratory album released in 2000 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Switched-On Bach, using more sophisticated synthesizers, and different settings, which she felt to be better choices for her musical selections.  I believe the F major invention was one of those.

Finally, the A minor Invention is the last of the ones familiar to me.  This was played to us by one of my daughter's friends, and I liked the piece immediately.  All of them are worth hearing at least once, but these are the ones that I remember.  Highly recommended.

Arch

Pi Day, and all that.

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What I'm going to say --my usual diatribe against Pi Day-- won't make sense unless you know a little of the background.

Our present way of representing numbers is based on the number 10, which is why it is called the Decimal System.  The symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 all have absolute meanings, but we can put them together to make compound symbols, which represent a variety of numbers far greater than you would expect from the compact symbols themselves.  For instance, a person unfamiliar with the number system, such as an ancient Roman, for instance, would assume that three -digit numbers, such as 999, were roughly three times as big as a 1-digit number, such as 9.  We of course know that 999 is a much more enormous number than three times 9.

Why 10?  Because, anthropologists believe, we have ten fingers.  In fact some primitive societies are said to use base 11 (a society in which, I should explain, they use for counting the ten fingers and another body part that remains a mystery).

As I have described in earlier posts, there are interesting alternative bases for place-value number representation, including binary (base 2), octal (base 8) and hexadecimal (base 16), all used in computer science.  The number 273, for instance looks different in each of these.

In base 10, we don't quite think of it this way, but 273 really means
"2 times 100 + 7 times 10 + 3."

In base 8, instead of 100, and 10, which are powers of 10, we use 64 and 8 instead.  So to get 273, we have to first figure the largest multiple of 8x8x8 that can be subtracted out of 273.  Let's see ... that's 512, which is too big.  So let's go down to: what is the largest multiple of 64 that can be subtracted from 273?  I think 4 times 64, which would be 256.  Let's see: 273 take away 256 is ... 15.  Now, what is the largest multiple of 8 that can be taken from 15?  Just one, which leaves 7.  So, the number 273 would be represented, in base 8, as 417_[8].  Notice that all the digits we used, 4, 1, and 7, all lie between 0 and 7.  (Notice that in Decimal representation, all our digits lie between 0 and 9.)

In base 2, we use the digits 0 and 1 only.  We must use multiples of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and so on.  The number 1 is written the usual way.  The number 2 is written as 10.  The number 4 is written as 100.  The number 8 is written as 1000.  The number 16 is written as 10000.  You get the idea.  (Putting an extra 0 at the end of one number gives you double that number.)

To represent 273, we write it as 256 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1, which would be written as  100001111_[2] in binary representation.

Other bases are just as usable; the few above have gained importance because of how computers are implemented electronically.  Using chips, we can build a vast array of memory units, each of which can be "up" (representing a 1) or ("down" representing a 0), so binary representation is particularly useful.

Fractions can be represented with only a little more work.  For instance, 3.14159 simply means 3 + (1/10) + (4/100) + (1/1000) + (5/10000) + (9/100000), right?  Let's see:

3.14159
= 2 + 1 + .14159
= 2 + 1 + 1/2 (.28318)
= 2 + 1 + 1/4 (.56636)
= 2 + 1 + 1/8 (1.13272)
= 2 + 1 + 1/8 + 1/8 (.13272)
= 2 + 1 + 1/8 + 1/16 (.26544)
= 2 + 1 + 1/8 + 1/32 (.53088)
= 2 + 1 + 1/8 + 1/64 (1.06176)
= 2 + 1 + 1/8 + 1/64 + 1/128 (.12352), and proceeding similarly,
= 2 + 1 + 1/8 + 1/64 + 1/2048 + 1/4096 + 1/8192 + 1/16384 + 1/32768 (1.62112)

So, 3.14159 would be represented by 11.0010010000111111011010101..._[2] in binary.

Will it ever stop?  No.  The pattern will repeat however, because 3.14159 is a simple fraction, 314159/100000.  The place-value representation (think: representation as a "decimal") of any fraction will either stop (or, as we say, terminate) in any base, just like it does in decimal, or will repeat, like 2/7 = 0.2857142857142857142857....

Numbers like Pi are not simple fractions, so their representations in any base will continue forever.  The example we used above is a rough approximation of Pi, so it behaves like a simple fraction.  The real thing behaves differently.

So when people connect the value 3.14 with Pi, they are doing a number of crazy things.

First of all, they're ignoring the remaining digits.  So, okay, it is an approximation.  But a lot of non-mathematicians are not sharp enough to appreciate the difference between two numbers in the third decimal place.  These are your basic "dollars and cents" people.  In Canada, for instance, they've passed a law to get rid of their pennies, so that the smallest denomination will be their equivalent of a nickel.  Okay; I guess if you live in Canada, after a few years, people will be celebrating Pi day on  3/15, since the closest thing to 3.14 using only nickels and higher will be 3.15.

Secondly, 3.14 stands for 3 + 1/10 + 4/100.

But in the date 3/14, the 3 stands for the third month out of twelve months, not ten, and 14 stands for the 14th day out of 31, not out of 100.  It's crazy.

So Pi day arises because non-math people love to obsess over mathematical things that they can barely understand.  And they tend to celebrate these things in irrelevant ways.  They tend to make tunes based on the sequence 3-1-4-1-5-9- and so on, though that sequence only makes sense if you keep going forever.  This brings us to:

Thirdly, why celebrate the decimal representation of Pi?  Why not use Octal, or Binary, or some other base?  In fact, it just occurred to me: why not use base pi itself?

This is a crazy idea --probably not original-- because even to represent the number 4 would be a challenge.  Here would be the numbers that you could represent easily:

1 (which means 1),
2 (which means 2),
3 (which means 3),
10 (which means pi),
11 (which means  pi + 1, which, in turn, is a little more than four),
12 (which means pi + 2, which is a little more than five),

and so on.  1.1 would represent 1 + 1/Pi, and so on.

[I want to make clear that this is not a practical base for numbers, and is of only theoretical importance!]

So celebrating March 14th as Pi Day makes no sense, because  it celebrates the sequence of symbols ['3', '.', '1', '4'], which has only a tenuous relationship to the fabulous number Pi.  So, while the non-mathematical world (and the slightly-mathematical world, I suppose,) celebrates March 14 with great delight, as far as real mathematicians are concerned, it is of no importance, except for the sake of publicity.  So, carry on, by all means, but leave me out of it.

Arch

What's Going On? Religious Conservatism: The Stuff To Give the Troops

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Those who take religion at face value are finding the world a very confusing place.

You have all these Catholic priests (and occasionally, nuns) getting accused of sexual harassment of minors of both sexes; then you get the Pope resigning.  Then you get conservatives who seem hardly religious in their personal lives suddenly coming out as religious fundamentalists.  You have the Italian prime minister who took the place of the corrupt Berlusconi threatening to resign (or being forced to resign), and Berlusconi reluctantly offering to run for election again, supposedly in a fit of religious altruism.  Google "bunga-bunga parties."

On the other side, you get all these corrupt Islamic regimes being confronted by what appears to be the common people of those countries: popular revolt, it seems to us.  Then you get confusing signals from the CIA about which regimes WE (the USA) wants to support, or ought to support.  And then, once some of the Arab Springers get into positions of power, they turn around and pass laws and regulations that almost make us want to wish the crooks back in power.

Who are the good guys, for heaven's sake?  What do we want to happen out there in Not-America-land?  [Added later: what do we want for these places, leaving out our self-interest for a moment?]

Well, let's take the Islamic business first: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, in no special order.  If you read the detailed historical chains of events, you lose all ability to figure out anything, for the mass of detail.  Too much information is a modern problem that we must all deal with, and most people deal with it by Googling a question, to which any joker with an Internet Service Provider can give an answer that can be misleadingly dangerous dangerously misleading (including this one.  I disclaim all responsibility for either the accuracy or the usefulness of this post).

Fortunately for you, this particular problem is not difficult to understand, if you make a few easy mental adjustments.  OK, here's my warm-up to the Big Point.

Many of these Islamic countries used to be governed by figureheads on behalf of the religious leaders of the countries concerned.  After World War II, however, the British (and to some extent, the French and the Americans, and the Russians) put in place truly secular (non-religious) governments that were favorably disposed towards the good guys who put them in place.  Initially, the good guys were Britain, the USA, and France, but later there were a few standouts holdouts, (the so-called Non-Aligned Nations) who insisted on being neither in the American camp nor in the Russian camp, which enabled them to get foreign aid from everywhere.

Over the decades, however, these leaders of Third World Governments, and more significantly, their family members, received lots of benefits from the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and so on.  In fact, many of their families actually had homes in New York, Washington DC, London, Paris, Moscow, and so on.  It was inevitable that, in order to maintain a Western lifestyle with third-world resources, a certain amount of corruption was necessary.  One by one, as the voters in these countries became aware of the contradictions between the rhetoric of their leaders and their lifestyles, all these regimes began to tumble, including Anwar Sadat in Egypt, Shah Pallavi in Iran, and so on.  In the West we are more cynical about the altruism of our leaders, and we are not shocked by social inequity.  In the Third World, many of the first wave of leaders came to power based on the struggle against Imperialism, and the brotherhood of the oppressed, and so on.  (I mean, we did too, but some oppressed are more brothers than others, to clumsily paraphrase George Orwell.)

One of the major complaints against all these leaders is that they neglected the national religion.  With clear logic, most of these people considered that they only needed to pay lip-service to Islam, because they could easily see that their Christian friends in the West were only nominal Christians.  If you are truly religious, my reader, this is where you should stop reading, because one of my major axioms is that religion is not only a lie and a sham, but a strong negative force, which as an enlightened citizen of the modern world you should abandon as a bad deal.

It was easy, once the conservative (non-government) elements in the Islamic countries were able to generate enough support (through the usual religious blackmail to which any religious fundamentalist organization resorts) to foment revolutions that overthrew these so-called dictators.

These dictators started out being the good guys.  They stood for non-religious leadership, which was generally benign to begin with.  Women were educated, financial aid was obtained from the West, schools were improved, as were roads, electricity supplies, airports, small manufacturing, etc, etc.  But this left out most of the traditionally educated religious males who knew little outside their Koran, and did not want deign to do menial work in some small industry, which was work only fit for, say, a woman.  In fact, they observed, the way the women were comporting themselves was positively shameful.

The history of governments in the Third World is the story of leaders who simply could not bring themselves to surrender power to their duly elected successors.  (If we're not careful, this could happen here in the USA as well.)  So, this gentleman in Syrian, whose troops are murdering civilians, was originally the good guy who kept the religious folks from their stranglehold on Syrian society.

The former communist state of Russia, and (the former communist state of) China have supported Prime Minister al-Assad for years, simply because he was essentially non-religious, and therefore generally speaking a better option than any religious leader, conservative or liberal.  Oddly enough, the CIA, which is, tragically, almost the only source of philosophical continuity in the US government (and I'll probably regret having said that) adopts the same view.  Make no mistake: if Pat Robertson were to endorse a particular person for President of the USA (and it will more than likely be a male, since women are considered a sinful sex by Christian religious conservatives---though they might pretend to have moved beyond that phase in their evolution , oh, pardon me, I said the E-word.  I mean, I wrote it) this country will descend into minor chaos.  The only reason we might avoid the horrible fate of Iran is that even a Presidential candidate endorsed by the Religious Right will probably not be a True Believer, but will only pretend to be one, for the votes.  But wait: there is Santorum, isn't there?

It appears that much of the Arab Spring has been manipulated by the Islamic Fundamentalists, which are essentially the mighty arm of Iranian Islamists.  But the USA cannot, and must not interfere with the Arab so-called Spring.  I mean, we've gone that road before, claiming that so many popular uprisings in Central and South America were communist-inspired, and wrong-headedly helping to put them down.  What can you do?  There is something wrong about stamping out an uprising, as we have found in the Syrian situation.

All we can do is to let it happen, if possible only interfering with obvious and explicit influence from external sources, including all sources, such as the USA and Israel and Iran and Saudi Arabia.  Chances are we probably will play favorites, and screw ourselves up yet again.

We can only defend supporting rational, secular nations out there.  Every time we go with a religious regime, e.g. Saudi Arabia, what do we get?  Al Qaeda.

So, secular leaders in the Third World do often turn bad.  But so do religious leaders anywhere.  Giving up power is difficult, and absolute power is absolutely difficult to give up.  We have to admire the courage of Il Papa Benedict.  You can try to portray the weaknesses of particular dictators in terms of their views of what their role in government was: Chief Executive versus Absolute Ruler.  But the poverty in the Third World makes giving up power even harder, because dictators of the properly Western stripe are so lionized by Western society that their being in favor in the West are the very seeds of their ultimate degeneration.

Having said all that, here is the Big Point.

In the West, many religious leaders, if not all religious leaders, are strangely rational, and not at all superstitious.  They will have explained away all the mythical aspects of their religions, until they have reduced all the miraculous acts of their particular gods as essentially invisible.  In other words, all the miracles recorded in their religious texts will have been explained away as mere perceptions brought about by the enormous faith of the witnesses, and the great holiness of the miracle-worker, so that it can be said that it was pure faith that made the apparent miracle take place, and it was not a miracle at all.  This is called demythologization of religion.  God does exist, dear believer (they would say), but only in your heart.  God does act, dear believer (they would say) but only through the faithful.  You, dear believer (they might say, in a careless moment) make God exist!!  Hah, they would have said a mouthful, if they were to confess that.  I strongly recommend a piece of humorous fiction by Terry Pratchett called Small Gods, which will leave you moved, or in stitches, depending on your disposition.

But much of this candid philosophizing is reserved for the cognoscenti.  For the masses, who supply the shekels that make the death squads possible, there is a more traditional message: death to unbelievers, or at least, salvation.  Some missionaries spread their faith by working for charitable organizations in the field, in painful conditions, but these were few and far between.  All the young people volunteering for missionary work are more disposed to preaching to the heathen than working in their hospitals for little or no money, in impoverished circumstances.  God's armies of today are well-fed, well funded, and well supplied with pamphlets.

In the East, one never knows.  One assumes that, at the very top, religious leaders are far less superstitious than their faithful followers.  In any case, the faithful are told what they need to believe, to put forward the agenda of the leadership.  God wants the women to take a subservient role is the most obnoxious precept in conservative religions, but there are others, such as God wanting the faithful to remain largely unconvinced about the laws of nature and ignorant of the evidence for scientific theories.

To summarize, we're never going to be happy with any leadership in the Third World that isn't secular, while the stubbornly religious elements in the Third World are never going to be satisfied with a secular leader.  Things will always be bad for somebody.

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Traumerei by Robert Schumann

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Here is Schumann's well-known piano piece transcribed for a string orchestra, and played through my music notation software.

The picture is of Clara Schumann (nee Wieck), the child of a well-known and respected gentleman who was Schumann's teacher.  I have written about Clara Schumann earlier.  She is close to being a sort of hero of lovers of Romantic era music.