Alpha Mind Blog

The first casualty in the war over water? Was it the guy in Sydney, or the truth?

Truth is the first casualty of war.

My fine Aussie friend Lee Hopkins has a slogan with which he ends the episodes of his podcast. “Communicate with passion!” he chirps.

Okay, Lee, I’m about to do just that.

Lee grabbed me with his short post this week, “There will be more blood shed yet.”

I knew that Lee would be paying attention. For many months he’s been noticing, out loud, Australian politicians’ state of denial over dwindling water supplies.

Is Australia’s drought part of a natural cycle or a symptom of AGW (anthropogenic global warming)? We can’t know for sure, but if warming continues and freak weather gets freakier, history’s verdict will most likely be that we, not unassisted nature, caused it.

Lee didn’t mention AGW, but as to violence, he is surely right. It has only begun.

Under nearly every scenario in which global warming kills people, we would be desperately naïve to think that all of those people will die without a fuss or a fight.

Climate change denial is the first act of the next great war (and I mean really great, war by comparison to which USA-on-Iraq is a mere mugging.) It’s a murdering of truth and a murdering of many, many people, of whom those already born probably make up only a small minority. Real skepticism is a fine thing and I respect it and practice it. But only a few points I’ve ever heard made by AGW deniers are honest skepticism; the greatest bulk by far are outright lies.

Being myself a skeptic, I even doubt whether Sydney’s lawn-watering killing is the first such event caused by climate change, if indeed that is what it is. But my best guess is that future history books will name it just that way. (In both respects: related to AGW, and the first murder thus related.)

Truth is also the last casualty of war.

Besides several hundred blog posts, my reading this week included Praise of Folly, by Desiderius Erasmus. This led me to read some literature about the man. I had known little about him except that he influenced the King James Bible. And that Luther called him “an eel whom only Christ can catch.”

In that literature, what struck me most is how little respect Erasmus gets in the Christian world.

The reason, I think, is that he simply refused to participate, on either side, in the Protestant schism.

Here’s what the online Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about him. I’ve emphasized the sentences I think are crucial.

Opinions concerning Erasmus will vary greatly. No one has defended him without reserve, his defects of character being too striking to make this possible. His vanity and egotism were boundless… he lacked straightforward speech and decision in just those moments when both were necessary. His religious ideal was entirely humanistic[:] reform of the Church on the basis of her traditional constitution, the introduction of humanistic “enlightenment” into ecclesiastical doctrine, without, however, breaking with Rome. … Devoid of any power of practical initiative he was constitutionally unfitted for a more active part in the violent religious movements of his day…

I believe what is actually meant here is that Erasmus’ profound pacifism was A Bad Thing. And make no mistake, Erasmus consistently opposed not only war, but the schism which would necessarily bring war with it.

Luther was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. He took joy in the burning of synagogues and Anabaptists. (Erasmus opposed the killing of heretics.) Johann Eck, who opposed Luther after the publication of the 95 theses, was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. His purpose in “debating” Luther was not to sort truth from falsehood, but to find some way of painting Luther into the heretic’s corner, where the full bludgeon of papal authority could be used against him.

For the occurrence of schism instead of reformation, Eck was as responsible as Luther was.

Meanwhile, Erasmus disagreed with Luther but refused to condemn him.

And while the motivations of Luther and Eck dominated both sides in the schism…

while Catholic and Lutheran vilified and killed each other…

while both sides gleefully murdered anyone who dared to live by true Christian convictions…

Erasmus simply tried to stay out of harm’s way long enough to finish a few scholarly projects, including a trustworthy translation of scripture.

The author of the quoted article believes, perhaps, that this desire demonstrates bad character. That Luther and Eck were true solid men and Erasmus wasn’t.

Even in reconciliation, the lying goes on.

The Catholic Encyclopedia was originally published in the seven years up to 1914. Yes, it’s old, and Catholic-Protestant reconciliation hadn’t gone very far in that day. But even now, when the two sides seek as much common ground as they can, who in this movement of unity is singing the praises of Erasmus?

After a bitter war, when the two sides reconcile, they still assume that what matters is the two sides. Catholic-Protestant reconciliation tends to riff on the theme “of course the other side was right in their way, from their point of view.” The two opposing points of view are now reconciled, but also validated.

Which is a great lie.

A better reconciliation would be of both sides to the truth. To the truth that they should never have been sides at war. The truth which would say “we were both wrong and Erasmus has chosen the better part.”

I’m reminded of an account I read some years ago of an early 20^th-century event. Some still-living veterans from both sides of the civil war got together and shook hands and adulated each other for their equal valor.

And there wasn’t a black face in the crowd. None had been invited.

War, born of lies, leads to a lying form of peace. One which says “My!, weren’t we both brave and principled, even if our principles were different!” Not a truthful peace, which would say, “In our thirst for a paltry mastery, we made pawns, we made non-persons, we made carrion of countless other souls whom God loves. May He forgive us. May we learn a better way and teach it to our children.”

In each such lying peace, the smiles and hugs and mutual congratulations are only dirt overlying the seeds of the next war.

The deniers of AGW count on a lying peace, even if the worst scenarios come about. They count on a forgiveness arising out of humanity’s perversity. Humanity’s way of paying attention to the power-wielders on the “sides” of a war, and ignoring the simply dead who never wanted to take a side but wanted to simply live.

Paying attention to global warming isn’t about saving the planet. The planet is a big wet rock. It will do fine even if we leave fewer than ten species to squirm their way out of the deuterordial soup.

No, it’s not about the planet.

It’s about all those other species.

But more…

it’s about our own species, the one that, rightfully, is dearest to us.

It’s about our great-grandchildren.

But more yet…

it’s about war, which God hates and we should, too…

And it’s about saving our souls.

Don’t. Don’t even think about it. Your life is too valuable. Don’t waste it, I beg you.

A bit more about that code of ethics thing (see my last post).

One of the reasons it’s dangerous to ascribe motives to another person is that it’s really hard for any of us to understand motives, our own or anyone else’s.

Let’s go down that path, tricky as it is, and talk about the motivations that might have been at work last week as the House of Representatives considered the Free Flow of Information Act.

To cut to the chase: before passing the bill, the house watered down the protections afforded journalists who shield their sources.

Declan McCullagh has laid out the steps by which the language was modified as the bill was considered. The crucial point here (and how this relates to my last post on Citizen Journalism Ethics) is that the bill managed to exclude most bloggers from its protections. Here’s the final language:

The term “covered person” means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

In other words, not I nor (probably) you.

Why does money make a difference? Why should those who get paid to do journalism be afforded protection that you and I don’t have?

Now perhaps I’m going to shock you by suggesting there may have been a perfectly good and sound motive at work here. Plenty of others have mentioned the crasser motives that may be at work (read the comments to Declan’s post.)

But what if… what if the legislators used money as a proxy for something else? For example, a code of ethics?

I’ll clarify. Much as they love to make laws which restrict people’s freedoms, legislators also have some grasp of the notion that those who self-police don’t need to be policed by others.

But how can we identify those who self-police? Well, generally it’s done by seeing that they belong to a group which collectively self-polices. And in the case of journalism, that would be professional journalists, who have a code of ethics, and not bloggers, who don’t.

That journalists might often ignore their own codes of ethics is not to the point. The legislators must operate under the assumption that the codes are largely observed, even if not universally. If they’d believed that such professional codes were worthless, they’d have been much more likely to treat professionals as they’ve treated bloggers.

Now comes the question that has to do with thoughcraft: If the House had meant ”professionals should be protected because they have a code of ethics which protects the rest of us from their behaving like scoundrels,” why didn’t they say so?

Well, indeed, some of them might have said so in their discussions; I haven’t read the record and just now I don’t intend to. But it’s just possible that that was what they meant even if they didn’t say so. And they didn’t say so because they knew, deep down, that to talk about journalistic ethics would open cans of worms none of them wanted to deal with.

Now what I am confident of is that there must have been some mention of bloggers in those discussions. And what I’m equally confident of is that the question of a code of ethics would have been very unlikely to come up at those moments.

Why? Because a code of ethics for bloggers is about as unthinkable among Representatives as it is among bloggers.

Here’s a snippet from chapter 10 of Thoughtcraft:

We are taught what to think by all the ways in which the community signals to us which ideas are in favor and which are not. Signaling may be very overt (”How dare you say that!?”) or less so, as when one’s statements are based on assumptions the group doesn’t share, and are consistently met with non-understanding. In many persons, these signals result in various thoughts being either “thinkable” or “unthinkable” in the context of the group.

Many of the reasons bloggers rejected the Bloggers’ Code of Conduct were intuitive. So much so, in fact, that non-bloggers, such as U.S. Representatives, might grasp them intuitively. So that, instead of explicitly naming the missing code of ethics as the reason for not protecting bloggers, the lawmakers instead chose a proxy—money, which makes a professional—which satisfied them. And which did so without opening the can of worms that lay in the question “So do journalists actually abide by a code of ethics?”

Kami Huyse is making me rethink the bloggers’ code of conduct. The idea of a code was put forward by Tim O’Reilly after Kathy Sierra decided to shut down her Creating Passionate Users blog due to harassment.

The Bloggers’ Code died not with a bang but a whimper, and I was happy to let it. But Kami has got me thinking about it again with her post on ethics among journalists and PR practitioners. The point of her post is that few in either group even read their respective codes of ethics. According to Kami, this is a Bad Thing.

But if journalists should be reading and abiding by their own code of ethics, and if bloggers are the new citizen journalists, then shouldn’t they be reading and abiding by their own code? And wouldn’t that involve having one?

O’Reilly’s draft code had a lot more to do with simple decent conduct than with our taking seriously our roles as journalists. But a code like his would have started us down that path, and maybe that’s where we need to go.

(The foregoing is part I, the simple part of this post. My next post will get a little trickier, going into the depths of what my Alpha Mind blog is all about.)

I’m not sure I have the nerve to disagree with Seth Godin, but…

Nathan asks Seth how to get a marketing job with no marketing background. Seth says, in essence, forget the job, just market.

Even if you’re 12 years old, start a store on eBay. You’ll learn just about everything you need to learn about digital marketing by building an electronic storefront, doing permission-based email campaigns, writing a blog, etc.

Is this brilliant advice? Or only advice for the brilliant? In other words, has Seth forgotten that not everybody is Seth?

There are many kinds of marketers, but the ones who succeed at all fall into two classes. There are the capable marketers, and there are the brilliant marketers. The latter are precisely the ones Seth is speaking to. These are the entrepreneurial ones, who have no need for the comfort of a big company, who just market because they love it, and who take to it like fish to water.

They are also the ones who tend toward Seth’s brand of brilliance, who figure out the world around them by native ability, not by having it explained to them. They do, as Seth implies everybody can, learn far faster by unaided experience than by classes or apprenticeships. They will, as Seth promises, have folks beating down doors to hire them.

There is a vast need, though, for capable marketers. They aren’t out in the long skinny tail of the bell curve. They learn by being taught. They they aren’t necessarily consumed by the hankering to market. They need a job while they learn to market, and so they find marketing jobs, as Nathan was hoping to do.

And they have one advantage even over Seth: they can empathize with the non-brilliant, who make up the vast bulk of most markets.

Notice that Seth prefaces the advice to start an eBay store with “Even if you’re 12 years old.” Better to have said, “If you’re lucky enough to be 12 years old.” Because a twelve-year-old is far better placed to follow Seth’s advice than a twenty-something or beyond. At twelve years old, you don’t have school loans to pay, a spouse to please, kids underfoot or on the way. Some folks need a job, and if they want to market, it should be a marketing job.

So, aren’t I disagreeing with Seth?

Not really. Because for someone who has the potential to be one of the brilliant marketers, Seth’s path is the quicker way to demonstrate it. And of course, if you’re passionate and single-minded, you should get a marketing job and start your own business.

When I found my post about Dee Rambeau’s “farewell to blogging” growing past 10,000 words, I decided to make a little e-book instead of posting it. I also decided not to put links in the pdf file, because readers would have driven themselves crazy following links; they’d never get my own essay finished.

The links that would have gone in the essay if I’d let them, are here:

Creative Commons licensing.

Dee Rambeau’s farewell post on his own blog.

Amanda Chapel’s post about the burst bubble of business blogging.

Wikipedia article on “irrational exuberance.”

The folks Amanda calls “rabid” in her “bubble” post:

• Jeff Jarvis
• Steve Rubel
• BL Ochman
• Shel Holtz
• Debbie Weil

MLMs: Multi-Level Marketing.

Wordpress, fine blog tool. I’ve stuck with it through two blogging careers.

Build a Better Podcast, my short-lived podcast about podcasting.

The quintessential A-listers I use as examples:

• The Huffington Post
• Seth Godin
• Om Malik
• Guy Kawasaki
• Dilbert

Darren Rouse’s post on 15 requisites for the professional blogger. The post, by Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, which Darren takes off on.

My own post on editors, which won me my 2005 scoble.

Scoble’s post linking to mine.
Financial Times. It shows up on my driveway daily. I read it most days. It’s excellent.

Wikipedia entry on Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London.

Wonkette. Not, oh please, to be confused with Strumpette, whom I also mention in my essay, and whose link is above.

MIT Sloan School of Management.

The allegedly sleazy ADM.
The HP Way.
George Orwell Resources.

Lists of tools:

• asymptomatic.net, blogging tools.
• aggcompare.com, rss aggregators.
• podcatchermatrix.org, podcast aggregators.

Social Bookmarking:

• del.icio.us.
• digg.

Wikipedia’s list of social software.

More social sites: squidoo and AmIHot.

Grant McCracken’s first post on “Cloudiness.” He’s done more since then.

Paul Graham’s essay “Is It Worth Being Wise?”

Hobson and Holtz, their fine podcast, “For Immediate Release“.

Kathy Sierra passes on a video of a newborn horse. I also used a photo from her post. Glorious!

Dee’s Post at Marcom Blog explaining his no longer blogging.

Radio Userland, the first blogging tool I ever loved.

Robert French at Auburn University. His students’ blog there: Marcom Blog.

Scripting News. I started reading Davenet in 1998, and I still enjoy reading Dave when he takes the time to write anything longer than 20 words.

Scobleizer. Robert Scoble’s blog, the basis of my new economic unit, the scoble. A scoble is the average value of one link to your blog from Scobleizer.

Skype. Rocks and isn’t a time sink, like the next two.

MySpace. Sorry, but I always navigate very briskly away from sites that play sounds at me unbidden.

Second Life. You have got to be kidding. God has given me maybe 85 years, if I take after my mom’s side. I have already stuffed 4 or 5 careers into that, and I want to get in about 3 more. So I have time to go build a house of bits in a world of pixels, and hang out with people who have that little to do? Nononononononononono! No!

Lee Hopkins. A good man fallen among Second Life, but still okay.

Google Alerts. They rock. Google is probably the company that will be smart enough to implement what I suggest in this essay.

Photo Credits: (partial here, complete in the book)

StockXchng Stock Photography web site, from which I took many pictures for the essay. Below I list the web sites of individual photographers whose work I used and who have their own sites. In the e-book, I list the StockXchng pages of the others who upload their photos there.

Teacup photo: Matthew Bowden. Gillingham, Kent, UK.

Dead Parrot Photo, from Wikipedia’s entry on “Dead Parrot Sketch.”

“Price Tag” photo: Hilary Quinn. Cork, Munster, Eire.

“Arborial Marsupial Road Sign”: Laurent Cottier. Lausanne, Switzerland.

World Socialist Movement web site.

“Diva and Filly” photo: Kathy Sierra, link given above.

Telescope photo: Martti Vire, Rauma, Finland

A fascinating article by Paul Graham: Is It Worth Being Wise?

Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom is how different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

I agree there’s a trade-off, but I also believe it’s necessary to seek for as much intelligence and wisdom as we can.

The key is in Graham’s choice of the word “curing,” which implies something very like eliminating, and I believe is the wrong word. In fact, all domestic animals, including humans, tend towards neoteny, the carrying of childish qualities into adulthood. For humans, there’s then the matter of overcoming, but not curing, the childish qualities.

The difference between curing and overcoming is that, when we’ve done the latter, the quality overcome remains within our repertoire–we can turn it on or off. We can choose, based on context, whether to allow the quality in question to express itself.

The person whose sexuality is “turned on” either all the time or randomly is a ghastly thing to contemplate. Equally ghastly, though, it the idea of someone who has “cured” their sexuality.

Wisdom is, I believe, precisely the capacity to wield one’s capacities by choice and not by inward compulsion.