Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

Genesis 1:26
And God said, let us make man in our image.

Genesis 3:22
And the Lord God said, Behold, then man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.

Genesis 11:7
Let us go down, and there confound their language.

Exodus 22:28
Thou shalt not revile the gods.

Exodus 34:14
For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

1 Samuel 28:13
And the king said unto her, Be not afraid: for what sawest thou? And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth.

Psalm 82:6
I have said, Ye are gods.

Zephaniah 2:11
The Lord will be terrible to them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth.

John 10:33-34
The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?

They have noise-cancellation headphones.  They need the same thing throughout cities.  Noise polluters should be obliged to install appropriate technologies, as soon as they become available, sufficient to counteract the noise they generate.  The idea that you can burden your neighbors with your noise — whether you are a music lover or a factory — should be as intolerable as the proposal to burden them with any other form of pollution you might generate.  People should not have to erect walls that block everyone’s view in order to protect themselves from overwhelming noise (e.g., along freeways).

Everybody’s worried about gas prices, about the cost of commuting and relying on cars.  People are going to be talking about improved mass transit.

Which we need — desperately.  We have needed it for decades, since the 1970s and before.  I remember writing a letter, as a schoolboy, to a state governmental transportation authority in Indiana in the 1960s.  I said that what we needed was an individualized rail-based system of transportation.  I suggested that rails could lead into people’s garages, just as driveways do.  It seemed to me that it would be cheaper and easier to run one or two rails than to cover the nation with hardened concrete platforms, wide as a barn and endless thousands of miles long.

The rail guy was kind enough to respond in all seriousness to my childish letter.  He said that a rail system limits mobility.  I remember thinking — Yeah, and a highway system doesn’t?  I still wonder what he was thinking.  Those were not the days of four-wheel drive vehicles and off-roading.

At the time, my concept was that each family could have a pod-like car that would run on rails, and when a bunch of them wanted to drive across the country on vacation, they could connect their cars together into individualized passenger trains and run them on express rails.  Later, when computers became popular, it occurred to me that computers could do that too.

I guess I still don’t get it.  Why perpetuate a system that kills so many thousands of people each year, when you could do something else instead — something that would move everyone along at maximum feasible speed, without slowdowns for accidents, without these tremendous road construction projects, without the unbelievable tab for maintenance that we now don’t know how we will afford?

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if rail transportation will experience a comeback.  My suggestion now is that it do so incrementally, in tandem with developments in preferences.  An alienated nation created suburbs in which people wouldn’t have to know their neighbors and wouldn’t have (or be able) to walk to the market.  That may not be the shape of the next generation’s America.

What’s needed is some relatively small, rapidly planned, highly publicized efforts that combine incremental mass transit development with higher-density residential areas.  Run an existing subway or light rail line one stop further, as quickly as possible, to a neighborhood that is being developed as an old-fashioned smallish town (of, say, 5,000 to 15,000 people), complete with its own city center including courthouse, grocery, and so forth, but perhaps with higher population density within walking distance of the train station.

Knowledge from that sort of project could advise as to whether the country is going to be intensively urbanizing or is, instead, in the market for a revival of the old Interurban lines, rolling along, trolley-like, from one freestanding small town to the next.

My fellow scholars:

I greet you at a special moment in the history of Avicenna University. This year marks the centennial of the founding of this educational institution in 2020. With you, members of the class of 2120, I feel the excitement of releasing you into the world, to share with it the marvelous gifts you have shared with us during these past six years.

As I was preparing the remarks I will be making today, I thought you might appreciate hearing a full 15-minute speech, in the style of the times when this university was founded. [Audience laughs lightly.] In those times, it was believed that wisdom came primarily from wise people. Everyone wanted to be considered wise; therefore, everyone had a great deal to say.

It seemed absurd, at the time, to imagine that one of the 22nd century’s leading centers of education would arise here in the blue grass of the district – what was then the state – of Kentucky. Places like this were backwaters, as people called them then: they were places where the water just sat, rather than rushing rapidly to somewhere or other. Backwaters were thought to be places where not much was happening – where wise people did not tend to congregate, and where, therefore, wisdom was believed to be in short supply. Water was not supposed to just sit around and do nothing. [At the mention of water, the audience grows very quiet.]

We know, now, where that leads. Funny, how the imagery changes when circumstances change. We are now more inclined to realize that, when water rushes off to some other place, you can’t keep it and use it. It’s gone. Backwater stays put, and remains available for those who need it.

The 20th century’s frothy centers of intellectual ferment brought strange fire to the hands of people bent upon misusing it. The yeast fermented uncontrollably. Finally, the batch blew up. The so-called Islamic Manhattan Project returned the strange fire of nuclear power to its birthplace, sending an exceedingly urgent message to political and intellectual leaders worldwide. Suddenly, froth was not so appealing; suddenly listening, reading, and thinking became as valuable and esteemed as speaking, writing, and teaching had been.

And so the way was prepared for the world’s discovery and embrace of Islam, enduring philosophy of the desert. The way was prepared, that is, for the interminable cycle of reflective life in which all (and university faculty most of all) are humbled before the vastness of that which they do not know. In the Judeo-Islamic backlash that followed the devastation of New York City, our thousand-year-old heritage was rediscovered. True Islam – the Islam of Avicenna, Averroes, and others of their era; of humble, openhearted, and exceedingly kind thought – reemerged.

Thus, this proud university came into existence. Here, you have found a haven from the harried practicality of everyday life, from the day-to-day struggles of those who must rely upon common sense in order to survive. I have satisfied myself, from extensive conversation with each of you, that you are well aware of the extraordinary privilege to which you have been entitled, during these years of reading and contemplating classical works in their original languages. You have acquired an education, in the very deepest and most consequential sense of the word.

You are now prepared, beyond any likelihood of temptation into practical affairs, to labor in good and anonymous pursuits, providing unpatented and virtually uncorrupted insights to political leaders and other decisionmakers whose entanglements would otherwise prevent them from achieving depth of insight or clarity of purpose. You cannot cure the desperate internal deficits that compel those unfortunate souls to seek approval in the eyes of thousands of onlookers; but, like generations of Avicenna graduates before you, you can - and you will - help those decisionmakers utilize the fruits of reflective wisdom at a level they would otherwise be unlikely to attain, within the still-benighted world in which they must function.

Avicenna, the scholar, helped to preserve the knowledge upon which Europe would later depend, during those dark centuries before Europe was prepared to use that knowledge. Avicenna, the university, likewise came into existence in a period that spanned many dark centuries, when an obsession with material goods and individual survival had left the bulk of humanity increasingly incapable of experiencing deep satisfaction and peace within themselves, with others, and with nature. In place of an individualistic, competitive divisiveness that had turned people against their neighbors and their planet, Avicenna University offered a path forward, one that will work sustainably for all of humanity, forever.

[Dean Silverstein lifts her hands. Members of the graduating class rise.]

This, then, is your fate, dear students. I welcome you to your futures. I bless your endeavors. I thank you, as my colleagues, for blessing us with your presence.

Let us now enjoy some refreshments and return to our work. But first, please allow me to append a short comment about this unusual little speech I have given.

I realize I have said many things here. These are things to which you, the graduating members of the class of 2020, have already been exposed. It will not be difficult for you to ponder and process my words, lengthy though they have been. But I do want to express my concern on behalf of those parents, family members, and other members of the audience who have not been so fully exposed to such subjects, whose daily meditations may thus be disturbed, for some time to come, by the thoughts I have expressed. Had this not been such an important milestone in the history of this institution, I would not have made such a speech. In the consensus of the faculty of the university, however, these are thoughts of such importance as to merit inclusion in your reflections. May they serve you well.

It would be entertaining and instructive to attend a jam session of highly skilled tech types.  The ambiance would be that of a karaoke bar, but the equipment onstage would be a set of fearsome multimedia computer systems.  The concept would be that you wait your turn to get up there and do something with the huge display, the audio synthesizer, the 3D sculpting printer, and whatever other toys they have.  No doubt the best acts would feature some audience participation.  (Has anyone yet actually invented Aldous Huxley’s “feelies” movies?)  Example:  instant group therapy, with volunteers from the audience wired for galvanic skin response, heartrate, etc., complete with therapeutically trained group leader and audio and visual feedback indicating how each group member is responding up on the big display.

1.  I do a Google search.  It gives too many results.  I refine it.  It gives fewer.  I want to see the cascading list of what I had before, and what I have now, and what I get when I refine it further.  Color-coding would be good, to show me (in e.g., blue) which ones dropped out in the first round, and (in e.g., green) which ones dropped out in the refined search, etc.

2.  Having refined my Google search, I begin to look at individual articles.  I want to annotate what I have found.  Under each Google hit, I want a space where I can write notes to myself about what this website contains.  I want it to happen within the Google format, so my notes will come up again if I do a similar study in the future.  Having annotated various webpages in the Google search results, I want a check box that allows me to hide the less relevant results, or perhaps display them in greyed or smaller print.

3.  I want to be able to design categories, and to click all categories that apply to each website Google finds (e.g., “informational site,” “product sale site,” “too good to lose”), and save my clicks, and do future searches (for e.g., “great vacations”) just within webpages I have already marked with checkboxes (as being “too good to lose”).

One of the most firmly held beliefs of the 20th century, in the United States, was that slavery had been largely eradicated following the First Civil War (CW I). This belief was possible primarily because, at that time, slavery was defined in terms of chattel ownership of one person by another. The ascendant view, throughout much of the 200-year period beginning in 1865, was that ending slavery was a convenient matter of forbidding the legally authorized ownership of persons.

That view survived as long as it did because this was an era of extraordinary cognitive disconnection, wrought primarily by excessive tolerance and sheer public fatigue. In other words, people were essentially trained to look at a situation and conceptualize it in terms other than what it obviously was.

The fatigue factor was simply that people were too tired and overwhelmed by the constant barrage of news, advertising, decision, stress, obligation, and the other trappings of consumerist society. They did not have time or stamina to sort things out and understand them. So when they looked at ongoing slavery, they lacked sufficient energy, training, or inclination to perceive it as such.

There were also, as always, some risks in any act of questioning the dominant viewpoint, in those areas where such questioning was societally verboten. People were free to wear, say, and think all kinds of things; but they were not really very free to question what the First Civil War had actually achieved, much less to ask whether another such war might be necessary to consummate the truly free society that abolitionists of the mid-19th century had envisioned.

The tolerance factor had to do with the core democratic flaw through which tired, uninformed, and easily manipulated voters could be persuaded to grant enormous power to madmen and fools. There was a remarkable faith in the wisdom of the people. Voters in Germany had elected Adolf Hitler in 1933, despite indicia of his intolerant views. And yet, after the experience of years of extremely costly war against Hitler, American voters reserved the right to do much the same with a series of extremist presidents in the late 20th and early 21st century. As in Germany, those presidents did not seem extreme when they were being elected; voters in all such instances were pretty confident, time after time, that they were finally getting it right. Only with the post-Depression generation of the 2020s was there, at last, sufficient public humility to obtain ratification of the 30th Amendment and imposition of basic knowledge requirements for those who would vote in national elections.

Because of these fatigue and tolerance factors, people of the slavery centuries possessed a highly developed ability to misconstrue a situation despite overwhelming evidence. As we now know about consumerist democracies, members of the public were typically functioning in a satiated mode of near somnolence, lulled almost to sleep by their comforts, at a time when alertness might have served them better. People simply did not see slavery as a continuing phenomenon, much less a growing one.

Slavery was only beginning to develop during the first century after CW I. The banning of chattel slavery meant that those who wished to own persons would have to do so in more carefully camouflaged ways. Black people were released from their plantations only to endure more than a century of struggle for equality with whites; and even then, their equality was often de jure rather than de facto.

Of course, blacks remained only a small minority of the population, and aggressive enslavement efforts were meanwhile underway elsewhere. For purposes of facilitating a highly affordable middle-class lifestyle, corporations enlisted desperate developing-nation workers (whether located on U.S. soil or abroad) in wage-slave conditions that were often worse than those that chattel slaves had experienced. The plantation slaveowner had a financial investment in his/her slaves, and would lose money if a slave became weaker or died. The wage slaveowner, by contrast, could exhaust the labor of the wage worker with little if any maintenance and upkeep expense, and (except where forbidden by relatively scarce effective union contracts) could simply discard the worker when s/he proved unprofitable.

The U.S. was thus able to exploit its predominant position in the world for more than a generation following World War II, so as to provide an unprecedentedly luxurious life to its middle-class citizens (primarily at the expense of those persons, American and not, who were least able to protect themselves); but in the late 20th century that American position of global supremacy began to fade. Working conditions for whites had been relatively tolerable, though still highly exploitative and oppressive, for nearly three postwar decades; but by the mid-1970s they were beginning to revert to their less tolerable prewar form, albeit in service rather than manufacturing industries. In this sense, blacks finally did achieve large-scale admission into the middle class, only to find that the middle class was ceasing to be what it had once been.

Facing overwhelming fiscal difficulties, reformist administrations of the early 21st century found themselves increasingly unable to help their constituents meet basic needs for security, education, food, shelter, urban infrastructure, and old-age assistance. Slowly, research began to demonstrate that consumerist democracy was delivering a lifestyle inferior to that which American farmers had enjoyed a century earlier – and, of course, vastly inferior to that which tenants had enjoyed under the manorial form of societal arrangement employed in Europe in the 12th century.

Such findings eventually contributed, not only to the passage of the 30th Amendment, but also to the formation of the Freedom Party, with its insistence that people enjoy greater peace, freedom from worry, quality of interpersonal relationships, and liberty of action and self-expression in small, insular communities under the protection of an appropriately trained and competitively selected liege lord.

Decades would pass before the Freedom Party moved out of fringe status and finally achieved power. Once the issue had been brought to public consciousness, however, those decades of recurrent tragedy and trauma served to underscore the plausibility of the Freedom Party platform. The first elected Freedom Party candidate for national office was Senator Perot of Oregon in 2024, but it would be nearly three more decades before the party was finally able to gain control of Congress and begin to dismantle the American slave legacy.

After Thanksgiving Thursday.

It is possible for a person to become wrapped up in his/her day-to-day activities and grow out of touch with the larger world.  This can happen to a president, Supreme Court justice, or member of Congress, just as it can happen to anyone else.

True, elected officials are supposedly in touch with what their constituents want, if they hope to be re-elected.  But this does not necessarily happen.  Such people are often able to win re-election through deceptive political advertising, negative campaigning, and other strategies that tug at voters’ emotions while leaving their larger life situations neglected.  Thus Americans, with their votes, have managed to spend many years in periods of excessive tobacco use, unpopular gun laws, substandard health care, and other circumstances that they actually do not want, circumstances that other advanced nations have been far more able to address responsively.

The suggestion here is not that the president should go back to a high-powered law firm, Hollywood filmmaking, or whatever it was that s/he did before becoming a politician.  The suggestion is, rather, that top leaders should be expected to spend a substantial number of hours, each week, working in a type of job that exposes him/her to a variety of real-life problems that people face.  Examples could include positions as counselors, social workers, nonprofit organization administrators, small businesspersons, legal aid lawyers, nurses, and community leaders.

Such leaders should be exposed, moreover, to real-life living conditions, to some practicable extent.  It is perhaps not realistic to imagine that a president could get a good feel for the life of a homeless person merely by tenting out in a park, surrounded by Secret Service agents.  Nor is it likely that such a leader would have the time to run an ordinary middle-class household.  But there may be some sort of living arrangement that would provide at least some constant reminder of what people are experiencing.  One example might be to live as a guest within a host family’s home and to participate in that family’s decisionmaking.

Such activities would detract from the number of hours available for affairs of state.  They could also distract the leader’s attention from important decisions that a national leader must make.  That is an important concern.  It is not necessarily crucial, however.  Leaders spend much of their time undoing the damage (or reversing the progress) that previous leaders have managed to achieve.  While the distraction of a real life could hamper a leader’s ability to achieve some things, it could also inform his/her judgment and instincts, so that the things that s/he did pursue and accomplish might be more likely to endure — within, perhaps, less of a cultural of constant governmental upheaval.

It is also true that any job, including particularly a job in government, can become encrusted with internal politics, gossip, resentments, and other potentially destructive behaviors.  Leaders, in particular, can become accustomed to their comforts. to the point of being spoiled.  Whether or not the leader in question felt invigorated by regular exposure to the lives and problems of normal citizens, some such removal from a potentially insular world could be invigorating in fact.  There have been too many American presidencies, in particular, that have become insular, inward-looking, suspicious of the press, afraid of the public, and otherwise unresponsive and irresponsible.

The American government of 2100 can be more truly a government of the people, by the people, for the people.  Insuring that decisionmakers are ordinary people, directly or at least vicariously, could help to advance that goal.

The theory is that we enjoy a right of free speech.  But that’s not true.  What the Bill of Rights says is, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . .”  It doesn’t prevent someone from abridging your freedom to speak within, say, the newspaper, church, or movie theater that s/he operates.  It just says Congress can’t pass laws preventing you from speaking freely.

Of course, that’s not entirely true either.  State and national legislatures can pass laws that allow you to be prosecuted as a terrorist if you say the wrong thing on an airplane.  They can pass laws that allow people to sue you for slander if you say the wrong thing about the wrong person.  They can punish you for saying something that someone else has already said — if, for example, you excessively quote someone’s book.

And then there are the nonlegal constraints.  Everybody knows you don’t badmouth a former employer in a job interview.  Commonly, you dare not say something kind about a person whom you are expected to treat as person non gratis.  You may hesitate to compliment the Nazis for something they seem to have done well; you may hesitate to ask the wrong kind of question, or state the wrong kind of opinion, in Sunday School; you express yourself circumspectly on the street, so as not to get punched in the nose.  Men learn caution when responding to the question, “Does this dress make me look fat?”; women learn to recite that size does not matter.  Our lives are simply filled with situations in which we learn not to speak freely.

So it would be impossible to eliminate free speech.  For better or worse, that has already been done.  What remains is to eliminate “free speech,” i.e., the term, which presently functions as a kind of doublespeak that purports to mean one thing and actually means something very different.  What we enjoy is not free speech; it is, more accurately, a certain degree of constraint upon governmental prosecution of nonpreferred utterances.  Genuine free speech would entail a kind of society that would seem very unfamiliar to today’s Americans.

When the false claim of “free speech” is eliminated, people may find it more difficult to evade the reality of the many ways in which they are constantly taught not to be honest with others or, ultimately, even with themselves.  Identification of problems is, often, an essential first step in understanding and solving them.

There are things in America, and in ourselves, that need improvement.  Let us claim a right to be honest about those things.  Let us acknowledge the ways in which law, society, and self prevent us from exercising that right.  The sooner we can achieve an accurate appraisal of our actual situations, the sooner we can begin figuring out how to improve them.