Chasing Davis: An Atheist's Guide to Morality Using Logic and Science

Contents

Chapter One

Statement of Purpose

Our Destination

A New Approach

The Genesis of the Voyage

Chapter Two

DAVIS

The Cradle

What Have We Lost by Falling Out of the Cradle?

Can We Retrieve What We Have Lost?

A Detailed Roadmap

Chapter Three

The Meaning and Consequences of …

Perception

Words and Language

Motivation and Intent

Something Uniquely Human Is Going on Here

Time, Cause and Effect, Determinism, and Free Will

Correlation versus Cause and Effect

Determinism versus Free Will

Memory

The Mythical Mind/Body Distinction

Self-Awareness and Intelligence

Diversity and the Propinquity/Proximity Principle

A Case Study

Gender Diversity

Generational Diversity

Social Diversity

Racial Diversity

Cultural Diversity

Changes within a Culture over Time

Loss of Cultural Diversity

What Cultural Diversity Means

The Propinquity/Proximity Principle Hypothesis

The Evidence in Favor of the PPH

Chapter Four

Belief, Faith, and Religion

Strangers in a Very Strange Land

Belief

Faith and Religion

Faith

Religion

In His Image (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)

Collective Omnipotence (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism)

In Their Image (the Ancient Civilizations of Greece and Rome and the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas)

Mystical (Religions in Surviving Stone and Iron Age Cultures)

A Quick Comparison of the Four Groups

Reason One: Religion Is Not Logical

Reason Two: Religion Promotes Fear of Life and Death

The Fear of Women

Collective Omnipotence: Fear of Life

Reason Three: Religion Is Not Useful Because …

Reason Four: Religion as Unreliable Crutch; Effective Weapon

Reason Five: Religion Is Too Mushy

Forgiveness Is Always Just Pretending

Reason Six: The Roadmap of Religion Omits the Detours

Some Concluding Thoughts about Good and Evil

Chapter Five

History, Law, and Government

Introduction to the Three Secular Guides

History: The Study of

The Law: Its Claimed Purpose; Its Actual Function

The Law as Culture Killer

The Law, As with Religion, Has Been Diverted from Its Original Purpose

Why the Law Is Such a Mess and How to Fix It

Changing the Law from a Devious to a Useful Guide

Childish Fairness

Adult Fairness

Government

How Government Really Works

The Power Elite: Who and What Are They?

Fear and Bread, the Glue of Government

A Sampling of Specific Government Tools for Creating Fear and Dispensing Bread

The Military

The Press

A Medley of Fear, Bread, Mendacity, and Mismanagement

Why and How We Can Lawfully Eradicate Government and Then Create a Moral Government

The Wrong Way to Eradicate Government

Discussion of RIVET

How to Properly Eradicate Government as We Now Endure It

Chapter 6

Science and the Scientific Method

The Glue of Science: The Scientific Method

Introduction to Science and the Scientific Method

The Historical Core of Science

Popular Science

Creation Science

Evolution

The Unfortunate Survival of the Survival of the Fittest

Evolution and Extinction Are Slow

Do We and Should We Trust Practical Science?

So What Does Science Tell Us?

Chapter Seven

Atheism

The Consequences of Not Believing in God

Who/What is an Atheist?

Atheism Is Not about Morality

Atheism Is Finally Out of the Closet

Out of the Closet and into the Lab

Chapter 8

Ethics and Morals

and the Five P Principle

Tools and Toolboxes

The Noble Savage

What, If Anything, Is Specifically Unique about This Evolved Primate Called Man?

In the Beginning

After the Beginning (Part One)

After the Beginning (Part Two)

In the Present

A New Hypothesis

Man, Evolution, and Morality

A New and Expanded Morality

The Big Map

A Close Look at a Man Who Tried to Be Moral without Following the Big Map

Looking for a Moral Person

The Five P Principle

Chapter Nine

Living Morally and Behaving Ethically

Using Logic and Science

A Day at the Lab

Making Moral Decisions Based Only on Cultural Norms

The Tip of My Nose and Yours

Selected Examples of Moral Analysis

Death and Dignity

Living Death and Living with Death

Timeless Age

Life after Death

Living with Dignity

Birth and the Moral Avoidance of It

Abortion

Birth Control and Overpopulation

Childrearing, or Living with Baby

How to Raise a Child, Part One

How to Raise a Child, Part Two

Your Side of the Street

The Other Side of the Street

Sex, Incest, Celibacy, Marriage, and Love

Sexual Intercourse: The Foundation of Dominate to Procreate

Nonviolent Sexual Issues

Incest

Celibacy

Sex and Old Age

Marriage and Monogamy

LOVE—Eros, Aphrodite, and Santa Baby

Guilt and Worry

Barriers, Neighbors, and Friends

Charity and Wealth

Charity—from the Heart, the Brain, or the Liver?

Wealth—Greedy Globalization versus Miserable Masses

White Lies, Black Lies, and Fraud

Crime, Punishment, and Incarceration

Punishment and Morality

Deterrence

Rehabilitation

Permanent Removal from Society

The Death Penalty

Life in Prison without the Possibility of Parole

The Mandatory Moral Precedents to Any Life Sentence

A True Life Example

Aggression and Pacifism

Aggression

War between Nations

War against/between Races and Cultures

War of the Civil Variety (Law and Order versus Anarchism)

Pacifism

The Environment (the World with People in It) versus Nature (the World without People in It)

Cultural Diversity and Tolerance

An Introduction to Tolerance

The Absence of Tolerance

Unreciprocated Tolerance

The Hypocrisy of Politically Correct Tolerance

Silence and Nonsense

Why We Remain Silent and Tolerate Nonsense

Science and Scientists

Science and Morality

Scientists

Chapter Ten

The Ten T Theorem

and the Conclusion

Some Concluding Remarks and a Suggestion

Dedication

To Marcus Aurelius for demonstrating that morality can be logical; to Isaac Asimov for putting history into perspective; to Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan for putting evolution into perspective; to Stephen W. Hawking for putting the universe into perspective; to the short stories of H. H. Munro for combining a sardonic worldview with a clinical eye to behavior; to the three Woods men: Kevin for helping me better understand the mind/body debate, Keaton for teaching me by example that there are many different ways to solve any problem, and especially to Norman, who for more than fifty years has encouraged me to share ideas with people; to my father, Sheldon, for patiently teaching me how to think logically and question ideas in a Socratic manner; to my mother, Kit, for instilling in me a love of books and learning; to my nurse practitioner daughter, Kazia, for guiding me through the maze of modern genetics/obstetrics plus devotedly correcting my syntax, grammar, and spelling errors; to my actor/director son, Norman, for reminding me I must have some creative genes too; to the rest of my fearless and patient editorial team (Joe Boyd, Billy Lee, Mike Muldoon, and Tim Weir) for their constructive comments; and to Melissa, my better three-quarters, for helping me understand more clearly what it is I think I know.

PREFACE

This book discusses in detail how and why to live a moral life guided solely by logic and science.

I have chosen to provide a short preface rather than a lengthy introduction. The first chapter of this book introduces you to the subject matter, scope, and approach to the how and why to live a moral life with logic and science rather than with belief or superstition. The table of contents provides a summary of the specific topics discussed. The bibliography will inform you of the basic source material used. The index will point you to any areas of special interest you may have relating to morality, culture, religion, history, science, law, diversity, or philosophy. Consequently, a traditional introduction is not necessary. However, there is a need for a brief preface to inform you at the beginning about

•   the author and my qualifications to write this book;

•   why the facts and data presented are reliable;

•   how you may gain the most out of reading this book; and

•   how you may use this book as a reference over time.

In reality, everyone is qualified to express his or her personal views about morality and the other subjects covered in this book. However, personal views are just that: ideas unique and useful only for individual persons as each of us spends a lifetime learning about ourselves and our world.

In my case, I have had the good fortune to have traveled all over the world and interacted with many cultures; to have benefited from a solid education in science, religion, law, and philosophy; and to have been raised by parents who were devoted to learning and to analyzing the human condition and who insisted on logical, analytical thinking before acting. I have earned a living as a farmer, rancher, US Air Force criminal investigator, and civil trial lawyer. I have been married, divorced, and married again while raising two wonderful children to productive adulthood. In short, since early childhood up through to the present of my sixty-sixth year I have looked at the world with a critical eye, trying always to understand not only what I was seeing but what the motivations and causes of behaviors and events were.

This book took only one year to write, but the research on which it is based dates from the early 1950s to 2011, not only in life experience but in studying a wide range of subjects and pursuing a wide range of interests. The facts and data you will find in this book have been verified from authoritative and/or original sources. Where you occasionally find a fact or bit of datum to which there is no specific citation it is because there is disagreement between or among the reliable or original sources. In such cases, I have given you my best summary and, in my view, the most likely to be correct.

You are encouraged to read the recommended sources and do whatever additional research you feel necessary to confirm any particular factual statement in this book. However, I hope you will keep in mind that scientific knowledge these days is advancing with extreme velocity and that the related fields of anthropology, psychology, physiology, and cognition are all discovering new insights with the help of such scientific advances as DNA analysis, cryogenics, and high-speed computing capability. From the time this book is published until you read it, there may be advances in understanding not yet available to me but which will most likely easily fit into the overall approach and conclusions of this book. The only exception I can think of to this last statement is if conclusive scientific evidence proves the existence of one or more gods. But that seems to me an unlikely event.

Before this book was submitted for publication it was reviewed by a biochemist, a nurse-practitioner, an architect, a cognitive scientist, a retired critic, and an American businessman from Argentina. History, law, religion, astrophysics, psychology, physiology, and particle physics I edited myself, as these are fields I have studied extensively over the years.

This book is organized in such a manner that it is best absorbed and understood if you read chronologically from chapter 1 through chapter 10. As with any logical progression, each chapter in this book has its foundation in the prior one, except of course chapter 1, which has its foundation in Davis, California.

If you are particularly interested in seeing what any particular chapter has to say and don’t want to delay reading it, feel free to do so. However, please then go back to where you left off and continue on through the book in chapter order, including rereading any portion you have read out of order to see if it makes new, different, or better sense to you now that you have the foundation of the earlier facts and arguments.

The primary purpose of Chasing Davis is to assist each individual in constructing a personal set of moral guidelines using the tools and blueprints suggested. These tools and blueprints are useful regardless of individual cultural, religious, or philosophic antecedents. Because these guidelines are not culture-specific, the book spends time discussing why every culture throughout history and up to the present is inadequate in providing effective assistance along the moral road of life. This book’s usefulness is therefore increased directly with the reader’s ability to keep an open mind to new concepts and ideas. The ability to rethink what you know is true and to reconsider your current beliefs is always beneficial.

In order to not interrupt the flow, the appendix contains numerous examples and other material relevant to chapters 3 through 9. You may read this material after each chapter, or after completing the book, or not at all, if you choose.

There are several sections within the main body of the work that list specific actions you can or should not take when dealing with specific behaviors or activities discussed. These include everything from politics to childrearing to how to live a moral life. You will find these sections indexed under specific guidelines.

Chapter One

Statement of Purpose

Our Destination

This book is a voyage of discovery. We will navigate through the reefs of our individual minds and our collective human cultures; we will search through time for what we have lost and what we may yet recover; and we will explore our present and sail on to see what our possible collective futures may hold.

Our ultimate destination is a rational basis for ethical behavior and a generic, cross-cultural toolbox for building a moral life, a box buried in the sand where X marks the spot. There we will discover why and how to live a moral life in a universe devoid of gods or divine guidance.

We will take a few steps away from that cluttered and clotted wall of our blurred, everyday existence so that we are able, with a little objective distance, to perceive the orderly mosaic of life affixed to that wall, an ordered kaleidoscope that is our actual reality as opposed to our seemingly random place in space.

We will travel outward around the world and through the possibly infinite universe in order to see the larger perspective that forms the majestic vista just beyond that same existential wall; we will see from this point of view that the wall is not an unbroken barrier but offers an elusive gateway.

We will travel in time, inward through that same gateway, to better understand how we, our parents, and our distant ancestors have formed those beliefs that have led to our behaviors and to the way we live today.

Finally, we will travel into our futures with a toolbox in one hand and blueprints in the other to build an ethical house where we can all dwell together without violence, hatred, or greed. That is not to say this metaphoric house will be full of nothing but happy people, but it will be a house where we can pursue happiness without having to constantly look over our shoulders to see who is about to stick a knife in our backs.

After reading this book, you will understand

•   why morality is not dependant on the existence of any god;

•   why the answer to the question, Does life have any meaning? is neither yes nor no;

•   why the question If everything is the result of immutable prior events, how can there be free will? is totally irrelevant to the why of living a moral life; and

•   why only our species, of all the thousands, engages in war, torture, child abuse, corruption of our environment, and all the other cruel and crazy activities that dominate the daily news.

You will have learned

•   how your brain actually receives, processes, utilizes, and remembers sensory input, and how with this awareness you may better understand how you form beliefs, why you behave the way you do, and how you can train yourself to think more productively and morally;

•   how logic and science, properly balanced, provide a practical, universal, and solid foundation for living a moral life; and

•   how law, government, and religion are symptoms of our immorality rather than any basis on which to build moral lives.

You will have in hand

•   a clear, practical, and universally applicable set of behavioral and cognitive guidelines for living a moral life and assisting others in doing so;

•   a useful methodology by which you may analyze the myriad, complex dilemmas we encounter each day to determine what the moral response to and resolution thereof is; and

•   knowledge about what you may do as an individual to start the process of restoring sanity to an insane world and why the process will require generations, not fleeting moments, to put into final effect.

A New Approach

Given the abdication of church and state in the twentieth century in both setting the criteria for and being an example of the moral life, it is time for a new genesis of moral living. It is time for the creation of a new set of ethical tools and a new moral toolbox to carry them in so they are always handy when needed. This book offers one such new beginning.

When I was ten or eleven years old, my father once summarized his moral philosophy of life in one sentence: Your rights end at the tip of my nose. It required many more years of listening to him, learning from others, and thinking about the underpinnings of this statement to bring me to the point where I fully understood what he was saying. When the underlying meaning of each word in my father’s summary is expanded, as they will be in this book, a universally acceptable, adaptable set of moral rules can be conceived and acted upon in any society by any individual using his or her customized tools, utilizing them with his or her own uniquely wired brain.

This book and its proposals are premised on the reality and utility of evolutionary logic and long-established scientific fact. Within this reality there is no need to propose the existence of any divine, omnipotent creator or any inflexible universal truths. All divine revelations and unquestioned beliefs are subjected to endless, pointless debate. They lack utility, because in the final analysis they are simply an unreliable crutch we use to hobble through our broken dreams and twisted cultures. They are not directed toward living a better life but are there to make life less painful. It is the difference between taking an aspirin and not having a headache in the first place.

This book provides a set of mental tools with which each person can build his or her own, personal moral structure but always using those tools while following the blueprints and building restrictions provided in subsequent chapters. You might well ask how or why logic and science are any better than divine revelation or philosophical speculation at providing a basis for moral living, and you would be asking a good question. Every logical argument must have one or more stated assumption. Assumptions are made without proof. That is their very nature. Assumptions always form the basis for logical inquiry into reality. Scientists call assumptions hypotheses. Testing and experimentation determine whether there is objective evidence to either support or refute the hypothesis. A true scientist is just as pleased by evidence that the hypothesis is wrong as by evidence that it is correct. There is no such thing as a failed scientific experiment. Proof that an idea does not reflect reality is as useful as one that proves that an idea does reflect realty.

In contrast, unscientific belief systems, such as religion and philosophy, treat assumptions as though they were already proved. A person who bases his or her life on a religion says, God exists because I believe he does; therefore, I can believe his holy writ. A philosopher makes an assumption and then proceeds only in a direction that will prove his or her assumption. Religious and philosophical arguments always start out on a foundation that is to be tested only by firm belief. The result is a structure that falls in the first storm because nobody bothered to be sure the foundation was solid and reliable. There is no rewriting of holy script every time some new facts emerge. Philosophers do not rewrite their treatises in light of changed circumstances. Both types of texts are immutable and inflexible. True … certainty is more comfortable, but only doubt and questioning bring orderly change with progress in a world where random change without progress is inevitable absent our logical intervention.

Just as religions are usually based on the assumption there is a divine creator who sets all the rules, so too any logical approach to the formation of ethical behavior in a moral setting must have one or more basic assumptions. But in contrast to religion, assumptions in a logic stream are intended to be continuously questioned and tested.

The two basic assumptions on which the moral system in this book are based are

•   that self-awareness and sentience are good things and that the absence thereof is a bad thing. Being able to think, meditate, debate, feel joy and sorrow, eat, breathe, sleep, procreate, fornicate, and get drunk is better than not being able to do so; and,

•   that it is better for sentient and self-aware life to live in a world that is just, peaceful, and productive than in one that is not.

There is not and cannot be any proof that these assumptions are correct, because, like a belief in a divine creator, they are not subject to scientific inquiry. However, unlike a belief in a divine creator who is never seen, we know we are alive and are self-aware and sentient. Otherwise, for example, you would not be here to read this book and would not know how to read even if you were.

In addition to my two assumptions, this voyage will rely on some very ancient and some newly acquired wisdom. Much of the analysis in this book is based on one of the admonitions of Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius: Look first to the essence of a thing in order to understand it. What is its nature? (Advice aptly and infamously given by Dr. Hannibal Lecter to FBI Agent Starling in Silence of the Lambs.)

So what is the exact nature of this self-aware creature we call man? What does it do, and what is it capable of achieving? What does it want? Why of all known living things do only men and women dwell on the concept of good and evil? Even more fundamentally, what is it in our nature that ever led us to even contemplate that there was any difference between right and wrong, moral and immoral? Answers to all these questions will be suggested as we progress through this book.

Laying the evidentiary foundation for these answers necessitates many pages of discussion devoted to providing you with fundamental facts about how the social and geopolitical world we live in actually functions, how the human brain processes information and then translates this data into behaviors, and, most importantly, how to rigorously identify and evaluate the constituent elements of morality

This book is the result of several decades of research and correlation of scientific, social, and historical facts. But you will find that even the most specialized and arcane topics discussed in the chapters that follow have been reduced to their basics so that they are understandable by people who do not hold a PhD in biochemistry, astrophysics, theology, or any other subject. You will be absorbing in a relatively short time information that has been assimilated and condensed over many years.

As you read this book, you will be asked to put aside for a while many of your firmly held beliefs. There are many concepts developed in this book that you may find startling, disturbing, or even shocking. All I ask is that when you come across any such discussion that you keep your mind open until I have completed the argument, and then you can decide for yourself whether you agree. If you dismiss an argument before it has been fully expounded, you will never truly understand what is being suggested.

It is my hope and expectation that you will find the considerable investment of time and thought requested of you to be worthwhile and fully justified by the results of staying onboard to the end of this long voyage.

If you are a member of that vast perplexed minority of atheists, agnostics, and the simply intellectually inquisitive who want to lead a moral life but do not know exactly why; who may feel a troubling frustration from this soft vacuum of understanding; or who have behaved ethically all their lives without asking why, then you will find this book of interest.

Even if you are uncomfortable with my foundational assumptions, or even if you vigorously disagree with them, you may still find some enjoyment, and, yes, even some peace of mind as we travel along on this voyage.

Even if you vehemently and inalterably believe that we can know nothing for sure or that somehow reality is an illusion or that everything is relative; even if you are a fundamentalist Christian, Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, or Taoist or a holder of any other belief set that views morality as a fixed set of dogmas thrust upon mankind by an all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, and divine creator; and even if you believe that nothing and nobody can change your mind, you may still find something useful in this book.

On the other hand, if you are perfectly happy with your life, if you are satisfied with the way the world around you is operating, if you are pleased by how you are treated each day, then perhaps you need not read any further.

But if you are not totally content with the way things are and the way your life is going, please join me on this voyage to see if my view of the world perhaps leads you to a way to be happier or, at least, more aware of why you are unhappy. Knowing the why of any problem is a prerequisite to ever finding the solution to that problem. Otherwise, it is all simply guesswork and luck.

The Genesis of the Voyage

The genesis and bases of this book include everything from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius to the collected short stories of H. H. Munro (Saki); from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Dr. Isaac Asimov; from the holy scriptures of Moses, Christ, Mohamed, and Buddha to the secular writings of Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan; from the simplicity of Newtonian physics to the unfathomable worlds conjured from the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics; and from the earliest time of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago to and through my own infinitely shorter sixty-six years of life.

The concept and consequences of time, both of the infinite and the finite variety, will appear frequently in this book. There are only three places I know of where time could actually seem to stand still: on the relativistic edge of a black hole; in the celestial presence of an eternal god; and anywhere in the tiny village of Davis, California, during that endless summer in 1952.

The first two places are, respectively, scientific and religious constructs whose existence in turn requires, respectively, belief or faith. The third is, or at least was a long time ago, a physical place whose existence requires only memory. It was here in Davis during the early 1950s that I found moments of inner peace that have only resurfaced in the last few years after moving to an equally small and peaceful pueblo in northeastern Spain.

In this book we will eventually visit all three of these timeless places. Arriving at them will require a few detours but no shortcuts. The route of the voyage will become evident as we proceed. Some of the places we visit will be familiar to you, some strange. Some of the familiar places will take on implications, innuendos, and consequences that you may not have noticed before or have forgotten you had noticed earlier in your life.

My personal road to finding inner tranquility in our insane world started at Sunday school in a tiny farm town when I was seven years old, way back in 1952. My parents were both graduates of Ivy League universities, but we were living in Davis, California, because my father was unable to live and work any longer in the fibrillating heart of New York City. He spent more than two years as a fighter controller during WW II in the terrible conditions of the Aleutian Islands. The constant loss of his pilots due to incessant, deadly Japanese air attacks and unpredictable, impenetrable fog had made the meaningless helter-skelter of city life intolerable. This intolerance was exacerbated by the fact that he had been raised in rural Shandong Province, northeastern China, the youngest son of a missionary. His earliest memories were of the tranquility and beauty he found in the Chinese countryside as he rode alone daily on his tireless, trusted donkey along dirt paths and through peasant villages.

Here I was—the youngest son of two highly educated parents—small and skinny, socially awkward, quick in school, reading books between classes, and worst of all, wearing glasses. In short, I did not fit in.

Well, of course, my mother, being a good New England Presbyterian, immediately upon our arrival in town had started sending me off to Sunday school every week. To get to Sunday-school class one had to first go to the back of the church, then down a flight of stairs, into a sort of large foyer, and then down the hallway to the right to arrive at the classroom—this route being out of sight and sound of the adults attending services.

Every Sunday morning I was heartily greeted in the foyer by three or four of the Davis Grammar School farm-boy bullies and dragged down the left hallway and given a good (or is that a bad?) beating along with what passed in their minds I’m sure as verbal abuse, albeit their vocabulary and grammar were so pitiable that, but for the beatings, I would have found their taunts funny.

After this pre-class, informal introduction to Christian mores, I would then be allowed to participate with the others in the official teachings of Sunday school given by the Reverend somebody, whose name I forget or never knew. Whatever his name, he never seemed to notice my bumps and bruises, or the occasional bloody nose, the torn shirt, perhaps because he was distracted by that old saw boys will be boys, or maybe because he too did not like intellectual little seven-year-old twerps who asked too many probing and irreverent questions.

After a few months of this, I told Mother I really wasn’t learning much at Sunday school and could I please stay home on Sunday and read the Bible? Mother was agreeable with this plan because I’d had the same problem with boredom in regular school, having usually finished the weekly homework assignments by Monday night. Mother always had other things for me to read or explore for secular schoolwork, so why not for religious education as well? I started reading the Bible every Sunday morning and found that it contained more and crueler violence than had been dished out by my less-than-virtuous Sunday-school classmates.

The part that really puzzled me about the Bible was that it seemed it was the holy men beloved of God who were the most frequent perpetrators of evil. I mean, Joshua ordering the slaughter all the men, women, and children of Jericho whose families had lived there long before the forty years of desert wandering led by Moses was bad enough. But when I got to the part where Lot, such a devotee of God that he is spared the flaming destruction of Sodom, gets drunk after his wife is turned into a pillar of salt and proceeds to impregnate his two young, virgin daughters … well, this was quite a revelation into what it meant to be beloved of God and to be righteous.

The book of Job really set off my alarm bells. Satan and God, hanging around together on some apparently boring day in Eternity, decided that God would send pestilence and misery to the least deserving recipient on the planet of this kind of attention, Job. This exercise in humiliation and torture was done because God bet Satan that Job would never turn against his Lord even if God really bunged him up good. To be fair, I did learn many years later that the book of Job in its original form went back to the oral tradition of the quasi-pagan days of the Jewish people, before the time that they were appointed by God to be the chosen people, but even so …

Having told Mother I would read the entire Bible, I continued through the Old Testament orgy of violence, backstabbing, and general mayhem and then on to the New Testament. The Jesus I discovered in the New Testament bore no resemblance to the all-loving, all-knowing savior of mankind I had heard about frequently in Sunday school. Besides committing several felonious attacks on persons lawfully conducting business in the Temple, Jesus made it clear that

•   the only way to not go to hell was to believe in and worship him;

•   such belief had to be as a child believes—in other words, without any thought or reason; and

•   such worship of him was more important than any mere worldly concerns, including sickness, slavery, and starvation.

Jesus said that the meek shall inherit the earth, but apparently only after the Second Coming, whenever that day of reckoning might be. In the meantime, you are supposed to render unto Caesar (pay taxes) and unto God (sacrifice your last goat). There was absolutely nothing Christ is recorded as saying to the effect that prayers for things would be answered, only that you should pray to the greater glory of God in order to receive salvation. Nothing was said by Jesus about the righteous being rewarded on Earth through prayer or that the devout would have their speeding tickets fixed or be given two season tickets to the Giants’ games. And yet all around me I often heard Christians uttering such prayers for earthly things and desires. There was an apparent disconnect between the original concept and the subsequent actual practice of Christian doctrine.

By mid-1953, having finished my first biblical read-through, I had concluded that guidance for a moral life had to come from some other source. What that might be I had no idea. Two years later we moved about seven miles west of Davis to a sheep ranch of a little more than a hundred acres. It is there that I had my epiphany.

As farming boys, my older brother, Steve, and I spent a great deal of time working in the fields, tending crops, herding sheep, mending and building fences, and dodging the errant shotgun blasts of city folk from Sacramento on their weekend ramblings through the valley trying to cause a mass extinction of the local pheasants, rabbits, gophers, and the occasional spring lamb that had wandered away from the flock and got stuck in the reeds by the slough. City folk will shoot at anything that moves that has, or might have, any meat on it.

On most Sundays we had a day off, unless Clearlake Water District picked our day of rest to send us our allotment of precious irrigation water, resulting in our standing in three or four feet of water at five o’clock in the morning manipulating siphons to transfer the water from the big district ditch to our little ditches and hence to the fields. The normal workdays were fine, and although still short and skinny for my age, I lost my scrawny physique, got a nice tan, and learned a lot about animal and human behavior. Sundays were special as I was able to spend most of the day, after doing my household chores, of course, riding in the fields still teeming with pheasants, rabbits, and gophers (the townies were enthusiastic but not very good shots) and ambling along the irrigation ditches with their reedy habitats for reptiles and birds.

Riding my three-year-old beautiful, blond, strong, agile, loyal, and gentle quarter-horse mare, Jackie, through this twentieth-century Eden was to be in the most peaceful place on Earth, except during hunting season. I would usually take along a bottle of root beer and an apple or carrot (the beverage for me, the food for the horse) and just wander for hours, stopping now and again to capture and release a toad or lizard or an occasional gopher snake; sometimes suggesting to Jackie that she launch into one of her short but emphatic gallops, or recklessly jumping a fence or two when I was reasonably sure that neither of my parents could see me from the farmhouse. (I always rode Jackie bareback, and Dad thought a saddle was safer for jumping fences.)

As time allowed or the sun began to set, whichever came first, I would point Jackie in the direction of the barn some mile or two away, lie back, feet tangling, head resting comfortably on Jackie’s slowly joggling rump and go to sleep staring at the endlessly blue sky, the occasional undulating clouds, and feel the sun baking down on me. On these blissful homeward journeys, Jackie was unperturbed by anything. Brilliantly colored cock pheasants could burst out of cover along the side of the dirt path and fly right past her ears and she would not alter, falter, stumble, or buck. The occasional alarm from the volunteer fire brigade building three miles away had no impact on Jackie, even though it had been designed to wake the dead and gather the local volunteers to whatever barn, haystack, or tractor had caught fire that day.

Only once when the dusty almond-shelling plant about two miles away blew up over a faulty fuse box did Jackie acknowledge that a world outside her and me existed—by turning her head briefly in the direction of the big bang and then returning to her barn course without further comment. Jackie’s job and joy was to wander slowly home, taking me with her in a most gracious manner, so that she could have me then feed her some oats while brushing her down and watering her.

What was my epiphany that particular summer’s afternoon as I was being gently transported home? It was that to be at peace with oneself only required one be in harmony with whatever it was that was going on around one. For Jackie it was easy. The trick is to do that now, years later, when you are, say, fifty-five years old, married, with children and, hopefully, a job, rather than nine years old lolling ’round on a horse in the middle of nowhere with no financial or emotional responsibilities to anyone.

Over the sixty-odd years since having first read the Christian Bible I have done a lot more reading on many subjects, including comparative religion. As you read this book, please keep one of the following questions in the back of your mind:

•   If you are a Christian: If Jesus died to save us from our sins, and God loves us all, why instead didn’t Jesus die to save us from sinning?

•   If you are a Muslim: If anyone who dies gloriously while engaging in holy war against unbelievers is guaranteed by Allah immediate entry into Paradise, why haven’t you already gone out and blown up the nearest US embassy or military facility?

•   If you are a Jew: If you, one of the chosen people, believe your divinely anointed duty is to strictly follow God’s laws or be punished, why do you complain so much when you don’t and then are?

•   If you are a Buddhist: If life is so miserable, painful, worthless, wicked and, well, yucky; if the purpose of life is really simply to get out of it, why do you cling to it at all?

•   If you are an agnostic: If you are not sure whether God exists or not, why is it that you are so sure there is no such creature as the Tooth Fairy?

•   If you are an atheist: Why if there is no God do you ever say, Goddamn it!?

***

So where and what was this place called Davis, and what have we lost since those days of yesteryear when the Lone Ranger was always comfortably just around the corner in the nick of time, and … is it possible to recapture some of those feelings and that life in today’s world? Some answers to these questions follow in the next chapter.

Chapter Two

DAVIS

The Cradle

In my beginning was Davis in 1950, a small town in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California. It was in this place that I first began to understand; to combine past recollections with current observations; to ask questions of myself instead of only others; and to realize how much I did not know that was important.

I first lived in Davis from just after I was born in 1945 until late 1948. The family moved back to Davis from a cattle ranch in Pennsylvania in 1950 until 1954, from ages five to nine, and several times thereafter. (Father moved the family around a great deal, sometimes twice a year.) By my beginning I do not mean that I have no substantial memories before 1950. I have memories dating back to early 1948 when I was three, memories that provided a launching platform for my rejection of Christianity in 1952.

I remember quite clearly a summer vacation on the New Jersey shore, a tiny resort town named Avalon. At that time the entire Jersey coast, from Atlantic City south to the cape was sparsely populated to the point of being almost wilderness. I remember being carried in the arms of what in those days would have been called a mammy and today would be called an au pair, but I do not have any recollection of her race or skin color, although from old family photos I found in Mother’s drawer after she died I now know that my babysitter was black. I remember only that she was gentle and kind as she took care of me during the day when my mother and father and two older siblings were off doing whatever more aged people do when vacationing by the sea. I remember this quiet woman taking me down to the beach at low tide and letting me walk and stumble barefoot across the acres of muddy sand that mysteriously appeared and disappeared under the tide twice a day. I remember looking out across this endless expanse of watery desert from my three-year-old vantage point and thinking that this wonderful playground went on forever toward the rising sun.

I remember too at about that same time when my grandmother, dying of cancer, came to stay with us. She was gray and bright at the same time and surely knew how to spoil her little grandson. One morning I sneaked into her room, me with an impossibly heavy and awkward stack of children’s books, where I discovered her propped up against a bedstead piled with comfy pillows, her usual shawl over her shoulders. Somehow I managed to plop my books next to her and crawl up for a good granny read.

Just as I had snuggled in and Grandmother had opened the first page of the first book, my mother came in and reminded me in her own quiet way that I was not to disturb Grandmother, as it was her time to nap. Grandmother seemed to rise up in indignation, although she did not actually move at all, and in her own firm and persuasive voice told Mother that she was going to read to me now and would she, meaning Mother, please leave. I recall thinking in a three-year-old kind of process that Grandmother really liked reading to me just as my mother did and that my mother was not Almighty God as I had thought up to that point.

All of these events occurred before Davis, but my first truly formative memories are of Davis.

Now Davis in the early fifties was a small town. I mean really small. There were perhaps three thousand permanent residents and a couple hundred students and professors at Cal Aggie (the California College of Agriculture, now better known as the University of California at Davis).

The village mayor owned the local feed store, the tiny movie theater, and the local Foster’s Freeze franchise. The permanent residents were farmers, farm equipment store owners, employees at the local five-and-dime, clerks, a banker or two, a doctor or three, a dentist, and a whole passel of kids who belonged to these adult members of the Great Middle Class of America, circa Eisenhower (I like Ike), Howdy Doody (Hey kids …), and the Korean War (Old soldiers never die …).

Everyone who lived in town was white, white, white. True, there were a few clean and tidy shacks on the outskirts of town for the braceros, legal Mexican workers brought in each summer to pick the several thousand acres of tomatoes; an occasional Asian would be seen wearing a coat and tie walking purposefully to some lecture at the college; and a family of Negroes lived in an old, unpainted two-story frame house at the town dump and took care of it. But everyone inside the town was white.

I remember the first time I saw a black person. It was on a visit one July day to Clearlake for a swim. As we drove into a leveled area of dirt near the lake, I noticed about twenty yards away a family of four in swimming gear. I said to my father, Gee, Dad, those people have got really great tans! Fortunately, my father had almost stopped the car; otherwise we could have had a serious accident he was laughing so hard.

Davis was a small, isolated, closely connected town. Of course, the townies disapproved of the liberal-minded, eggheaded professors who were never warmly included in anything, such as the annual Fourth of July parade and community picnic, but nobody—I mean nobody—locked their doors, even when they went away for a long weekend. Neither did anyone linger on into ever more decrepit, senile old age but died gracefully at sixty-five of a sudden heart attack or swiftly moving (because untreated) lung cancer from smoking those smoother Lucky Strikes for forty years; there were no racial or religious tensions, no street crime, no mind-altering drugs, no drive-by shootings—unless you count the occasional water balloon tossed from a slow-moving, one-speed, iron-framed, red hand-me-down bicycle … not mine, of course. If I were caught by some adult doing some mischief on the other side of town, the person would know who I was and call my mother, who would spank me with a hairbrush when I got home and then, worse, more painfully Dad, when he got home, would lecture me for what seemed like forever about right and wrong and rights of the individual, personal responsibility, and generally Maintaining Order in the Universe.

The fact that there were no social tensions is not to say there was no conflict among the members of the community. There was infighting among the mothers over who would be this year’s chief den mother for the Cub Scouts. There were constant political arguments among the adult males down at the coffee shop counter about whether Adlai Stevenson was a communist or a liberal (I was never quite sure which was considered worse). And, of course, the children had their tiffs, spats, and fistfights.

Perhaps the simplest way to describe how isolated, insular, safe, and homogeneous was Davis circa 1952 is to describe one of the local law-enforcement techniques. There were two ways into town. One was from the west, where the farmland was located. Anyone coming into town from that direction would be a local, either a townie farmer coming home or a country farmer coming in to buy something at the feed store. The other entrance was from the southeast, where the then Highway 40 traffic hurried its way from/to Sacramento, the state capital, and to/from San Francisco, that City by the Bay.

Any such long-distance driver who perchance turned off at the Davis exit, perhaps to buy gasoline or a burger or visit the college, would have to drive down a short hill, under a railroad overpass, and up a short hill to the end of Main Street. At the top of this main street one would usually find one of the two Davis Police cars with one of the four Davis policemen in it. If the officer did not recognize the driver or the car coming up the hill, he would follow the car for a few blocks and then pull it over and ask the driver what he or she was doing in town, how long the person planned to stay, and whether he or she minded if he took a look in the trunk. Needless to say, there were never any homeless, itinerant hobos, hitchhikers, panhandlers, drifters, grifters, Negroes, Mexicans, or Chinese seen on the streets of Davis. Only good, solid, hard-working, home-owning, neighborly, safe, churchgoing, God-fearing white folk.

Davis was a feudal community run by the Clearlake Water District Board and a city council. Nobody who lived in Davis voted for who would sit on the district board because it was self-perpetuating, and the selection of candidates for city council was limited to those anointed by the four or five richest members of the community. Anyone who has visited Disney World in Orlando, Florida, has been in a similarly orderly, quietly run, and controlled community … control of everything in the hands of only a few, with all the trappings of democracy but with none of the inconveniences of making any adult, hard choices about anything. But for a kid it was paradise. I remember that the summer of 1952 went on forever and ever, what with barbeques and potlucks, walks down the west-side road lined with huge black walnut trees and bordered by a soggy slough with frogs, snakes, and lizards just waiting to be caught and brought home to an appreciative Mom who usually provided the glass jar with a lid with holes punched in it with an ice pick on condition that the slimy, slithery, and/or ugly creature was kept on the screened porch and would not be there the next day.

If things got too tranquil, there was even an abandoned, spooky three-story house over our back fence that could be explored at night with the flashlight sneaked from Dad’s desk. A double-feature movie with cartoon, a Coke, and popcorn cost all of fifty cents every Saturday afternoon, and the post-cinema vanilla cone, chocolate dipped, was only another dime, all of which I could afford if I had earned my allowance that week by scrubbing down the bathroom tub, floor, and sink, taken out the garbage without being reminded, and had not too seriously offended the World Order.

Even if I had offended World Order that week, I could always take my hand-me-down red wagon and a couple of big burlap bags from the grain shop, walk out to the west-side road, collect two thirty-pound bags full of black walnuts, and sell them to the grain man for fifty cents a bag. Child labor laws apparently did not apply in Davis, and nobody minded.

In 1951 I thought all families were normal and that the world was basically good. Sixty years later, in 2011, I know that almost all families are either weird or dysfunctional and that the world is basically bad. The world as a whole has not changed all that much. I have. Back then, my seven-year-old knowledge of the world consisted of a few square, homogeneous, tranquil, reasonably prosperous miles. My knowledge today extends over a much wider range of space and time, including a Davis that has grown from a sleepy cow-town to a city of more than sixty-five thousand residents and thirty thousand university students, with all the problems usually associated with such explosive growth.

What Have We Lost by Falling Out of the Cradle?

It is clear that today the West is missing two characteristics that were present only sixty short years ago:

•   a sense of connectivity between members of the community, and

•    a sense of continuity with the experiences and wisdom of the past.

We are also faced with the bewildering situation where much of the law is not able to keep up with our current, rapidly changing reality and where that new reality has lost the traditional bases for living an orderly and moral life.

Both this lack of connectivity and disconnect between law and reality can be seen clearly in the confoundedly complex situation my father-in-law, Dr. Ed, found himself in shortly before he died. Here was a man of ninety-two whose children, like many other children, had long ago moved away from the ancestral home and even out of the ancestral state and were living thousands of miles away. Starting more than ten years before his death, my father-in-law was begged to move in with any of his three children, but he declined to do so because he found that living away from his old haunts was too painful, incomprehensible, and just plain undesirable. So now his children had to deal, long distance, with their father’s problems of memory loss; telephonic and Internet scamming of the elderly; and positively Byzantine rules and regulations concerning health-care, tax, and estate-planning laws that are incomprehensible even to the lawmakers. There was even the problem of getting good and nutritional groceries delivered to the ancestral home.

This same lack of connectivity can also be seen at the town and tribal levels:

•   Most people don’t know their own neighbors.

•   Most people manage somehow to be alone even in the shoulder-to-shoulder world of their beloved theme parks and detested subways.

•   Most young people today communicate with some form of long-distance electronic device rather than by the formerly traditional means of having an actual conversation, any sort of apparatus to avoid the embarrassment of face-to-face communication. Forget the fact that such mobile exchanges lose almost half their communicative potential because the receiver is deprived of the visual cues to meaning and emotion that are available in an actual conversation.

The problems with electronic exchanges are many:

•   They are not personal communications;

•    They are spontaneous without being thoughtful;

•   They are instantaneous communications with discontinuous responses;

•   They gratify the urge to voice an immediate opinion without much expectation of the benefit of an immediate reply.

In short, most of the exchanges of ideas, feelings, and counsel engaged in by the under-thirty-five set today are not really communicated to anyone; rather, they are communications launched at someone. In other words, total disconnect. As for the decaying biomass called our legal codes and regulations, dreamed up and amended nearly in toto in approximately four-year cycles of uninformed, lobbyist-inspired, voter-driven legislative equivalents of bulimic group gropes called legislative sessions … what ever happened to the principle that we were all bound to obey the law because it could be found and, once found, understood by all of us?

Every time I try to complete yet another unintelligible government form that nowadays all have printed at the bottom the estimated amount of time it will take to fill it out under the latest reduction in paperwork regulation, it becomes clear to me why Einstein said that all time is relative.

A short article entitled We’re No.1!, written by Thomas L. Friedman and published in the New York Times September 2010, summarizes the sad situation in the United States and Britain. His conclusions are actually valid worldwide. As a foundational fact to support his arguments, Mr. Friedman tells us that a recent survey by Newsweek ranks America as the eleventh of the top one hundred best countries in the world, compared on the basis of education, health and health services, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and the political environment (stable or not, corrupt or not). Britain ranked fourteenth.

Newsweek’s editor concluded first that small, rich countries ranked higher than big, rich countries. The top ten countries were Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Luxemburg, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan, Denmark, Australia, and Canada (these last two being large-in-area countries but with small, concentrated populations).

Even in comparisons between small and big poor countries, smaller did better, even if the country is poorer (e.g., Mexico ranked higher [#45] over Argentina [#46]). The fact that smaller countries do better is not surprising. The top ten countries are all ethnically homogeneous, so people are more connected with each other and their communities than in larger countries, such as Russia and Nigeria. The United States still ranks number one if you exclude the small, rich countries in the top ten. But Americans should not feel smug about this. In the fifties, not only was the United States seen as being the best country in the world, it probably was. Indeed, no other country, big or small, came close to our standard of living, educational achievements, competitiveness, and political stability.

Mr. Friedman concludes that our fall to eleventh place in the world is due to one basic phenomenon: the breakdown in moral values. He points obviously enough to the Wall Street smash-and-grab of the US financial system; the decline in student motivation and increase in absenteeism; and the cowardly way Democratic and Republican leaders grovel for votes by passing popular rather than thoughtful legislation. In summary, sacrifice is out and sloth is in.

The problems faced and solved by the generation in charge in the fifties were immense compared to those facing the generation in charge in the 2000s. This not-long-departed greatest generation, as reporter Tom Brokaw described those who were raised during the Great Depression, conquered a worldwide economic depression and won a worldwide war against fascism. They managed to do this through hard work, community cooperation, and a vigorous sense of personal responsibility. In contrast, the current offspring of the baby-boomer generation abhors and abjures hard work, community cooperation, and personal responsibility. It has been unable to solve any problems, big or small. Instead, it has allowed its government to expend money, energy, and lives on worldwide offensive wars accomplishing nothing productive, unless you are a defense contractor.

Mr. Friedman points out that both Communist China and Hindu India are gaining on the United States in economic might because the people in those two developing countries are ironically demonstrating more of a puritanical work ethic than either the Americans or the British. What is missing from America today, Mr. Friedman says, is the willingness to postpone gratification, to invest for the future, to work harder than the next guy, and to hold their kids to the highest expectations.

Can We Retrieve What We Have Lost?

The short answer to this is a qualified yes. But first, let’s examine in a little more detail than provided by Mr. Friedman exactly what we have and have not lost.

Within the last sixty years, not everyone in America has lost the connectivity within their communities and with their collective past wisdom because they never had these connections in the first place. Most big-city folk did not live in the middle-class harmony of Davis because not everybody in those city communities thought of themselves as being 100 percent middle class. Certainly the world was going on as usual in the fifties, with people starving and/or slaughtering each other in Africa; class warfare raging in South America and much of Asia; the Middle East with its usual sports arena of hatred; and Europe still recovering—with the assistance of the not-bombed United States, of course—from having violently blown itself up during World War II.

Furthermore, some of the aspects of the 1950s Davis/American experience are well