The goodness of Benedict

Early tonight, a good woman was at my door to see whether I would make my contribution to the church of which I am a member. I said I would. Although I am not particularly religious, I do wish to express my appreciation for the work of the church in our community and - in a way – to make clear where I stand in the world of our Christian humanity.

I am a staunch protestant. Yet I follow the events in Rome with keen interest. Whatever one may say of Rome’s rigidity v.à.v. Christians who call themselves Catholics, the Vatican is the only authoritative source available on the broader meaning of Christianity in our current world. So, whereas many of the stringent rulings of the Church affect its members only, a Pope’s actual influence extends far beyond its constitutional borders and thus affects the identity of other Christians much at the same time.

And it so happened today that Benedict XVI issued his first reading as the supreme teacher of the Catholic Church.

The new encyclical is titled ‘Deus Caritas Est’. Most papers translate this as: ‘God is Love’. But when one reads its content, it might be better to translate it as: 'God is Goodness'.

"In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant," Benedict writes. "For this reason, I wish in my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes on us and which we in turn must share with others." Well, fair enough.

He then proceeds to explain his concept of love. Benedict projects this concept first of all as an expression of the bond between a man and a woman. He underscores that this concept of love should “mature into unselfish concern for the other - creating a love that ultimately demands charity and justice even to strangers.” Wonderful.

Love is “a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self toward its liberation through self-giving, and thus toward authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God." It takes a Pope to make love sound so beautiful.

“Deus Caritas Est” further elaborates the concept of love along those lines. Really, it doesn’t strike any discord with me.

And the first responses to this recent teaching seem equally positive. A liberal group We Are Church, called the encyclical "a sign of hope" that Benedict would prove to be a "human face for Christianity and for the Catholic church."

Most of all, this papal letter to the bishops seems much more an exploration than an instruction. In no way does it order or condemn. It confirms the profound humanity that seems to drive this Pope, who is a man of age and who – as I see it - more than anyone else realizes that this is not the time for yet another Crusade, but for reconciliation and for coming to terms with the commonalities of humanity, rather than to seek the light between them.

Thus far, I have viewed Benedicts papacy as an extension of the reign of John Paul II, and in many ways his new encyclical seems to confirm this. At various points he stresses the continuity of the papacy in the past nearly thirty years. I believe it is part of his strength – and of his potential to effectively address the many conflicts that still linger between the – western – Christian world and others.

In fact I believe the moment is long overdue that our Christian societies, whether Catholic, Protestant or otherwise, come clean on what the Benedict’s goodness of God really offers to the rest of the world.

Survival of the fittest

Picture: a contmporary view of our Neanderthal cousins

A recent study has shed new light on the displacement of our hominid cousins, the Neanderthals, by our human forebears. The emerging picture reflects themes that are highly illustrative of selective pressures at work even in our modern day mass societies.

The archeological research from the University of Connecticut and other universities reported that some 30.0000 to 40.000 years ago “each population (i.e. Neanderthals and modern humans) was equally and independently capable of acquiring and exploiting critical information pertaining to animal availability and behavior.” They furthermore suggest “that developments in the social realm of modern human life, allowing routine use of distant resources and more extensive division of labor, may be better indicators of why Neanderthals disappeared than hunting practices.”

Doesn’t this ring a familiar bell? Differences between contemporary human populations are all about the ability to organize and communicate at great distances. In particular, the white western variation of humanity excels in this capability. And our variation does so at the greatest possible expense of the remaining populations of homo sapiens. Don’t we?

For our capability of networking and global organization, our power of communication between and within unparalleled conglomerates of human co-operation exceed anything that life on our planet has seen before, and that – at the same time – has been such a threat to it. This is not only the case in respect of the many variations of life that we have deliberately or thoughtlessly whizzed away into oblivion; it also holds true for the lives of a great many of our brothers and sisters - modern humans - of other cultures.

Yet we choose to arm ourselves against them in a highly primitive way. Does our way of life hold so little attraction to others that we can only say: if you don’t like us, we will fight you? The Neanderthal example should give us the conviction that a better quality – and organization – of life should in the end prevail against any lesser alternative, and that there is no need to fight for it – only to demonstrate it.

Sure enough, people will say: but what if other humans decide to fight and throw airplanes filled with kerosene into our skyscrapers? I agree, it is the saddest possible tragedy, and anyone is justified to enhance defenses against it.

But the main thrust of our energies should not go into defense, let alone outright war. If we wish to survive ultimately, our best prospects are gained through the quality – and sustainability – of the way of life we choose for ourselves. Our best offense is in increasing that quality, and allowing our immense capabilities of communication and organization to truly work in our advantage, and – ultimately – in the advantage of people who today we might label as ‘adversaries’.

The greatest tragedy (well, at least for you and me) would be if the Neanderthals in the end – are us.

Youth, alcohol and society

In Holland a serious discussion is at hand to forbid the sale of alcoholic beverages to youth below the age of 18. Lately, the Health minister suggested he would move to submit such a proposal. The current age limit for alcohol and tobacco is 16. Initial response in parliament is hesitant.

I believe a downright prohibition for youth below the age of 18 is a very foolish proposal.

The use of alcohol by young people is a widely acknowledged issue across Europe. The Dutch youth according to recent statistics tops the bill. So, indications are that this phenomenon does indeed require our serious attention.

Among those who are hesitant about raising the legal age limit are people who stress that we are talking about a – substantial – minority of the youth, but certainly not all of them. Secondly, it would be counterproductive to simply penalize young people and not increase our efforts to take away whatever causes the apparent abuse.

In an unrelated news item, just a week ago or so, it was reported that our present society is all but sympathetic to our children. Our social life, and especially our way of life that affects the environment in which young people grow up, has become unfriendly, harsh, dictated by the needs and pre-occupations of the working generation, parents and so on, rather than geared to nourish and groom the younger generation.

True or not, the issues are not unrelated. It is always better – first of all – to look at the factors that drive a particular development, such as alcohol abuse, rather than cry wolf over its unwelcome effects. To many this must be obvious, but in our current political climate, with fear becoming more and more the key determinant of almost all policies, it is not so evident any more.

Dutch politics and political attitudes especially have grown more restrictive than they have been for many decades. It seems as if old rigidities have suddenly woken up after we put them to sleep some time ago when we took the road of deliberate permissiveness and liberalism.

Those days appear well past now. It is a liberal minister who wants to solve the issue by means of old-fashioned punishment!

We should all know that any kind of prohibition will only make things worse. It will simply add to the thrill of alcohol, nothing less.

It will be much better to step up our efforts to make our society more worthwhile for the young, increase their challenges, commit them to change, involve them in our world, and allow them to enjoy it at the same time.

Abuse never came out of such dedication.

There is no such thing as time - 2

The Universe as we know it is all a jigsaw. We perceive a Universe that is actually a complex puzzle of events that took place at widely different stages of its development. When we read of advanced telescopes able to peer far away in the very outreaches of this great expanse, in fact they look at faint reflections, far out in the distance, of events way down in the past, one a little more close to us perhaps than the other.

Time is just a convenient measurement. It allows us to keep track of things as they progress. Keep track of our own life, history etc. and and it allows us to mark the various events with ‘dates’, or time.

Astronomy is the ongoing adventure of jumbled snapshots.

We cannot tinker with causality. Even if we wish to reverse a certain process – let’s say: if we wish to restore order to something that has gone into disorder – we only add a new causality. We do not really reverse the original events. By the same token we cannot turn back time.

But then, time has become humanity’s first and foremost obsession. It has become an obsession very much in the same period that youth has become an obsession. We do not want to age, but time goes faster en faster. We want to stay young, but our years continue to count.

Still, there is room for what people tend to call time travel. We all know that if you go fast enough - and I mean: extremely fast – your physical processes start to operate at a different rate than the physical processes at your point of departure. And when you return, the sum of your experiences will have left you 'pass your time' at a seemingly slower rate than is the case for the people you left behind. You return a young man, and everybody else has aged or is possibly dead and buried.

It is a strange journey for sure. But it is not time travel in the sense that most people attach to it.

So let’s forget about time. Why bother about something that is relevant only in our measurements but that otherwise does not in reality exist.

Yes, as you progress, your biology and physiology changes. But this does not necessarily make you ‘old’. At one point you die. But you can still die someone young.

We can allow ourselves to increase our enjoyment in the present, live the present – day after day. Expand our senses to suck all experiences, everywhere, at every instant. Enrich ourselves, drink each precious when-and-where down to the bottom, in short: let’s live intense.

The more we do that, the longer we will live, or rather: the larger our life will be, and the richer our memories.

There is no such thing as time

Picture: at our distance we can look at the outreaches of this nebula in a nanosecond. But to actually travel between them would take many light years.


I am not a physicist but I would very much like to understand the reality we are living in before the instant that I am no longer there.

One thing I do grasp is the vastness of our universe and the nearly infinite minuteness of the particles or strings that make it work.

I also appreciate that for mere practical purposes we use our concept of time to express distance. For instance, when we say that a particular star or galaxy is so many light years away.

A consequence of the vastness of our universe, and some of the physical laws governing it, is that the universe we can ‘see’ in a star filled night, ‘is’ not actually there the way we see it.

Most of what we see are the mere images of stars and galaxies at many different distances – and reflecting situations at many different instants - that happen to meet our eye at the same juncture.

It is even true when we ‘see’ our own sun. We don’t. At any given point we only see the image (the light) of our sun as it took off a few seconds (or minutes) before.

We use the concept of time to express a succession of realities. And we know that this succession cannot be measured for the entire universe as one fixed sequence. Enter Einstein’s relativity theory. It all depends on your point of view and on your speed.

Yet, in the end, I feel, that if we would simply travel a long enough distance and would bring along a camera of infinite fine resolution, we would be able to make a snapshot of our universe very close to what it ‘is’ and what it looks like at that particular instant. The problem is, of course that such a journey in itself would take an infinite number of instants, so for all practical purposes, it is impossible. And I am not quite convinced that the concept of warps or other theories of long distance travel would by any means be truly helpful.

In the meantime, we are making all sorts of fuss of this concept of ‘time’. Why? The main reason, I believe, is that we have set our minds to either ‘go back in time’ or go forward in time, and travel to the future. But both ideas are utterly ridiculous. We cannot tinker with time as a distinct phenomenon. The only way to go back in time is to look at old photo albums, much the same way look at our sky as a collage of pictures, taken from events at very different, actual, instants.

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I believe, that the image of time moving and "going by" is misleading. What goes by are our experiences. (Ernst von Glasersfeld)
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When we say, for instance when the weekend is approaching, “Wow, the week went fast”, we are simply referring to our experience of the (speed of the) week’s events, not to the actual speed of time.

Time is a construct of our mind, indicating that there is an – inevitable – sequence of experiences, events, actions followed by reactions etc. We do need time to arrive at the concept of speed, but there is no flow of time separate from events and mere causality. And it is quite clear, especially from Einsteins theory of relativity, that the actual sequence of events in different places, relative to one another, can differ according to relative speed etc. I do not wish to question all that, however difficult it remains to fully grasp.

“When I punch the ‘post’ button, this blogposting will be in my past, but it will still be in your future. The passage of time is a measure of motion." I here paraphrase a thought placed somewhere on the web by one John Merryman.

My wish is to eradicate time as a distinct phenomenon in our discussions of the properties of our universe, however vast or however small.

I am confined to what I am - and when I am - at every given instant.

(To be continued)

Would you like to be frozen for an eon or so?

A guy, somewhere in France, has fought his way up in court to keep his dead mother at home frozen in a box, until such time that medical science is able to resurrect her. This is probably not any time soon, so he may end up joining her in this icy state for one other eon or so. But he is unlikely to get the chance. In France, there are only two ways out: regular burial or regular burning.

I wonder, would you like to be frozen – and be resurrected, say, a few thousand years from now? Even if the waiting is only a couple of hundred years, I would still hesitate.

But let’s assume there is the possibility. One day in the future, you wake up. The first thing you’ll say is: “Please put the heater on, I’m freezing cold.”

Strange eyes will gaze at you. They might smile and check your heartbeat. They might utter a few kind words, but you cannot possibly understand them. The surrounding in which you open your eyes is totally alien. “Am I, after all, in heaven?” you might ask.

But you are not. You’re still on Earth. And it is unlikely that you find yourself in the very same spot where many years ago eh ..you died. You’ve been moved, and the facility in which these strange people with their funny clothes have brought you back to the living may well be miles down the road from where you went to sleep. In the mean time, things have changed in other respects as well. Buildings have gone, new ones have been erected; villages have been replaced by new bundles of skyscrapers; the entire countryside, perhaps even the entire nation has been replaced, turned upside down, new populations moved in; massive natural disasters have pressed the evolution of mankind into new crossroads. The one thing they did was to preserve you – and re-ignite your life.

Then you are discharged from the facility with a clean bill of health. Congratulations. Now what? Where will you go? And where will you live – or how? You might as well have landed on Pluto, with a one way ticket. No way to go back. You find yourself thrown into a jungle in space, inhabited by vaguely humane beings, with friendly eyes – still staring at you, wondering – as much as you do yourself – how to communicate.

Off you go on some unknown crowded street. You start walking. Funny things zip by. Whatever they're driving in, the vehicles they use don't really look like cars.

At one point you realize that you have built up a massive appetite. It’s been a while since you last had a snack. So, do you have money? Is there any way you can pay for your living? Whatever salary or pension you may have enjoyed in you earlier life, it will have dried up long, long ago.

Chances are that you next life will be on the fringes of decent living and that – at best – you will be given some sort of welfare payment, hardly sustainable, let alone a living that is worthwhile to be frozen for.

They may even want you to pay for all these years, or eons of electricity needed to retain your icy state.

So here is my advice.

If you wish to freeze yourself, never go it alone. Have somebody to join you, so at least – later on – you have a person to talk to.

Secondly: bury a treasure of some kind in a place that can stand the tides of time. A grotto, or the deep ocean. Be sure this is a treasure that will still have a value in the future – so you can change if for the relevant currency later on. Gold? You don’t know. An artifact of your own time? Perhaps. Keep it a secret!

Third: see ya.

Should the Dutch go to southern Afghanistan?

A new hot potato has emerged on the Dutch political scene. It was already brewing late last year when the Dutch cabinet discussed a decision to dispatch 1200 troops to southern Afghanistan, in support of an essentially American led peace enforcement operation.

Given some strong reservations within the coalition, the cabinet moved to let the ultimate decision be taken by Parliament. Although the free liberals are the main dissident party at this point, none of the other coalition partners from the outset wholeheartedly supported this mission.

The Netherlands have already contributed to peace keeping efforts in the country, but these efforts have so far been of a restricted nature and, more importantly, have been directed by NATO rather than the American forces.

In the southern part of Afghanistan, where operations thus far have been solely directed by American troops, there is noted activity of militant Talibans. There is a greater possibility in this region that Dutch troops, in the event they get involved, will have o pull their trigger.

Some people say that the Dutch reluctance in this case is based on our fear of actual combat risk. I have been given to understand that this is not the reason for our hesitation. Most people understand that such risk is part and parcel of having a Defense outfit to start with.

An important factor is the trauma of previous engagements. In Sebrenica, more than ten years ago, we took the hard lesson of an embarrassing involvement (i.e. by remaining totally passive) in genocide, most of all because there was a total lack of authority-in-situ and of support (from the NATO command) to allow us intervene. We do not want to get into an other Sebrenica.

Secondly, there is strong hesitance to – continue to – simply follow a US-lead situation. It’s like little Hans putting his finger in the dike and the water still running through. The question here – politically – is whether Holland will continue to support the foreign endeavors of the Bush administration that are seen by many as a flagrant failure. Do we wish to look foolish and run a serious risk of having caskets instead of living bodies arrive at our airports?

Most certainly, if the Bush administration would shrug at the Dutch, and say (what they seem to have said already), well, if you don’t help us here, this will damage your interests in the US, then that’ll be the final B(ush)-word. We may be a midget in military terms, but in economic terms, the Dutch are still – relatively speaking – giants. So, Washington better be a little more understanding and helpful.

The Dutch dilemmas furthermore do not stand in isolation. They are shared in other European countries. They only illustrate the underlying rift between Europeans and Americans. They are perhaps in part caused by a lack of European unity – particularly in matters of international security - but most certainly they are a result, too, of the prevailing egotist attitudes of the Bush hawks.

In the meantime, at the level op Dutch politics, the issue has become a matter of prestige for the free liberals: they will find it extremely difficult to turn around and support the position of their coalition partners. Evidently this has little to do with the merits of the case. Politically, it should be far preferred that a decision is reached which can draw the support of all coalition partners, rather than that the cabinet will need the support of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats. But this is a question to be resolved in our own house, so to speak.

Finally, other than Irak, Afghanistan is more truly a case for the international community. Americans so far have done most of the dirty work there, and allowed NATO partners to do the peace-keeping. We are a vehement NATO supporter. A Dutchman is its Secretary-General now. Dutch government parties would prefer close allegiance in that context, but we cannot pledge loyalty to it at any price. This is what makes it a complicated question. There is a lot of credibility at stake. I agree with William Pfaff in today’s IHT: perhaps even the future of the NATO is in the balance too. Even more so, it cannot be simply the Dutch to push this balance in the right direction.
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Note, February 2: The Dutch parliament, in large majority, decided to back the governments proposal for the mission to Afghanistan. The social democrat opposition saved the day. The free liberals decided not to support the mission, but they will not block the cabinet's ultimate decision. A face saving exercize for many, a wise outcome for all.

What do you mean: progressive?

A short while ago I participated in a television program called “The Future of The Netherlands”. Really my cup of tea, I thought. I didn’t actually participate in the program, but I did log-in to its website, which carried me through a host of questions about possible changes in the outlook of our country, say, twenty years hence.

The questions were of the kind that more typically reflect our present-day concerns, such as personal security, the threat of terrorism, minority issues and so forth, and most of the possible changes which the questions hinted at, in my mind, would make our country nothing less than the worst nightmare. They would take us far beyond ‘1984’, with human beings living as mere puppets on the string of Big Brother watching – and punishing – you. Not for me, I thought. Nor do I really believe that this is the inevitable course of our society.

I completed the questions and clicked ‘send’. I immediately received the program’s (or whatever was behind it) evaluation.

“Conservative” it said.

If ever I felt insulted, this was the moment. Never in my life I have been labeled a conservative, never will I accept it. So I wrote this e-mail to the producers of the TV-program. I suggested they better review this program. “Have you really succumbed to our present-day shallowness”, I asked them. “The government measures suggested in your program are a far cry from progress. They are gruesome, right wing, abhorrent”, or words to this effect. I got a reply, a few days ago, thanking me for my comments and emphasizing that contributions such as mine are a great help. Well, OK.

I do realize that my kind of progress is highly out of fashion these days. Only a few months ago, when I was talking about some current issue (I don’t remember which) to one of my younger colleagues, he said to me: “Ah, yes, but you are of the generation of progress”. He more or less implied: your are of the past.

Sure enough, the attributes of progress as I learned to understand them, have very little to say in our present day. I am a liberal, not a socialist, yet in my mind real progress is a phenomenon at the societal level. It is reflected in every enhancement of our behavior (and our being) as social animals. We should be able – and willing – as a society to control violence and aggression, and help others to enjoy a decent living etc., and never allow any of this to be the sole authority of intelligence officers, let alone militia’s or armies or similar agents. We should control the need for legislation, spying on citizens or invading people’s privacy, and be more societal – less egoistic – in the conduct of our own lives.

Perhaps my outlook on politics stems from the sixties and the seventies – not the eighties and the nineties, when extreme individualism and, more in particular, extreme consumerism took the lead over public cohesion and active political debate. Yet I am convinced that, one way or the other, new terms for progress will emerge. I am convinced that we will not succumb to the nightmare of rigid policing, of consumerist slavery, of utmost materialism. Our real future lies elsewhere. Our progress will be a different dream.

So I hang on to my outlook. I cherish all the improvements in my lifetime. I will fight stupidity. I will stand at the center of a progressive, fee society where common sense prevails and where the energy of freedom is directed to benefit the common good.

The Rule of Law

Supreme Court nominee Alito has said that a judge's only obligation "is to the rule of law” (CNN). That is the truism of the day. And it is true not only for the judicial branch of government, but as much for the executive too.

In the western world we are all children of revolutions with the same theme: the eradication of arbitrary government, the rule of law and the trias politica – the separation of powers – which was most rigidly installed in the US Constitution.

Well indeed, Senators in the US who are so eager to grill Alito with questions on divisive topics such as abortion, equal rights, the right to privacy, gun control etc. should first and foremost check with themselves whether at all times they have been sufficiently critical about the actions – particularly in recent times – of the executive branch in these dimensions and whether in fact, they are not at the same time – potentially – pointing their finger to weak spots in the American res publica that most of all they can be blamed for themselves.

Of course, the people’s representatives in the Congress have a right – if not the obligation – to examine whether Alito has been truthful to the rule of law in his actual record as a lawyer and a judge. But they would be doing a very bad job if actually they are trying to probe into Alito’s opinions on matters of policy or legislation, which can only be resolved by the legislative branch.

I am well aware that law is a living phenomenon. Law arises from legislation – and judicial practice. So, in part, the judicial branch does have an influence on the actual outreach of the law. But even then, the sense of the law (and not of public opinion, let alone of someone’s private opinion) is its one and only source.

I have no position on Alito personally. That’s quite beyond me. But public proceedings on nominations such as a judge of the Supreme Court are extremely important in terms of testing the legal and public morality of a nation. So I follow it with keen interest.

I have been active in the sphere of - the Dutch – public administration most of my life and I have always taken an active interest in politics. In many ways I am the child of a period when government policy and especially policymaking was having its heyday. We loved the idea of changing the world – for the better. The legislative part of policymaking always came as an inevitable burden, preferably to be avoided. At that time, some twenty-five years ago, a good friend of mine completed his Ph-D on the very subject of the rule of law: there can be no policymaking, he said, unless it is a strict execution of the law. He was right, I knew, but I also felt a little uneasy. Policymaking, government, having influence and all that, is quite addictive. The tendency is to extend the law – as much as you can, to find all kinds of excuses to evade it; the only thing that mattered – we were inclined to think – was the benevolence of our policies. And benevolence came in plenty!

Later I learned that benevolence throughout history has been the greatest source of human terror and destruction – not otherwise. So I have grown a little more cautious about good ideals before they are fully supported by the voice of the law – the voice of our legislators.

Today my good friend is a member of the Dutch Council of State, the highest advisory body in our government. So, I feel quite assured about the rule of law in my own backyard.

I am far less assured about the rule of law in the United States. I truly hope that Congress will be as vigorous about it v.a.v. the Executive as it now appears to be v.a.v. the Judicial. It would make our world so much better to look at.

Getting started

This is my first sentence in a blog.
I'll have to figure out what it can do for me - and what I can do for blogging.

There are quite a number of topics that interest me. Some may be of interest to others.
First of all, I am a person who very much likes to think about the future.
In very much the same measure I am a man of history too.
One is impossible, I feel, without the other.

So that is where I will start.

My history and my future are most of all determined by my background.
This is not a simple background, like..where I was born, or what I am doing in my daily work.

My mind is filled with a huge library of legacies and memories which constitute who I am and how I think about, for intance, the passage of time.

All this, I will clarify along the way, wherever my thoughts carry me.

Just a few data for starters:
- I am 53 years old
- I was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands - so:
- I am a Dutchman
- I live in The Hague, often called "The Legal Capital of the World"
- and, yes, I was trained as a lawyer
- I am single (divorced), and I am blessed with a wonderful daughter
- I would call myself a progressive liberal (as opposed to many liberals in Holland who are actually very conservative or right wing)
- I am not at all pleased with the mainstream drift of American and European politics
- this is one of the topics I will most certainly touch upon in my blog.

Today, my greatest concern has been my foolishness over the weekend when I left my bicycle unlocked at the grocery's, only to return this morning to find it gone - taken by someone who
obviously took the opportunity.

Damn! If only I were more careful.