THE GREAT AMERICAN ROAD TRIP

Growing up, our family never had enough money to take regular road trips and besides that it would require someone to be hired to milk our cows twice a day, feed our chickens, take care of our dog, etc. This is a kind way of saying that the trouble would be more than worth the trip might be to our family.

Back in those days, in the early and mid-1940s, motels were few and far between – and too expensive, restaurants were expensive too, and the only affordable part of the trip was gasoline for the car, which, by the way, had no air conditioning. The gas generally cost between 10 cents and 20 cents per gallon.

Consequently, with one exception when we drove to Louisiana to see our aunt and uncle and cousins in 1948, any trips we took were generally “turn-around” ones so we could be home again within twelve hours, especially when my brother, Jerry, and I were still too young to do all of the daily chores.

Other families we knew well, that did not live on farms, were free to take longer trips. But even their trips seemed to be unforgettable as they described them to the rest of us.  

Skipping ahead to today, family trips taken with the children of Generation X parents, are in danger of death by neglect. Neglect from teenagers who are perpetually wired into their electronic devices and neglect from misbehavior by the younger siblings also riding in the rear seats of the family their younger siblings riding in the back of the SUV. This always seemed to occur when the back seat was just beyond the long arm of parental justice and any other interaction between parents and children.

A few years earlier, everything seemed to be different, mom would sit in the passenger seat up front and dad would so all of the driving, but only after everyone and everything was packed in the car. He would stride out of the house like a relief pitcher walking across the outfield to take his position on the mound at a baseball game, and ask rhetorically, “Is everyone ready?” Seatbelts were optional, if they even existed, and everyone thought they were too busy to take the time to buckle them.

Things in the car would be calm for a while, but about an hour into the trip, something would set dad off – maybe a yell from one sibling after a kidney poke from another – and the fur would fly. It would also happen when one sibling would ask: “Are we almost there?”

That was when the magic would happen. Road rage between two drivers is usually deadly serious, but road rage between father and children always gives the children a wonderful opportunity to develop critical-thinking skills right there in the car.

It became a time when the threats would begin. “Don’t make me come back there.” This was an absurd threat because it was unlikely that dad would ever stop to crawl in the back seats to make peace. His concern for getting to a destination on time was really his prime goal for the day.

The next threat was, “Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” That threat was always menacing, but the kids always knew it was “all hat, and no horse.” Never would a threat like that make a child stop crying, and everyone, including dad, knew it.

The next threat was, “I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.” That was always followed by silence until one of the kids made a “peeping” sound and the others joined in symphony form. Pretty soon, the back seat sounded like a chicken hatchery and not even the old man could suppress a smile.

The next admonition that came from the driver’s seat, was, “This is our only bathroom stop. Make yourself go.” Most urologists will say that is not a good idea.

By that time, we had reached our destination.

 

THE G-7 SUMMIT

As I write this piece on June 12, 2018, I have had a chance to reflect on that Summit, hosted by the Canadian government as well as President Trump’s summit meeting with the President of North Korea, Kim Jong Un in Singapore a few days later.

While the stated mission of both meetings was to be about trade and strengthening the Western Alliance in the case of the G-7 Meeting and the denuclearization of North Korea in the case of the Trump/Jong Un meeting, the real essence of both meetings was that they both highlighted the steady collapse of the ‘post-war order’ and the way power structures are now being reorganized and renegotiated across societies around the world.

The post-war order that created the G-7 Group was thought of as a great historic post-war achievement. As for the Korean Summit, it reminds us that the Korean War has dragged on for sixty some years, seemingly hindered by human rights abuses.

The founding generation of the (then) G-8 Group (Russia has since been kicked out) created a series of organizations and alliances that were designed to fight communism, create a stable trading system, combat global poverty and promote democracy. If the goals of the Korean Summit are similar, we need to understand that the relationship between America and North Korea is still in its infancy stage, at best.

The current generation of G-7 leaders seems to have lost their thread of unity as European elites have become so afraid of nationalism that they fell for the illusory dream of convergence – the dream that nations could effortlessly merge into cosmopolitan Pan–European communities.

While progressives were so confident when the G-7 was originally set up, they allowed the concentration of power to be upward and away from the people, but at the same time, technology advances were pushing power downward and toward the people. Consequently, elites of all stripes became so detached that they never saw that untrammeled meritocracy divides societies between the fittest and the rest of the folks.

The current leaders of G-7 are not so much bound by a shared ideology as a shared mentality that makes them think and act like a pack of wolves. Wolves perceive the world as being a war of all against all, as they seek to create a world where only they can survive and thrive, which in turn is a world without agreed-upon rules, without restraining institutions, norms and etiquette.

With President Trump as our leader in this consortium, values don’t matter much, because they are only interests. In his world, friendships are just a ‘con’ that other people try to pull on you before they screw you over. This low-trust style of politics is often characterized as realism on steroids.

He (Trump), takes every relationship that has historically been based on affection, loyalty, trust and reciprocity and turns it into a relationship based on competition, self-interest, suspicion, and efforts to establish domination. When he seeks to destroy trust and reciprocity, he creates an environment where he can thrive – just like the wolves do.

When we turn our thoughts to the North Korean Summit, we can realize that trust and reciprocity have never existed, so it may be an easier route to take toward any new peace accord.  

 

 

THE CULTURE THAT SUSTAINS OUR CONSTITUTION

When we think or talk about our Constitution, the conversation rarely turns to how old it is and how long it has lasted. But now that a Supreme Court seat has opened up, it will likely be spoken of in terms of the candidates being “textualists” or “originalists” in their interpretation of the document.

Depending on how each of those terms is defined, with “textualists” generally being described as what the document meant to the writers at the time it was written and should not be thought of any other way, while the “originalists” think more about how the document fits today’s society when laws are made and judged. While these two versions can overlap, it would take too many additional essays to fully explain everything beyond what I will use for this essay.

Since 1789, when our constitution went into effect, the average lifespan of national constitutions word-wide has been 19 years, according to scholars and researchers at the University of Chicago. Meanwhile, the “We the People of the United States” document is now well into the third century. We’ve lived under the same written charter longer than any other people on earth. We’ve even had regular federal elections every two years that have never been uninterrupted by, even the Civil War.

Yet America’s founders had serious doubts about the durability of their ‘experiment,’ as they called the Constitution at the time of its writing. Alexander Hamilton, in an 1802 letter to ‘Gouverneur Morris’ even wondered why he had wasted his best years defending our “frail and worthless” charter. In 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall, near the end of his 34 year tenure on the high court, lamented in private correspondence that “our Constitution cannot last.”

One might think America’s track record in the subsequent 200 years would inspire greater confidence in the document. Yet, many people today feel, as they have after many fraught elections, still feel that our president is either a savior or the harbinger of doom.

All of this makes it worth reflecting on why the Constitution has endured. The first and most important thing to consider is its text. It is rigid enough to restrain excesses, yet flexible enough to accommodate innovations. It is terse and it presumes that both governors and the governed will act responsibly.

Next, the framers created the world’s first constitution to institutionalize the principle of human equality. Our country’s progress in respecting the real implications of equality has at times been slow, even glacial, especially with regard to race. It took until 1876, in the case ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ passed to admit minority children to schools on an equal basis as white kids.

Other classic laws were affirmed as the years passed. Justice Anton Scalia reminded us that ‘written guarantees are meaningless without a culture to sustain them,’ he went on to say that “every American generation has a vocal minority that considers itself doomed to live in an age of constitutional degeneracy.”

Constitutionalism is not a mere institutional form but a culture that exists around it – a set of sentiments, habits  and assumptions, pa permeating spirit that animates an otherwise lifeless paper scheme.

So long as we keep faith, our Constitution will be displaced no sooner than an ant tips over the Statue of Liberty.   

 

When we think or talk about our Constitution, the conversation rarely turns to how old it is and how long it has lasted. But now that a Supreme Court seat has opened up, it will likely be spoken of in terms of the candidates being “textualists” or “originalists” in their interpretation of the document.
Depending on how each of those terms is defined, with “textualists” generally being described as what the document meant to the writers at the time it was written and should not be thought of any other way, while the “originalists” think more about how the document fits today’s society when laws are made and judged. While these two versions can overlap, it would take too many additional essays to fully explain everything beyond what I will use for this essay.
Since 1789, when our constitution went into effect, the average lifespan of national constitutions word-wide has been 19 years, according to scholars and researchers at the University of Chicago. Meanwhile, the “We the People of the United States” document is now well into the third century. We’ve lived under the same written charter longer than any other people on earth. We’ve even had regular federal elections every two years that have never been uninterrupted by, even the Civil War.
Yet America’s founders had serious doubts about the durability of their ‘experiment,’ as they called the Constitution at the time of its writing. Alexander Hamilton, in an 1802 letter to ‘Gouverneur Morris’ even wondered why he had wasted his best years defending our “frail and worthless” charter. In 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall, near the end of his 34 year tenure on the high court, lamented in private correspondence that “our Constitution cannot last.”
One might think America’s track record in the subsequent 200 years would inspire greater confidence in the document. Yet, many people today feel, as they have after many fraught elections, still feel that our president is either a savior or the harbinger of doom.
All of this makes it worth reflecting on why the Constitution has endured. The first and most important thing to consider is its text. It is rigid enough to restrain excesses, yet flexible enough to accommodate innovations. It is terse and it presumes that both governors and the governed will act responsibly.
Next, the framers created the world’s first constitution to institutionalize the principle of human equality. Our country’s progress in respecting the real implications of equality has at times been slow, even glacial, especially with regard to race. It took until 1876, in the case ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ passed to admit minority children to schools on an equal basis as white kids.
Other classic laws were affirmed as the years passed. Justice Anton Scalia reminded us that ‘written guarantees are meaningless without a culture to sustain them,’ he went on to say that “every American generation has a vocal minority that considers itself doomed to live in an age of constitutional degeneracy.”
Constitutionalism is not a mere institutional form but a culture that exists around it – a set of sentiments, habits and assumptions, pa permeating spirit that animates an otherwise lifeless paper scheme.
So long as we keep faith, our Constitution will be displaced no sooner than an ant tips over the Statue of Liberty.

THE CATHOLIC MEDIA UNIVERSE

The media types that have historically followed the moves of the Catholic Church in America, the National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal and America, have carried much of the church’s water to the public, but it is not difficult to take a leap of faith and call all of them liberal in their presentations.

In reality, the writers for those publications understood that the universe they were writing for was small, so if they wanted to get their voices heard or read so they had to write in a way that pleased the editors of those three journals.  

Yet, because none of them have a very wide reading audience, which is primarily made up of professionals, they speak to those people in their writing and leave conservative thinkers in the weeds. Consequently, the approach of these journals leaves a wide swath of Catholic thinking the social media and its adherents feeling they are targets of their writing.

Auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, Robert Barron, has stepped into this breach with his folksy Midwestern “aw-shucks” demeanor that doesn’t fool anyone. With his popular online film reviews, political commentary and plain-English commentaries, he has acquired 1.6 million Facebook fans, and 130,000 Twitter followers. His You-Tube videos have been viewed 34 million times and his own television channel has about 165,000 subscribers. This number is greater than the number of subscribers to the three Catholic journals combined. Additionally, Barron has attracted over 91,000 Instagram fans. Only Pope Francis, among church people is more popular with English-speaking Catholics.

However, his robust online presence does carry some pitfalls, when viewers use the comment sections, it frequently attracts comments that range from contemptuous to profane. But he has learned to shrug the profane ones off by simply saying he has gotten used to them. 

Bishop Barron grew up in Chicago and had the late Cardinal Francis George as a mentor. As such, George encourage him to develop his talent for communicating with non-Catholics and those Catholics who have strayed from the church. George reminded him that: “You can’t evangelize a culture you hate.” As such, George had a reputation as a social and theological conservative, a tag Bishop Barron wishes to avoid. Barron, when talking about Cardinal George, characterizes him as not being “antiliberal,” but “postliberal,” a moniker that Barron says he can identify with.

Like most clergy members, Bishop Barron works hard to keep his political preferences under wraps: By firmly saying he is neither Republican or Democrat, but as person who represents the great values of Catholic teaching, and drawing members of both parties closer to those teachings.

As such he advocates for the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity and human dignity as the greatest of all principles. Following those principles, he is against abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research and whatever else directly attacks life. Barron also opposes capital punishment, unjust war, any marginalization of the poor and any aggressive attitude that is directed toward migrants.

These thoughts don’t jibe with any American political party, but he has the ability to make arguments on behalf of each of these potential policy positions.

He believes we are “anti-socialist” in America, people who support a vigorous market economy that is disciplined by a very strong moral sensibility. Said another way, that is, a market economy that is morally constrained and culturally conditioned. He goes on to say that any party that can espouse those positions, is the party he would like to be affiliated with.        

                    

TEACHING TOLERANCE

Our country has long had problems with “leftists” who can’t stand to have conservatives speak on our college campuses. Those venues are supposed to be open forums for free thought and speeches, but that is no longer the case in today’s society.

In fact, the situation has gotten so bad that several colleges and universities have adopted programs to deal with what they call “offensive speech” on their campuses. But, what does “offensive speech” really mean? 

When it comes to tolerating offensive speech, many American colleges and universities, simply hold themselves to a lower standard than the rest of society does. Kentucky State University, for instance, includes “embarrassment” on its list of “sanctionable “offenses against speakers.” Dickinson College promises to sic its “Bias Education and Response Team” on those persons whose speech is deemed “offensive or inflammatory to some,” even if no rule has been violated.

Now we have a new book, “Speak Freely,” in which the author, Nadine Strossen, argues that even free societies are shaky on the proposition that, “free speech” is essential to the advancement of knowledge, but at some universities, “free inquiry and debate” are the only possible means of advancing their core mission of “producing and disseminating knowledge.”

Externally, all schools should always demand more freedom for speech than in the society they inhabit. Internally, schools have a need to welcome the unorthodox and reject “those who prefer to be sheltered from challenge.

For example, when students at Emory University shouted down a Trump friendly speaker in front of an administration building on campus, the school’s president responded by suggesting that Emory would be a better institution if students were spared exposure to disfavored electioneering speech. But most of us know that when those people prefer to be sheltered, the university has lost sight of its core mission.

Despite the power of speech to motivate and wound, there is basically insufficient evidence that any constitutionally protected hate speech contributes significantly to violence, discrimination or psychic harm.

Today, we are wrestling with U. S. House of Representatives member, Maxine Watters, who unleashed a significant amount of vitriol in front of a crowd against President Trump and the people who work for him. Those same “free speech” advocates are the same people who tested the waters when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary And Kristen Nielsen were respectively asked to leave a public restaurant and were then heckled at another public restaurant.

Unfortunately, when we allow “hate speech” to occur, it only allows the division of our country to deepen further, despite the right to express free speech we all have. No doubt, our court system will be asked to review when speech becomes too hateful that it impinges on “free speech.”

 

 

STAYING TOGETHER, BUT LIVING APART

As more people live longer and changes happen in their lives and their marriages, they often feel compelled to stay married, but, at the same time, they feel equally compelled to carve out their own life as an individual. It is just the nature of human life. This may come off as an anti-marriage statement, but it does reflect the thoughts of some people. Folks in this situation frequently ask themselves: Are we doing this (staying together) because we love each other or are we afraid of each other?

Without saying it outright, many young couples (close friends, engaged, or even married) are actually buying houses for the convenience of living “near” each other, but not “with” one another. It is a fair bet that many people don’t know of the existence of these types of arrangements, but they are much more common than one might think. The rather uncommon term for this type of living is “LAT” or “living apart together.” It can refer to couples who choose to live separately – even far apart – while remaining committed to each other.

Some couples might simply say they are “living together, apart” and think of it as being the same thing, but it is not. It is actually the opposite of that. Think of it this way; “one roof, two households, a unique kind of commitment.”

At the same time, older folks who have been married for a long time will often say that love involves compromise. But the person who says that is probably married to the least compromising spouse you can imagine.

Young couples who gravitate to these types of living situations are likely to have come from broken families and fear they might fall into the same type of landfill. As one young man who said his mother was married twice and his father had been married four times; never referred to the fact that he came from a broken family; he came from “scorched earth.”

Many young people, who come from these backgrounds, innately search out partners who have equally odd backgrounds and lived in equally different ways. It is safe to say that it does not necessarily translate into a desire to live together either. One or both of them might think of it as being a character flaw, but it is often their desire to seek out personal autonomy – or having their own space.

They enjoy the opportunity to visit, but “mostly” like it even better when the other person leaves. An unwillingness to appreciate each other’s personal foibles is at the base of this thinking. Autonomy has many different layers, and when it surfaces in any relationship it creates new names, like “the wife” instead of “my wife” and “the design committee” instead of jointly deciding how to display the husband’s artwork in the house. The hidden anger behind these references, pungent as sulfur, often overtakes reason.

People in these situations are usually coming off of a bad relationship and are urgently looking for a less challenging follow-up, which they determine to be “maintaining distance to avoid pain.” For some women, it might be an admonition they heard from their single mother, “never depend on a man.” For some men, it is just the way they want to live; with a security blanket close-by and available when needed. 

Separate living arrangements can be tenuous, but might also mean accepting someone’s neediness when it might be more loving when you don’t need to worry that it only means it is being done to keep the peace. More than that, it is like sharing experiences at night, while waking up in separate beds.

 

 

SQUEEZED

It wasn’t long ago that the term “middle class” suggested security, conformity and often complacency – a cohort that was such a reliable feature of postwar American life that it attracted not just political pandering but also cultural embrace and ridicule. It was a stereotype that everyone from men in gray-flannel suits to slick young professionals who were stuck or smug in their own world of bourgeois comforts had.

Members of the “middle class” are no longer a robust demographic, but an embattled and shrinking population, struggling to hold on to their perch in life in our totally unforgiving economic order. These folks are not the truly poor but those in the “just making it” group who are sometimes called the “Middle Precariat.” They have always believed that their education and backgrounds would guarantee some financial stability; instead their work is “inconsistent or contingent,” and their incomes are stagnant or worse.

More than that, they are people who have done everything right, and yet the math of their family lives is simply not adding up. Typically, they are also the people who have experienced the falling into the “middle-class vortex” after some significant family event (think, birth of a child or hospital bills) that placed them directly into a “fiscal vertigo,” making them part of a transition they never bargained for, but surely feel now.

These folks find themselves having to deal with the tenuousness of their economic situation, but also the turbulence of their emotional life. Unfortunately, many of them are middle-age job seekers who once worked as computer programmers or newspaper reporters who have suffered from the fallout of a rather discriminatory job market, which sends a message to older unemployed people that they just need to buckle-up and start over; all while making them feel superfluous.

One of the more unsettling threads in the disappearance of the middle-class is that it has prompted new industries to spring up from the rubble left behind. Companies that hired middle-class workers are often the same ones that grew to rely on government grants to assist processes and peddle their wares. For-profit colleges are among this group as they have habitually sold fantasies of lucrative second careers, as are the “Gig-economy” start-ups that have encouraged cash-strapped professionals to moonlight their way into making ends meet.

One example of the “gig-economy” is Uber, whiuch is now making efforts in a number of states to sign-up school teachers as drivers. In Oregon, the company even notifies riders on their “app” that the driver is an “UberEducator,” bragging that 3% of each fare goes to the teacher’s classroom. 

All of these people suffer from various forms of anxiety as they come head-to-head with vulnerabilities that used to be the exclusive domain of the poor, but many of them, while being on the cusp, are also pushing for genuine change that will positively affect their lives.

The first thing they must do is to “quit blaming themselves;” for their current status. It is really the state of the system we live in that permits comfort and security to be exclusive perks for the extremely rich. But while that type of reassurance is the kind of platitude that feels simplistic in all cases, it remains a tough hurdle to get over for most people.

On another level, the issue is also ever-present in the minds of parents who are simultaneously raising kids and trying to make ends meet. They hear legislators saying they are working hard to sentimentalize family values and the hard work that goes with it; but they are largely abdicating their responsibility toward families that are left to navigate a job market that prefers its employees to be childless and un-encumbered in all ways.

While I frequently mention the “middle-class” in my writings, it is ironic that no one has ever been able to identify an appropriate and definitive definition of who occupies that class of people.   

SOCIALISM AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The direct role of socialism and life in the Catholic Church has never been as evident as it is today under the leadership of Pope Francis.

While the church teachings have always had a socialistic bent affecting its believers, it has always been more or less tempered in our world-wide democratic societies which are much more competitive in many respects than socialism ever was.

Now we have a pope, Francis, who has lived and worked in a socialistic society in Argentina for much of his life before being elected to his current church leadership post in 2013. It is difficult to criticize him for merely carrying out his socialistic based agenda because that has been how his life has been formed, but now he also has an obligation to consider his leadership role in democratic states too, like the United States.

The immigration crisis in democratic Western Europe and the United States has caused these differences to surface and the picture isn’t pretty. Unfortunately, the response has not been on migration itself, but on the actions that leaders of these countries have taken to deal with the circumstances that continue to occur.

In Western Europe, where immigrants have been welcomed in the past, the people are now saying that enough is enough and their borders need to be closed to new immigrants seeking asylum because they are using funds dedicated to taking care of their own people. In the United States, the issue is a little different. Migrants are not only coming to the U. S. to escape the ravages of their home countries, but also because the United States offers unlimited health and welfare benefits to immigrants; something they have never received in the past. And we do so at no cost to these recipients.

Pope Francis also sees the major issue as one of “welcoming” our brothers and sisters from countries where people don’t want to stay because of adverse government policies. He has even placed this “welcoming approach” above a number of moral issues that have always been held sacrosanct in many countries, including the United States. Yes, those moral issues are certainly religiously oriented, but they still hold sway over the minds of many people, not just Catholics.   

 In our democratic society, we have always paid significant attention to moral issues because most of us hold them in higher regard than any secular ones. There are consequences for violating secular issues, but we still do not hold them in as high a regard as we do moral issues.

Does this mean that we need to find a better way to describe “moral issues?

The answer may be yes, but defining “moral” is a heavy lift for those of us who feel it is an integral part of our life. Furthermore, we feel unable to re-define what they mean. We could chalk it up to different meanings in different languages, but that is not the answer either, because it transcends any attempt to it define it’s issues in some other language.

We are all “monads” (single units) living in a world where community is important, whether it is in the secular world or in church life; yet Pope Francis is calling for us to follow our individual conscience when making our decisions. It is my feeling that his thinking runs contra to my life as a Catholic in America.

At the same time, my thoughts about the co-existence between of living in a democratic society and adhering to church teachings can always be balanced if I am willing to work at it.  

 

 

SEEKING SOLUTIONS

Several years ago, I expressed the feeling that the rise of robots was on the horizon, so I added a strong robotics company to my investment portfolio. While the price of the stock in that company has done incredibly well, I have also begun to think more about the day when robotics will take over much of what we do.

Knowing that that day is not just over the horizon and my age is going against me, I am not likely to see that day come, but it still concerns me.

This is because lots of smart technologists and futurists are saying they are convinced that our society is on the cusp of becoming a world in which artificial intelligence, robotics and other advancing technologies will make a large portion of today’s jobs obsolete. Back when I made my initial investment in that robotics company, the issue of artificial intelligence (AI) was not even on the scene yet. 

These technologists and futurists might be wrong of course, but the consequences if they are right, which is the more likely case, will become a defining challenge in the decades ahead, and one in which might also demand some political attention.

One interesting entry in this discussion is a paper just published by the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank. The title of the paper, called “Don’t Fear the Robots” is one where the writers say that a series of policy steps that are, in isolation, not all that radical would go a long way toward insuring that the benefits of technological advancement will be widely enjoyed.

As an example, the Federal Reserve Board and other policymakers should commit more energetically to pursuing a “national employment” goal set in federal law, even if it leads to small advances in inflation, and the use of “work-sharing programs” like those that have been used in Germany during economic downturns. Those programs hold the idea that if a company needs to cut 20% of its work force because of new innovations, it is better for society if it cuts each worker’s hours by 20% rather than laying off 20% of its staff. Needless to say, we can only ask: How would the 20% measurement be made that applied to new innovations?

The bigger question then becomes: Is the use of these programs tilting the operations of the company more toward workers and less toward the stockholders?  Capitalism always holds that the rewards to investors in the form of returns (think, dividends) need to be paid to the investors and need to come first because without those investments, the company would never have existed.

Other questions arise when new approaches are recommended for workers. Some would like to make job benefits like health insurance and retirement funds more “portable,” so that people who work as independent contractors and who change jobs frequently, can have more financial stability in their lives. But this also means more government interference in the job market and opens the door for employees to lobby for even more benefits.

In the end, we need to fully realize that from the 1980s to the early 2000s, when thousands of workers lost their jobs, it created disruptions in many communities that is still being felt today, and is arguably at the root of a lot of our biggest social and economic problems that arose in that era.  

If we have a wave of robotic and artificial intelligence advances sweep over our economy and our lives, we need to know how we can keep that response from repeating itself.

 

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Many of us feel that science and religion have hit a rough patch in our lives. Science is getting too complex for many of us to fully understand and religion is falling short in our increasingly secular society, which no longer embraces religion like we and our families did for years.  

Life is getting to be like a married couple whose kids have moved out of the house and have moved on with their lives; leaving the balance of the household feeling lost and neither parent is entirely sure of the other.

Should religion adapt its narratives to scientific explanation? Should science submit to the moral truths of religion? Should they operate in some “non-overlapping magesteria,” – with separate realms of inquiry that ignore each other completely?

For roughly two millennia, these questions did not need to be asked. Going way back, both the classical and medieval worlds had their own balances, where science and religion inhabited the same intellectual space, working together and offering a holistic image of reality.

Beginning on the 17^th and 18^th centuries, however, that balance slowly dissolved. Arguments over planetary motion, human evolution and the origins of the universe escalated into full-scale culture wars. Preferring divorce to continued discord, the leaders of these wars argued that “not only is science corrosive to religion, religion is corrosive to science.”

To provide some additional historical context to the origins of this discord, leaders on both sides agreed to disagree that neither science nor religion could bridge the gap. A review of history from ancient Greece to the 17^th century, the rift that existed in the two elements and different technologies that science and religion employed, science has communicated in abstract numeracy, while religion has remained in “logos” (the logic that is based on coupling of words and things).

Today, religion is easier for us to grasp because it has subjective faith and beliefs at its base and doesn’t require calculations to become fully understandable. So, naturally we gravitate in that direction. But, while religion is based on faith, we are finding that it too, is crumbling because faith is imprecise and has little basis of proof.

Science, on the other hand, involves the ability to prove itself without having to rely on any abstract thoughts or feelings. Consequently, in a world filled with people wanting more certainty in their future, it seems science now has been able to gain the upper hand.