Experiencing the Plight of Refugees

By Gary Berg-Cross

When did refugees become terrorists? Or at least some are like "rabid dogs" - see Ben Carson talks of 'rabid dogs': US refugee debate descends into ugliness.

To say the least the idea of letting scores of Middle eastern (think Syrian, no think Muslim refugees) into the US has stirred up nationalist and xenophobic  emotions. It doesn't help that there are politics and religion involved at times too. Consider:

GOP Politicians Rejecting Refugees Sound Like Racist Internet Trolls (RollingStone) or

Data Show Links Between Fear of Terrorist Attacks, Anti-Muslim Bias

Hate crimes against Muslims are up this year, despite a general trend downward for all such crimes. (US News and World Report) or

Syrian Refugees Are Being Punished by Republican Nativist Hysteria

What the Republicans now rejecting Syrian refugees would have said about Jews a century ago. (Haaretz)

Sure there is some fact checking such US News’ 8 Facts About the U.S. Program to Resettle Syrian Refugees (or the Guardian) where we  learn such things as “refugees have to pay back the money for the plane ticket that brings them to the U.S and how “Refugees are subject to Department of Homeland Security background checks before arriving in the U.S.“ Checks to enter take 18-24 months and include the collection of biometric data, security checks, interviews and background investigations, but also “Refugees are processed in conjunction with nine nonprofits, not solely by the government.” (and there is even more at Vox on how few Syrian refugees have been allowed in.)

On the USNews site you can see where refugees since 2011 have bee settled – 25 are in Baltimore, while 115 are in Houtson.

Since a Syrian passport was reportedly found near one of the assailants in the Paris terror attacks there is heightened fears that Islamic State group terrorists could or are exploit(ing) refugee routes and resettlement programs as a way to prepare for later attacks. And on Thursday, the House passed a bill that would impose additional security measures on refugees from Syria and Iraq. But...

You can read critical articles like “The Big Logical Error Made By Everyone Linking Syrian Refugees To The Paris Attack” which asserts “All the perpetrators of the mass murder in Paris who have been identified are European nationals from France and Belgium.”

The Washington Post added that a passport was found near the slain body of one of the terrorists. It was issued to Ahmad Almohammad, a 25-year-old Syrian national, by officials in Greece on October 4. He had arrived a day earlier on a boat carrying migrants from Turkey. Some view this as evidence that one of the terrorists was a refugee. Authorities, however, have determined that the passport is fake. On Tuesday, November 17, Syrian officials arrested another man at a refugee camp who carried a forged passport with the exact same information. It is now unclear if he is involved in the case.

                                      From inquisitr

It seems unlikely that facts alone may not be determinative with this type of group concern meets a panic reaction for a while. Given political campaigns we are more likely to hear stagements from Republican presidential candidates like Chris Christie who has said his state will not take in any refugees – “not even orphans under the age of five”. Or Carlie Fiorina says 'vast majority' of Syrian refugees are able bodied young men. http://ow.ly/UWk38  (Boo says Politifacat)

But perhaps getting a more personal experience with what refugees experience might provide a richer, human experience. Just last year a movie dramatizing the experience of the Lost Boys of Sudan provides one such theatrical experience that on what US resettlement is like and what some refugees go through before, during and after resettlement. This includes the chill imposed by 9/11 and the plight of families trying to reunite during a freeze in immigration. The story has a Christian immigrant view of things, but the experience is more general given who the real life actors are.

Orphaned by the brutal Civil war in Sudan that began in 1983, these young victims traveled as many as a thousand miles on foot in search of safety. Fifteen years later, a humanitarian effort would bring 3600 lost boys and girls to America

The main characters are played by actual refugees—two of whom we learn were child soldiers.  They are the focus with” uninflected, authoritative performances.” compensate for the feel-good simplifications of (the) script.  

If you want to feel a bit of what child refugees got through in war, what it is like to be torn from family and culture you can watch this movie and along the way learn a bit about a connection to Mark Twain via Huck Finn explain the nature of a Good Lie.

Who me? I’m not responsible. Why do those things happen?

by Gary Berg-Cross

Flight from responsibility with its resulting dilemmas is nothing new, but it confronts us in a variety of ways across the country, globe and culture.  It is difficult not to think of the reign of unintended consequences of irresponsibility as we are showered with 21^st century news.  This ranges from the responsibility of deaths from police such as in Ferguson, Missouri; to epidemic deaths in Africa; to thousands and millions in conflicts around the globe.  No one thing seems responsible, although you can find attempts to simplify it down to a target cause.  Policemen are only doing their duty and protecting themselves.  They are not responsible if someone gets shot.  Riots break out as unintended consequence of that action.  Are the police, the community of the media responsible for that?  It’s just an unanticipated consequence of a diffuse system where it is difficult to locate one single, intended, responsible cause.  But a multi-causal/many hands explanation might mean that I, as a citizen, share some of the responsibility.  No, not me.  Society says that a crime and such must be intentional.  It's not my intent.  It must be them, or whatever, but not me.

So an easy, religio-cultural defense is that “I didn't intend for this to happen” any more that an anthropomorphic God intended bad things to happen.  Of course, social science suggests that "actions" are generally performed by some human or animal for some purpose.  Certainly we have things discussed in business, law, government, economics that depends on goals or purpose. It’s just that these or a person's model of what will happen based on some intended action may not be what will really happen. Our models are imperfect.  So we have the famous" unintended consequences" and a search for someone/something responsible to blame.  It is a difficult causal analysis and one can understand why we tend to avoid the complex explanation for the simple. Indeed it is a general phenomena that we may recognize which problems are significant, but they are often difficult and so we drift sideways on easier problems and topics that provide more immediate pleasure and conversation.

Fox News is blaming President Obama for being indifferent to the threat of terrorism.  He's an easy target of the focus of who is responsible for all that goes wrong in the Near East.  Who’s responsible for these deaths?  We want a simple answer.  Of course there is a history here and other players with various intentions.  But there is one model to analyze all of this, so as beings with limited analytic ability, we simplify with rules of thumb and biases.  It’s hard for most of us to believe that the President intends things to go wrong, but in politicized times we look for a simple agent explanation.  It’s a very natural way of thinking. But is can be dangerous.  Things happen for a “reason”, but if it is something I don’t like it makes sense to find a cause external to one’s self and group to blame.  And blaming can make enemies of lead to the gridlock of two 6 year olds fighting.

Why are there high divorce rates, the spread of venereal disease, troubles in our schools, and increases in teen suicide, along with alcohol and drug abuse among the poor?  A simple answer is that it’s their culture (see The Poverty of Reason by Glenn C. Loury) .  They are responsible, not the larger society in which poverty is created.  So if "they" rather than "I" are responsible I don't have to do anything about this problem and its unintended (by me at least) consequences.

I can ignore social sciences understanding of dysfunctional behavior patterns adopted by people in poor communities. It’s just too complicated for me to understand and this support broad solutions. 

A worrisome, perhaps central, example of this fight from responsibility is the creeping impact of climate change. Why aren't we taking action? Sure there are scientific warnings about what is happening and why. We  don’t want the anticipated climate changes let along unanticipated ones.  But since they are part of a very complex natural system, coupled with human institutions and power centers beyond my control, it seems to say that “things just happen”. Someone responsible will have to deal with that. 

As passengers on planet earth we can say “I don’t intend that the seas warm and polar bears die off.  My conscience is clear and my moral principles say that I am not to blame.  And thus we drift to unintended consequences unless we see some shared responsibility. As noted in the lead up discussion for the recent UN climate summit:

“...stating that nobody is responsible for climate change leads to paralysis. Second, empirical evidence of public and private initiatives in distant corners of the world ... suggests that both individuals and groups are actively taking responsibility for climate change mitigation.

Climate change can also be approached as a problem of collective moral responsibility. “

Who Has Moral Responsibility for Climate Change?

VANESA CASTAN BROTO, MAR 6 2013

Humanist William James on Certain Blindness in Human Beings

By Gary Berg-Cross

These are angry times on so many level including the war front.  It seems at times like “The Guns of August II” or to paraphrase a recent WAPO article, “Is this 1939 again?”  Will the dogs of war and the romance of simple military solutions sweep away another generation?

Events don’t make it easy to talk about alternatives to war or the value of the culture of peace, but perhaps such times are exactly when we need this conversation the most.  As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

          “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate

          cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” 

With this hypothesis in mind it seems like a good time share, if not love, then a peaceful space in which to discuss such the topics.  WASH MDC has organized a panel and community discussion on Sept. 6th from 2-4 (Wheaton Public Library, 11701 Georgia Ave., Wheaton, MD ) on the topic of Peace and Issues including a Humanist perspective. Edd Doerr, past AHA president, who blogs here often, will be on the panel along with an anthropologist with experience in peace negotiations. 

I thought that I’d get a little jump on the meeting with a few humanist-oriented thoughts on the challenge of peace going back to a time before the WWI Guns of August swept away the Great Powers' peace.  Why not a mini-Renaissance on the prospects of avoiding the damages of war and the building of a culture of peace?

Around the turn of the 20^th Century American

Philosopher/Psychologist William James looking back to the Civil War, a squalid US war with Spain and the recent Boer war.  It was the late colonial period. Looking back to our late 20th and now recent 21st century events in history's rear view mirror they start to uncomfortably resemble the earllier aggressions that James lamented.  Similar too is the specter of war clouds abroad that motivated James to gave talks and write a series of anti-war pamphlets around the turn of the century,  He started with one called “Certain Blindness in Human Beings” in 1899.  In raising anti-war consciousness James was leveraging facts & new understanding from the social sciences.  It seemed to him that the emerging sciences offered some enlightened basis to understand human nature and the tendency toward violence.  Certainly he saw the corruption of language as the word Peace and peaceful activity had come to mean essentially the preparation for war.  And with that start of new factual understanding strengthened with a Progressive philosophy of truth,  knowledge & morality James argued we could begin to take on age old problem & escape the ruptures to civilizations caused by war. But it would, as he later said, take a moral and culture commitment as strong as the commitment to war and militarism. To bring the war-party and the peace-party together an extended discipline was needed and the avoidance ot, as he said:

  “The strength of one’s opposition to war depends on the correctness of one’s position, certainly, but it also requires a better understanding of the permanent enemy among us, namely, “the bellicosity of human nature.”

New understanding in turn calls on moral action. Beyond the mere intellectual conviction that war is morally unacceptable, James argued that we have a

 “bounden duty to resist settling reasonable disputes in a violent manner,”

Instead suggests James one is also obliged to translate one’s beliefs into an active, yet non-violent resistance to the human proclivity to settle disputes  “quickly, thrillingly, tragically, and by force.”

    From http://williamjamesstudies.org/8.1/kipton.pdf

That’s still good advice and a hard task. Sure, we have an even better fact and theory basis to understand human tendencies.  It’s just that empirical science and our best wisdom, tempered by moral sense, seem now to be again out of power and favor.  What passes for statecraft is running somewhat amok.

James followed him 1899 work with 2 later ones. The Essence of Humanism & The Moral Equivalent of War.  In the first James pointed to the hopes of Humanism mixed with a Pragmatic philosophy which he saw as levers  to advance society’s enlightenment:

Humanism is a ferment that has "come to stay." It is not a single hypothesis of theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new center of interest or point of sight.

A humanist perspective might be marshalled to avoid war, but in Moral Equivalence he starts with the observation that:

“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.”

It certainly hasn't been easy and The Great War proved to be a steam roller that ended peace and progress for a generation.  James saw militarism well entrenched asd as Chris Hedges later wrote, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. As James put it:

"The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration.

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. .."

These ideas are  protected by irrationality, paradox and old human tendencies claimed as the highest of virtues not balanced by enlightened passion .

“ The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals   from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade…

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. 

James could see the factors that militaristic times leverage to trample peaceful stances.  There is seemingly paradox there too as some things so horrible should propel us into action, but they are rationalized away with ego defenses and spin:


"Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him (people). The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.”   From   http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

 Yes, and we still are willing to pay for war over pre-school and the like.

James worries and paradoxes & double personalities of civilized man still hold sway even as the Humanist perspective and a better understanding of human nature sheds light on factors like irrationality, the politics of fear, scapegoating, personalizing evil, religious & self-justification, the seduction of glory, the fear of shame, tribal solidarity, pugnacity.  James saw it all and rang the bell of warning that is hard to hear with the thump of bombs.

Still sadly still  too true. In our time the Dept of War has become the Dept of Defense. We have perpetual preparation of war and plans for attack masked in the right of self defense. As James said:

"Peace" in military mouths today is a synonym for "war expected." The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace" and "war" mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the 'peace'-interval."....and

"...no legitimate interest of any one of them (Great Powers) would seem to justify the tremendous destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests."

Cartoon from http://cybertrails.org/mil/

Metaphorical Conflicts: Budget, Arguments & Belief

By Gary Berg-Cross

Who will win the budget battle? It’s a war of words. Which side has conquering strategy and the troops to take control? Just now this is the type of warlike phrasing heard around the debate ceiling limit. It’s an argument without reasonable compromise, which in turn can have consequences.

It’s a PR ware but also bit of a conflict of wills and intentions and has its war-like tactics and strategies. Based on experience and leveraging their philosophies each side has developed approaches to “win” the argument. Metaphorically it can seem a bit like a sports contest (or even a war) and takes on some of their trappings. I worry about the consequences when pragmatic reasoning is pushed out of the conversation. We have to understand that there is a deep reality behind the current language since it isn’t just Shakespeare that speaks in metaphors. In Metaphors We Live linguist George Lakoff, and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are not late embellishments of thoughts that make them vivid and persuasive. They are essential mental tools that actively shape our perceptions, knowledge and understanding. So thinking of debate as a "war" for example, leads to one set of expectations as how the back and forth will proceed. It may also shape how we see the post-debate world.

War IS like an argument in that you can win or lose. It is therefore easy to see a person on the other side of an argument as the enemy just as we do in a real war. And facts and arguments, like territory can be attacked and defended. We can say:

Your facts/claims are indefensible

If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and draw up a new line of attack. The we can say

She attacked the weak points in his argument.

In argument as in war we gain and lose some resource, capital or ground. To be effective we plan and use strategies as well as tactics. And we project the likelihood of success as in:

If you take that strategy, he'll wipe you out.

Many of the things we do in arguing are then partially structured by the concept of war. Once we are talking like this we push others into the metaphor and often away from some reality. The following are examples that further illustrate the metaphor of debate or argument as a form of war:

My criticisms were right on target.

This demolished his whole argument.

My father always won the family arguments.

She shot down all of my arguments.

It’s OK if these actually reflect some underlying reality, but often they do not. People who argue for a literal interpretation of the Bible for example, can use such triumphal language. Such phrasing of hot conflict is often amplified by opinion leaders and echo chambers that push ideological (or religious) positions. There are many sides to this debate but to a secular rationalist it has elements that mix war metaphors along with irrational ideological and religious infused moral arguments. Certainly there are different ideological positions about competing interests, the value of tax breaks for the wealthiest, the value of direct government help to the unemployed. And invoking religious teachers and traditions to build support for political positions is not unusual as some just simply ask, “what Jesus would do?” There are even many views on that. To be fair, the religious community is divided on which side to come down on in this debate. Nationwide, about 4,000 pastors signed a letter entitled “Listen to Your Pastors ” which expressed a degree of charity. The letter was circulated around the Capital by Sojourners, a D.C.-based Christian social justice organization. It advised politicians not to cut welfare and charity programs for the poor and cited some history:

“It wasn’t spending on the poor that caused this deficit. Half of it was financing two wars off the books without paying for them and tax cuts to the wealthiest,... Let’s get our house in order, but not on the backs of our poorest people.”

Good for them, because history and topics like the cost and value of war seem out of mind in this debate. A causal analysis of the history events and who did what leading to our deficit seems not to be part of the context for the negotiation going on. It certainly isn’t part of conservative talking points. It’s more like a walking case of selective amnesia that says:

“Let's forget for the moment who and what got us here. Yes, we didn’t pay for a war or two. We worked through the Clinton surplus and reduced taxes so our deficits rose by the trillions. Let forget all that and talk about Social Security. Yes, I know that it been running a surplus, but isn’t it evil since it is social?”

As alluded to before this reminds me a bit of the cognitive lapses in conversations with intelligent design (ID) and evolutionists. ID folks don’t want to talk about the enormous and ever expanding realm of what modern evolution theory explains. Forget all that. They want to frame the argument on terms favorable to ID/creation science’s terms. This includes a contrived model for evidence. ID assumes that every possible shred of evidence tending to discredit, or at least question, biological evolution is evidence that confirms intelligent design. This is at best a negative argument of evolution incompleteness but not proof of design. The debate tactic focuses on taking some favorable ground. This is the reality that science’s horizons involve controversy. On this ground creationists can seize the initiative with a few glib phrases. Such shallow arguments and tactics are abhorrent in biological discussions and political-economic ones as well. It’s as if the one infects the other.

Beyond such cognitive flaws the arguments of some conservatives take on a sanctimonious flavor of good versus evil. They seem inflamed by near-religious passions of moral conviction. Some use an Ayn Rand, Fountainhead-like language labeling (and libeling?) the liberal side as big, bad “Government religionists.” To a non-fact based, ideological position no mis-characterization seems too extreme. It is even better if language floats free of facts to ride on emotion and mythical stories. The strategy seems to be to seize the conversational ground with a catchy slogan – one that can play meme-like in the echo chambers of the media. The Grover Norquist oath of “no tax increases” is one of those artificial, binary black-white lines that can’t be crossed. That and "starve the beast" strikes what Jim Sleeper called mystic chords in his blog The Debt Crisis' Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, Airheads, and the Rest of Us . Reason and historical perspective is thrown out as we are treated to balanced budget amendment that float dream like on an unchallengeable belief in a magic solutions.

Besides the ID-evolution and pro-government vs. anti-government arguments the current debate also reminds of atheist-religious debates. We’ve probably all seen, heard or participated in arguments between people from the religious community and the atheist/secular community. Both can be highly motivated. From a distance there are parallel motivations and views. Each sees the other side as having serious defects. Followers of traditional religions faiths see rationalism, secular humanism, atheism and the like as a life threatening illness that needs be cured and they have that cure as laid out in sacred texts interpreted by special people. They are motivated to go forth and evangelize and save the unbelieving. They also believe that religions offer wisdom based on very old thinking that makes it true today and well, for all time. Jim Sleeper called this pre-political view a Godhead one and used a 1980 quote from James Lucier, assistant to conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms in 1980 represent the position.

"The liberal leadership groups that run the country -- not just the media but also the politicians, corporate executives ... have been trained in an intellectual tradition that is ... highly rationalistic. That training excludes most of the things that are important to the people who are selling cars and digging ditches. The principles that we're espousing, have been around for thousands of years: The family ..., faith that ... there is a higher meaning than materialism. Property as a fundamental human right ... and that a government should not be based on deficit financing and economic redistribution ... . It's not the 'new right' - people are groping for a new term. It's pre-political."

There’s lots not to agree with in this belief. Non-believer “beliefs” are otherwise and arise from different sources, often more contextualized. They also have to pass a gauntlet of rational analysis and empirical inquiry. Based on resulting facts and reasoning they can obviously see religious people as having problems with rationality and the role of evidence. This is what they (we) see that needs “curing” or at least progressively improving. That’s one reason that atheist and agnostic arguments are often broad educational improvement efforts aimed at straightening others out. Unfortunately on the current budget debate we’re running out of time for education. Conservatives remain dug in with moral, religious and ideological positions. It’s more like a war where whatever happens will have impacts over a vast period of time and the impacts are usually bad. Even among people that are portrayed as centrists seeking a “compromise” there is a lack of realistic thinking. Economist Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, made this point recently when analyzing the “Gang of Six” proposal, which takes some aim at social security. Baker points out that about 1/3rd of retirees are almost completely dependent on Social Security. Meaning that any SSN cuts will seriously be felt by that group, and it will in turn affect the economy. They will have less ability to purchase what they need when we need to stimulate the economy. Yet the Gang of Six obviously proposes to cut Social Security and ignoring relevant evidence and economic reasoning. We have been pushed into politically practical compromises that are not economically pragmatic.

Another parallel. It starts with metaphoric language but fooling ourselves, deceiving others, hiding the truth and making workable compromise too difficult a mountain to climb all had its consequences.