HUMILITY? DOES BUSH HAVE IT?

One of the most puzzling issues concerning George Bush is why he can’t get along with people. He can’t get along with half of the American people, and he certainly doesn’t seem to be able to get along with most of the free world outside the boundaries of the U.S.

Some of us think we know why he’s such a troublemaker. We recognize that, of course, he’s a dry drunk, unable to be one among many and lacking the humility to see that he just can’t always have things his own way and that if he does force his will on others, he’ll end up causing more trouble than good and making more enemies than friends. Dry drunks never see that they’re sometimes wrong. They insist on having their way.

Some of us also understand that part of Bush’s inability to be humble is his religious temperament. Religious people (like orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Moslems and evangelical Christians) just are not willing to admit they can be wrong. This is because their religions teach them that they are right and the rest of the world wrong. With that sort of training, how can a truly religious person get along with people who think differently from them?


A PLASTIC FREEDOM?

In a MIND SO RARE (pp.208-209), Merlin Donald writes, “Neural plasticity simply implies that there is some flexibility in the way a nervous system unfolds in reaction to the environment [and] plasticity itself is subject to natural selection....” (p. 210)

We just keep stacking up the evidence for evolution, don’t we? How plastic is Bush’s brain? Is he and his an evolutionary deadend, unable to move on? Or is his dead-headedness, what natural selection will elect?


A SOURCE OF HUMILITY

The humble choice we all can make if we have the courage, if we want to honor human freedom, is the choice to give up our lives for the greater good of mankind. Metaphorically and, yet, literally too, that’s what an atheist does when he chooses his philosophy over the primitive religions which continue to offer “eternal life” in exchange for fawning obedience to their king/gods and kingdoms. Only atheists can relish the feeling of true human freedom and are truly suited to the rigors of democracy. It is the irony of their rebellion in which their freedom is won that everyone loses their lives and not a shot is fired.
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"Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowlege of good and evil. He acts against God's command... From the standpoint of the Church, which represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom." —Erich Fromm