Secular Addiction Recovery

My last hurrah as a volunteer with SMART Recovery and Recovering from Religion is a talk I gave about Secular Addiction Recovery, which you can see here: https://youtu.be/PdxYIcJjbMA.

Serenity Prayer

I propose a new version of the wonderful Serenity Prayer: 

“Develop serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” 

I replaced “God grant me” or “Grant me” with “Develop.” Here’s why. Serenity, courage, and knowing the difference between things I can and cannot change require learning through study, contemplation, practice, and experience – they are not granted.

Background

American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the Serenity Prayer in 1932, used it in a sermon in 1943, first published it in 1951, and in 1955 it appeared in Alcoholics Anonymous publications. It has been widely used in addiction recovery, psychotherapy, posters, and medallions ever since.

Focusing on things within our control is a key feature of modern mental health therapy techniques. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was developed in the 1960s & 70s by Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, and others. CBT techniques are applied to irrational beliefs and cognitive distortions, such as control and fairness fallacies. Control fallacies are distorted thoughts about things that happen due to external forces or due to your own actions. The distortion involves assigning them incorrectly.  Fairness fallacies afflict those who are overly concerned about fairness. The person who goes through life looking for fairness in all their experiences may end up resentful and unhappy.  But as as we all know, life is not always fair. Sometimes things go our way, and sometimes they don’t, regardless of how fair it may seem. Similarly, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches us to accept not only our circumstances, but also our feelings about them. Then focus on things within our control and act accordingly. Along these lines you will also find mindfulness meditation practices.

Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) covers the circle of concern and the circle of influence, with ideas on how to expand the circle of influence. Others have added a circle of control. Covey mentions things under our direct control, indirect control, and no control. In any event, it is wise to recognize that even though the Serenity Prayer is presented as a simple dichotomy (things we can or cannot control), our ability to control things vary by degree. So our developed wisdom is our guide.

All these ideas can be traced back 2000 years to stoic philosophers Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca, and others in ancient Greece and Rome.

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." – Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.5-5

“Some things are in our control, while others are not. We control our opinion, choice, desire, aversion, and, in a word, everything of our own doing. We don’t control our body, property, reputation, position, and, in a word, everything not of our own doing.”  ― Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1.1-2

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another. These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills into tune with nature’s.” – Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

My wife Laura is my favorite stoic. Without going into great detail, she has overcome more than her fair share of tragedy. I often hear her say, “You know what? That is beyond my control so I might as well just get on with it.”  The day after the Harpeth River flooded our house in 2010, she put on her “WHATEVER” T-shirt and got to work cleaning up.

“May have to do it. Don’t have to like it.” - Song written by Mike Stinson, performed by Jesse Dayton

“You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.” - Navy SEAL Training

On Race

Writing about race is hard. I am doing it with good intentions. It is to carve out a place for treating all people well while not having other people’s beliefs imposed upon me.

Leftists find a willing accomplice in the well-meaning anti-racist, those who think racism is systemic are too easily persuaded that the way to fix racism is to dismantle the system. All the socialist has to do is whisper “capitalism is racist.” All the anarchist has to do is shout “policing is racist.” All the communist has to say is “democracy is racist.” If they go on to say “science is racist, reason is racist” then, if they get their way, the Enlightenment is over and it is back to superstitions of the Dark Ages. Don’t fall for it. Instead ask, “OK, after we dismantle the system, then what?

Of course black lives matter, lower case. The trouble is woke leftists overran Black Lives Matter, the organization. From the BLM website what-we-believe page: "engage comrades," "dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women," "dismantle the patriarchal practice," "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure." Fortunately that page was removed. But what remains on the site has the same font as communist propaganda. Coincidence? 

Those are concerns about the extreme Left. But even moderate incarnations like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are troubling. And the trouble is including race as a criteria for decision-making, such as hiring, promotions, college acceptance, and supplier selection (I work in purchasing). That’s because race is superficial. It is only skin deep. It is unrelated to merit.

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” ~ MLK from his “I have a dream” speech

At least that's how I was raised. As a result I try and usually succeed in treating everyone respectfully. When I don’t succeed it might not even be related to race, despite what unconscious bias training programs might say. When we strive to be color-blind we exclude race from decision-making, whereas DEI programs seek to bring race into play. When a characteristic unrelated to merit is brought into decision-making, merit can suffer as a trade-off.  Also being challenged are enlightenment values like reason, objectivity, and the scientific method by "other ways of knowing," "indigenous folk science," "lived experience," and "my truth." When merit, science, and truth are undermined, outcomes deteriorate.

Yes, writing about race is hard. Time to give it a rest!

Presumption of Innocence and Woke Cancel Culture

There is a principle in criminal law called the Blackstone Ratio, which says "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." This liberal principle is an expression of the Presumption of Innocence, which is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Article 11.(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence. 

Not all people in history have agreed with this sentiment, however. Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh said "Better ten innocent deaths than one enemy survivor." 

These are statements about the perceived costs of false positives (identifying an innocent person as guilty) versus the costs of false negatives (identifying a guilty person as innocent).   On one end we have people valuing freedom on the other those who value purity. Leftism as expressed through woke cancel culture is currently moving towards purity by neglecting false positives. Increasingly it seems the prevailing view is that it's better to accuse 10 innocent people of racism than to miss one. It's better 10 innocent men get wrongly accused and fired than for one sexual predator to not. Better to have 10 innocent shunned than one enemy among our midst. This is moving us to a place where people excessively censor and self-censor, which impairs productive dialogue. This outcome is an inevitable consequence of costless false positives. There is almost no cost to identifying an innocent person as a bigot. Not only can it not be proven wrong, the only time accusations backfire is in the form of lawsuits for libel, defamation, or wrongful dismissal, which are costly and rare.

One way to counter this impulse is to impose social costs on dubious accusations. People should be criticized for accusing innocent people. Innocence here does not have to be proven; it is to be presumed. If someone cannot support their accusation, they are to be countered for inaccurate bigotry detection and for toying with peoples’ reputations. But innocence is not presumed if certain categories of people are said to be inherent oppressors and that systemic racism permeates society. That’s the rub.

The Presumption of Innocence comes into play in other arenas. Consider argumentation. Best practice includes giving your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt. Have a charitable view of her motivations. When summarizing her position, build a steel-man not a straw-man. Do it so even she agrees with your representation of her views. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. To understand is to forgive. In contrast, the calls for justice by social justice activists sometimes sound shrill, more like vengence. Social Vengence!

***********

Journalist Andrew Sullivan described two steps to get back on track. First, get Trump out to quell extremism on the right. Complete. Second is to pivot and confront the leftist, woke, critical race activists that Biden will enable. On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order reinstating critical race theory training for government employees. He also prioritizes ending systemic racism – an inherently elusive goal. Now both chambers of Congress are Democrat majorities, allowing woke infiltration into government, academia, and corporations to continue unabated. It will be interesting to see if pundits Sullivan, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, even Tucker Carlson will have any dampening effect.  Meanwhile Christopher Rufo, who penned Trump’s ban on critical race theory in government training, is forming “a new coalition of law firms and legal foundation with the explicit goal of fighting critical race theory in the courts.” And Helen Pluckrose launched Counterweight to help people resist the imposition of critical social justice on their everyday lives. We will see how it all plays out.

Maybe in another post I will articulate my objections to critical social justice, woke ideology, diversity/equity/inclusion programs, and so on.

Braver Angels

I attended an online workshop put on by Braver Angels (https://braverangels.org), an organization that seeks to depolarize American politics. The workshop is called Depolarizing Within: Becoming a Better Angel in Your Own World. It teaches you how to find your own polarizing speech even when talking with like-minded people. It called out 4 markers of polarization: stereotyping, dismissing, ridiculing, and contempt. That’s when it hit me. Those are also characteristics we warn against as being bigoted. Polarization and bigotry both show a lack of respect for the “other,” for those people, for people who are different.

Overdoing Democracy

In 2011 I completed a Master of Liberal Arts & Science at Vanderbilt University. As an alum I was recently allowed to audit a course in Ethics taught by Robert Talisse. Dr. Talisse has become quite active authoring books, doing podcasts, and in social media. His book Overdoing Democracy (2019) presents the great idea that democracy, if it is to be effective, needs to be kept in its place. That is, politics need not permeate everything. We all need endeavors where politics are beside the point. Examples: raising a family, most jobs and volunteering, sports, music, and art.

Here are excerpts taken from various pages of the book that seem to flow fairly well together:

“Belief polarization besets individuals who talk only or mainly to others who share their fundamental commitments. To be more specific, when individuals talk mainly with others about the matters upon which they agree, discussants tend gradually to embrace a more extreme version of their initial opinion. Belief polarization is the tendency whereby discussion among likeminded people results in the participants shifting to a more extreme version of their pre-discussion belief. 

“So the first step to take toward putting politics in its place is to acknowledge our own vulnerability to the polarization dynamic. We need to work to recognize in ourselves the vulnerability to the same distortions and corruptions that we commonly ascribe only to our political opposition. We should acknowledge that our own views are likely products of belief polarization.  <We should> recognize that the common asymmetry in ascribing the effects of the polarization dynamic is unfounded, and that one’s own view of one’s political opposition is likely the product of polarization. 

“Putting politics in its place involves establishing boundaries within our social environments, and thereby restricting the reach of democracy so that social encounters of other kinds can take place. Hence it is consistent with being a vigilant and conscientious democratic citizen who is fully devoted to justice to simply refuse to use Facebook as a site for political action, for example. And although friends and feeds might contend otherwise, there is no dereliction of one’s political duty in using social media strictly to look at videos of pets. 

“If we are to work on breaking the polarization dynamic, what we need to do is engage in endeavors that satisfy a particular description; namely, they must involve us in cooperative activities with others whose political commitments are not only unknown to us but also beside the point. And although there are certain collective activities that are intrinsically political, whether a collaboration of some other sort counts as nonpolitical in the relevant sense depends largely on what we bring to it. 

“Hence the practical recommendation: after working to rehabilitate your view of your political opponents, try taking up some cooperative project or endeavor that you regard as not having a determinate political valence. If this project is something out of the ordinary for you, all the better. Volunteer to pick up litter in a local park or to teach someone to read at the public library. Sign up with a group that visits the elderly and infirm. Join a bowling team or book club. Register for a cooking class. Participate in a community organization. Begin following a local sports team. Organize a trivia night at a local bar or start up a group that supports local businesses. Audition for a local choir. It ultimately does not matter very much what you choose to try; the important thing is that you do something that you sincerely take not to be an expression of your particular political identity. The idea is that if we can multiply social encounters where citizens collaborate to produce what they regard as a valuable outcome, but in collaborating are unaware of one another’s political allegiances, we will be on our way to breaking the polarization dynamic as well as cultivating civic friendship.”

Talisse summarizes: “I first identified two measures that one can take in order to begin breaking the polarization dynamic and putting politics in its place. The first is to acknowledge one’s own vulnerability to polarization; the second is to take small but nonetheless significant steps to desaturate one’s immediate environment. I then proposed that once these measures are taken, the next step is to involve oneself in social activities that one sincerely judges are not expressions of one’s politics. The overriding objective of these efforts—and the key to breaking the polarization dynamic more generally—is to enable a rehabilitation of one’s conception of one’s political opponents. To acknowledge that our political animosities and divisions are at least partly the result of a debilitating syndrome to which we all are subject is to begin to reestablish the capacity to regard one’s political rivals as one’s equals. Once we recognize that our perception of the depth and severity of our political divisions are due to a dynamic that afflicts us all, and once we follow that recognition with cooperative engagements that reaffirm the humanity and civility of those whose politics are unknown to us, we can begin to admit that our political conflicts are not necessarily the result of our opposition’s depravity and corruption. Hence we will be able to affirm that, despite their being severely misguided, wrong, and ignorant when it comes to the political things that matter most, our political opponents are nonetheless our equals and therefore are entitled to an equal democratic say. 

The point of democracy—and also its good—lies in the nurturing of things beyond politics. The point of democracy is human flourishing. That is what democracy is for. Our flourishing, both individually and collectively, depends also on the realization of goods that cannot be won by politics alone.”

Now let me take it one step further. Not only can we overdo democracy and politics, but we can also overdo government itself. If we feel so strongly about elections, maybe it means government has taken an outsized role in our lives. A limited government safeguarded by our Constitutional checks and balances is what we need. This will allow private enterprise and individual responsibility to take precedence. It is an argument for Libertarianism, if not as final destination, at least as a direction.

The War of Art

I see my last post was June 2018. Wow, 2-1/2 years ago!

Jon Acuff, a motivational speaker who happens to live in my neighborhood, recommends the book The War of Art (2002). In it author Steven Pressfield describes how to overcome resistance by pursuing your creativity like a professional, getting up every morning to just do it.  So here I am before 7am -- writing. I have some things to say. Verbally I sometimes stumble or hesitate to bring up the controversial topics I read and think about.  Like philosophy, religion, politics, science, and culture wars. I am stepping down from two volunteer programs I’ve been supporting for the last 5 years with hopes of creating space for new endeavors. I am stepping down without knowing what those new endeavors might be. We will see. But my first idea is to try writing. I will stop now to poop and watch the CBS morning news for today’s eye opener -- your world in 90 seconds. It is a great way to check on current events without dwelling on them. 

Back now.

The volunteer roles were with two wonderful organizations: Recovering from Religion and SMART Recovery. Recovering from Religion helps people who are struggling with or leaving their faith. I served as a helpline agent taking incoming calls and chats, curating website resource links, interviewing new volunteers, and facilitating support group meetings. SMART Recovery helps people overcome addictive behaviors with a secular, science-based approach. I started the first support group meetings in middle Tennessee and became regional coordinator for the state of Tennessee. Turnover is a problem that can beset any organization, but especially volunteer organizations, when knowledge and experience suddenly walk out the door.  Succession planning is important to me so I have been busy developing my replacements. Almost complete.

Time to get started on my day job, the one I get paid for. Since the pandemic I work 100% from home. All I have to do is slide over to the next desk in my office. When I return I will tell you about my office.

My office is upstairs. It is either a small extra bedroom or a big alcove with sloped ceilings (13’x11’). My work computer sits on my desk, the Apple Mac sits beside on a card table with one of those multi-purpose printer-copier-scanner-fax machines in between. Along the wall with the window are shelves holding knick-knacks, awards, framed photos, diplomas, and certificates. There’s my chess set, dumbbells, metal box with important papers, sofa, Bluetooth speaker, and guitar. By the door is my bookcase with books I’ve read but can’t seem to part with, including The War of Art. And there sits our dog, Cooper, a Jack Russell Terrier and Shih Tzu mix – which makes him a Jack Shits! All this with just enough clutter for that inviting, lived-in look.

Ok let’s get into a topic.

I voted for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen in the 2020 Presidential election. The Republican and Democratic nominees where not appealing to me. I could not vote for Trump because of his lying and bragging. I was concerned about Biden’s age, mental acuity, and the woke illiberal Left flank of the Democratic Party. So I voted for Jo Jorgensen because she is a reasonable person, but also to express my displeasure with the candidates presented by the two-party system and to follow my libertarian instincts.  I almost voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016, but his bizarre comments towards the end of his campaign seemed intended to deliberately shoo away votes. I sensed that the race was getting tight so I changed my mind in the voting booth and voted for Hillary Clinton, never Trump. When you vote 3rd party you have to overcome the valid argument that you are throwing your vote away since there is no chance of winning. But I feel good about it because I expressed my Libertarian leanings: freedom of choice, free trade, free movement across borders, freedom of speech and thought, and limited, non-aggressive government. A friend likes to tell me “Libertarians live in a bad neighborhood, right next to anarchy.”  Let me assure I am no extremist or anarchist. I am a centrist and a moderate who leans toward liberty.

More to follow.