PEACE SWORD

PEACE SWORD

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“I came not to send peace, but a sword.”  Mathew 5:34

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God’s peace requires first a sword.  If our real enemy were in fact natural, a worldly weapon would do.  Instead, Jesus sent the Spirit of a Holy Child to live in the home of our hearts.  Wheeling the sword of His Spirit in that home severs us from an entire family of desires that hinder our peace.  Use the sword He sent, so you might truly enjoy peace this Christmas.

I AM STANDING WITH STANDING ROCKBRIGHT

I AM STANDING WITH STANDING ROCK

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The thread that ties me to the Dakota pipeline is historically thin and weak.  It starts in the summer of 1861.  The Arkansas Mounted Rifles recruited my great-grandfather’s brother, Wiley Clark Eppler a farmer and saddle maker, at gunpoint.  Arkansas, ramping up its military in preparation for the Civil War, needed to” tack up” many additional horses.  While working on his farm, that summer, Confederate “recruiters” compelled Wiley to ride off with them, without even allowing him to return home for his coat.  That winter, while attacking a band of pro-Union Cherokee, Wiley took a musket ball in the chest that punctured his lung and fractured two or three of his ribs.  It is hard to see Wiley as a victim sense his unit left no trace of Chief Opothleyahola’s band…men, women, or children.  Wiley did survive, but now one hundred fifty-five years later, his great-grandnephew, in my small way is offering support to the Sioux of South Dakota at Standing Rock.  

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The Standing Rock issue began when concerns over an oil pipeline contaminating the water supply of the North Dakota capital of Bismarck caused its redirection through Standing Rock.  A leak along there would ruin the tribal nation’s aquifers and rivers.  In the words of a local assistant principal, “... it would be a death sentence."

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My great granduncle’s foe, represented by the Cherokee Nation’s Principal Chief, Bill John Baker, made the following declaration in August.

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“The Cherokee Nation stands in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its effort to halt the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and I applaud our Tribal Council for showing the support of the legislative body of the Cherokee Nation as well.  The Standing Rock people have an inherent right to protect their homelands, their historic and sacred sites, their natural resources, their drinking water and their families from this potentially dangerous pipeline.”

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Chief Baker updated his commitment in a statement in response to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer, November 15, 2016.

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“The camp is prepared for a long winter and ready to peacefully protect the water that sustains many communities.  I remain hopeful that the Army Corp of Engineers will render a decision that will take into account tribal concerns.  We pray that the well-being of the community will be prioritized ahead of profit and corporate interests.”

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As for me, I am a sailor, and no activist, yet I cannot help being sympathetic to the injustice imposed, again, on these ancient indigenous people.  That is why, in solidarity with them my wife, two sons, my daughter-in-laws, and grandchild helped Café Gratitude serve free Thanksgiving meals in a fundraiser to support their resistance.  My lack of sympathy for Wiley’s injury, in light of the murderous offense of his unit, causes me to wonder about how my progeny will judge the causes I support.  What causes do I stand for today might generations tomorrow judge valueless, or even harmful in the future? 

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Thanksgiving at Cafe Gratitude

Like other Western families, unavoidable changes have disrupted the Eppler family unity over the ages.  Changes come not just from family relationships, but also from advances in technology, science, economics, theology, politics, philosophy, or culture.  However, that does not kept us from fully committing life, limb, and property to causes that later are judge unworthy of devotion.  The commitments held with such confidence today are often the ones we opposed twenty or thirty years later.  Nonetheless, disruptive change propels families and the human race onward, whether toward a better future or a bitter end.

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The classic view of change claims there are certain elements that persist eternally unchanged, with few notable exceptions.  The opposing view is that the foundation of reality rests on eternal and universal change.  By standing with the Standing Rock people rather than my ancestors, I maybe yielding to the irresistible forces of universal change or standing for an enduring unchangeable principle.   

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Whatever the case, with the 2016 election we have all been given a heavy dose of those two conflicting points of view.  The USA is split between the classic view of change and a process view of change.  The classic view is that our national greatness is an enduring condition that must be sheltered and occasionally restored.  The process view is ours is a growing greatness, which becomes ever greater with change.  The election results tilt us toward the classic view.  

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Dominated by the politics of restoring USA greatness, the Standing Rock Resistance has little, if any chance of success.  I am proud to stand with those at Standing Rock even though in doing so it shows disrespect for the wounds of my great granduncle.  Unfortunately, the Standing Rock cause demise will contribute another blow to indigenous populations in the name of the fantasy of Yesterday’s greatness.  The question is, are we restoring greatness or restraining growing greatness?    

Voter Certainty

VOTER CERTAINTY

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To avoiding the swirling slime posing as political discourse, my thoughts turn to how the mind works, or does not work, to evaluate all of the sludge.  Splattered with so much spun-reality, how can any of us receive, decipher, sort, and choose the factoids that represent truth?  Yet, we make those assessments confident that all our opponents must be wrong.  With the minutiae and scant firsthand knowledge available to any of us, how is it that we feel our grasp on truth and our conclusions are superior to all others? 

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November of last year, when the primary elections spun into shape, I consulted several articles describing how the mind molds its sense of certainty.  A dictionary definition of the mind says, “The mind is the part of a person that thinks, reasons, feels, and remembers.”  Most dictionaries also mention that the mind has both conscious and unconscious mental capacities.

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UNCONSCIOUS MIND

“Certainty” registers in the conscious mind but forms in the unconscious mind.  John A. Baragh, researcher at Yale University studying the unconscious mind reported its influence on judgments and decisions in 2006.  His work dealt with the unconscious mind’s “pervasive, powerful influence over immediate and unintended evaluation processes.”  His work on reflex actions showed that, “The unconscious mind is a behavioral guidance system and a source of adaptive and appropriate behavioral impulses.”  It is an, unconscious guidance system and responsible for the confidence we feel about the decisions we make, despite insufficient or contrary information.  

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CONFIRMATION BIAS

David McRaney, a prominent author, lecturer, media producer in the field of psychology and the cognitive sciences, dealing with unconscious certainty and conformational bias, cautions that, “Confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.”  He further warns that cognitive bias “represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study.”

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As a media producer, McRaney points to broadcasting as a major contributor to our conscious certainties, “Punditry is a whole industry built on confirmation bias.  Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views.  If their filter is like your filter, you love them.  If it isn’t, you hate them.”  His reminder demonstrates, “Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point.  You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.”  The application of his point is, “In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary.  Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.”

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EMOTIONAL BIAS

One of the most interesting aspects of our unconscious bias system is the way we avoid the scientific method, which sets out to test a conclusion by finding contrary evidence.  We do the opposite.  Those who study this dynamic the closest are sales professionals, like Geoffry James of Sales Source.  In his study of tactics that change people’s minds, Geoffry says, “Presenting the evidence is a huge mistake.  People tend to make decisions emotionally and only then evaluate the evidence.  Once they've made a decision, people tend to either disbelieve contrary evidence or mentally manipulate the evidence so that it supports their decision.  In other words, when people are wrong about something, the more evidence you present that they are wrong, the less likely they are to change their minds.  Decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or under-weigh evidence that could 'disconfirm' their hypothesis.” 

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In 1960, the deductive reasoning researcher, Peter C. Wason, provided salespeople like Geoffry rules of effective transactional influence.  Wason offered one of the basic means of closing a deal called the, “makes sense stopping rule.”  Sense our tendency is first to determine a conclusion and then work backwards, finding evidence to prove it.  Consumers are not looking for errors leading to their conclusions; instead, they seek only to verify their conclusion.  Rolf Dobellis offered data proving that buyers usually confuse the “results” hoped for with legitimate information to form a decision.  The idea, then, is not to sell the item itself, but confirm the purchaser’s subconscious feelings about what the purchase will do for them.  Confirming the unconscious bias makes the sail.  Raymond S. Nickerson, research professor of psychology of Tufts University agrees.  With our emotional bias confirmed, we stop considering the possibility that our bias may be flawed and accept it as true.  The way Nickerson puts it, “Once your presumptions are satisfied, you stop searching.” The makes sense stopping rule is also the underlying strategy for both presidential campaigns this year.
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PROTECTING OUR BIAS
The person we belief we are, is bound together with the cords of conscious or unconscious biases.  Nickerson says, “Whenever your opinions or beliefs are so intertwined with your self-image you couldn’t pull them away without damaging your core concepts of self, you avoid situations which may cause harm to those beliefs.  You seek out safe havens for your ideology, friends, and coworkers of like mind and attitude, media outlets guaranteed to play nice.”
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The harm he speaks of is the threat to our self-perception.  1) Our estimated value as a person, 2) our assessment of personal abilities, 3) our emotional stability, and 4) our overall sense of control (internal or external) are all under the influence of our unconscious and conscious bias.
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Americans and Europeans are more venerable to belief-system threats because we tend to have rather inflated opinion of ourselves.  “When asked to rate them-selves on virtues, skills, or other desirable traits (including ethics, intelligence, driving ability, and sexual skills), a large majority say they are above average.  Power and privilege magnify the distortion: 94% of college professors think that they do above average work.  This effect is weaker in Asian countries and in other cultures, which value the group more highly than the self.”
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Robert Wright, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, highlights our bias self-protection when he wrote, “Humans are very good at challenging the beliefs of other people, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they tend to protect them, not challenge them.  A consistent finding of psychological research is that humans are fairly accurate in their perceptions of others, but generally inaccurate in their perceptions of themselves.  Humans tend to judge others by their behavior, but think they have special information about themselves – that they know what they are "really like" inside – and thus effortlessly find ways to explain away selfish acts, and maintain the illusion that they are better than others.”
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Acknowledging the strength, pervasiveness, and effects of unconscious biases, leads me, along with the for mentioned experts, to wonder if these biases could, “Account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations.”  However, there is no escaping it; “biases” are an unavoidably part of the mind and contribute a dominate influence in our selection process.  The question then is not will you or I overcome our biases and vote rationally.  The question is will America overcome its biases and thrive as a united nation or merely survive, splintered by our biases.
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Binna Kandola believes there is hope in the friction biases cause.  His presentation on Diffusing Bias, Reimagining Self and Others, concludes, “In an age of globalization, new ideas about identity are at once the spark for conflict and at the same time the hope for greater cooperation and tolerance.  In the last decade identity has been used as a justification for genocide, terrorism, and war.”  Kamdola expresses the hope that the human bias-structure will come-out of its hidden self-protection, where it is secretly, “…sheltering long held assumptions about the development of identities and their boundaries suggesting new narratives in the way we think about who is “us” and who is “them.’”
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In achieving that goal of cooperation and tolerance, Kandola recommends individuals take, what I call three baby steps in that direction,  
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STEP ONE- Self-awareness…Turn the mirror on your-self and tell your-self to stop

STEP TWO- Conscious effort…Instruct your-self and set fairness as a personal goal

STEP THREE – Responsible action…Take social action while leading and challenging others

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This approach is better than doing nothing and it has my endorsement.  However, I know from experience that methods based on willpower are unsustainable.  Like so many other approaches to overcoming biases, they work fine, until the practitioner wares out or becomes discouraged in the effort.  The bias system is a part of the way the mind works.  Therefore, transforming this feature of our mind requires radical alteration, beyond the mind’s rational and emotional capacities.  It takes activating a third part of human personality…the human spirit.  We usually ignore or dismiss the spiritual aspect of our personality, but if we ever bring our unconscious biases under control, the human spirit must change.  As a Christian, I am as susceptible to unconscious biases as the next person.  However, I know when I yield to God’s Spirit, He alters, not just my thoughts and feelings, but my whole personality.  Unless I am much different from the rest of humanity, I believe He will make the changes necessary within anyone who seeks Him.   

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All of these unconscious biases make it difficult to accurately evaluate and choose between normal presidential candidates.  This November’s abnormal contestants make an unbiased selection impossible…without supernatural intervention.  Despite the questionable character of the candidate and the unconscious biases that guide our selection, the real question is, can the USA rise above our irrational biases, and reunite as one nation after the election.  The world and we will see.  God help us.  

COMPORTMENT CRITERIA

2016 ELECTION CRITERIA

COMPORTMENT

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The role of Comportment in the 2016 election.

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Persuaded that everything is a lie, voters must select the fiction that best fits their own notion of reality.  When politics, itself, becomes a fictional endeavor, the only choice voters have is the fiction that best suits their taste.  In his latest article, Phantasmagoria, Ned Resnikoff concludes that politics has been, “…devoured entirely by personal aesthetics.”  Because everyone assumes the candidates are lying, voters are forced to suspend their critical faculties and choose to believe the unbelievable.  Therefore, Trump supporters tolerate him lying, about such things as his Cuban dealings, and Hillary supporters tolerate lies, which include her Emails.  A voter observing the 2016 campaign, knowing it is a work of fiction, resort to political narcissism or cultural affiliation.  As a result, the criteria degrades to which contestant expresses their own point of view or promotes their personal self-interest, rather than which one is best suited to the job.   

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Resnikoff, blames Trump, but both candidates call into question the existence of any political reality.  Ned’s article says, “By telling so many confounding and mutually exclusive falsehoods,” Trump has created a sense of unreality in which, “Truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision.”  So what is wrong with backing someone who advocates your own sense of reality?  That is the way democracy works…right?

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The problem is when both candidates shave the truth, voters must structure a reasoned political decision based on something other than “their word.”  It might follow that the innate wisdom of a candidate would surface as the default qualifier.  Unfortunately, neither aspirant ranks high in the opinion of the electorate in the wisdom arena.  Wisdom reflects “the soundness of one’s action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment.”  Our dynastic-politician candidate has extraordinary governmental knowledge but questionable judgment.  On the other hand, her opponent, an entrepreneurial-showman, possesses strong capitalization and marketing judgment, but little political knowledge.  In the “application of experience”, the records of them both reveal gaps in ethical, moral, and principled decisions.    

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Usually, when other criteria fail to identify the best person for the office, voters turn to party ideology as their alternative selection criteria.  However, there is no certainty that either presidential candidate will adhere to their party’s platform.  Funding sources normally provide clues about which entities will be favored when the candidate takes office.  Unfortunately, a shrewd self-funded businessperson knows he can use the power of the presidency to recover and advance his own financial interests.  Examples of this are Berlusconi of Italy, Putin of Russia, Marcos of the Philippines and many others.  Even if they honored their constituencies’ preferences, given the provocative exclusivity of one, and the enmity gendered by the other, it is unlikely ether will gain legislative support necessary to implement those preferences.  It is certainly unreasonable to hope either will strengthen and unify the nation.  Nonetheless, one of them will be the next president of the United States of America.     

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That is why I, for one, have chosen another reference point for this year’s political deliberation.  In my opinion, the only reality-gauge applicable to this election is the candidates’ comportment …his or her “personal bearing or conduct; demeanor; behavior.”  Comportment is different from “temperament” in that it deals with the manner in which people conduct themselves, not a person's nature, character, or fitness.

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It is sad that the only reality-based quality left to formulate a reasonable presidential selection is so superficial.  Comportment refers to the way people carry themself — their general manner.  “A queen's comportment is usually regal, a bit stiff, and dignified.  The comportment of a bunch of little kids at an amusement park is very different.  The Middle French root is comportment, ‘bearing or behavior,’" In an environment filled with fiction, it is a real quality…free from deception.  Either they behave themselves properly or they do not. 

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Faced with the truth bending candidates of this 2016 election, I plan to put aside guesses of their character or intentions.  My focus, free of spin, will not be caught up in who the candidate claims he or she is, how sincere they claim to be, what deeds they claim they will accomplish, nor how despicable their opponent claims they are.  In so doing, I will be free from the fantasy, so I can make an informed decision based on something real, their comportment…conduct and manner.