New Year's Gratitude on the Occasion of the Marshall Fire

It is said that, on average, Olympic winners of a bronze medal feel happier than winners of a silver medal. For a bronze medal, the salient alternative is no medal at all, while for a silver medal, the salient alternative is a gold medal.

Our house in Superior is in the subdivision just south of the southeast end of the Marshall Fire that has raged in Superior and Louisville Colorado the last few days. Valiant efforts of firefighters to contain the fire mostly kept it from reaching as far as our house. And finally snow has put an end to the fire. My heart goes out to all the people who did lose their homes. And I know that we could easily have been among them had the wind pushed the fire a little further south to our home instead of pushing the fire almost due east.

We have felt no grumpiness at all about having to evacuate to a comfortable Hampton Inn in Lakewood (west of Denver and east of Golden, quite a bit south of the fire), because we feel so lucky that our house is still standing and intact, unlike the houses of so many of our fellow citizens of Superior and its twin city of Louisville.

Because the snow would have made driving dangerous from our distance, we have not yet seen our house again. Our wonderful next-door neighbor Bob went in to turn the water off and run what was then left in the pipes out in order to avoid frozen pipes.

Our son Jordan and his fiancee evacuated with us to Lakewood. We are enjoying their company here instead of in Superior. It is mostly safe to go back, but we might hold off a while from concern over all the exotic chemicals that burning buildings would have put into the air.

I usually read the news rather than watching it, but yesterday morning and the night before that I spent a lot of time watching the news trying to learn exactly how far the fire would go. One scene memorable to me had the Safeway we shop at on Coalton road in the foreground with giant flames a few blocks behind. In the end, the fire came right up to the strip mall that Safeway is in. Now I am grateful to be worrying about what other places we usually shop at still stand or how soon they can be repaired instead of worrying about all the many idiosyncratic useful things about our house or things in our house.

For the community as a whole, there is great reason to be grateful that no one lost their life as a result of this fire. With a few horrible exceptions, insurance will spread out the financial losses over tens of millions of people around the country who have an ownership interest in insurance companies (often the policy-holders themselves). But a lot of the emotional and time burden of rebuilding and replacing what was lost falls on the residents of the destroyed houses and workers in the destroyed commercial buildings. That is a heavy burden my wife Gail and I had reason to contemplate, but are spared. We will try to be conscious of that burden on others in our town that we interact with in the coming months and years. We will be reminded of that burden for a long time by the long tail of visible effects of the fire.

Update, January 3, 2022: The fire began on Thursday, January 30. On Friday, January 31, our neighbor turned off our water to avoid ice damage to the pipes and in the process verified our house was fine. On Saturday, New Year’s Day, Gail and I returned to a cold house because we knew we had to be present to let the natural gas people in to restart our gas. Fortunately, we did have electricity and could use electric heaters. I took a walk as far as Coalton road and saw the destroyed houses in the front row facing Coalton from the north. Our neighborhood south of Coalton was spared. On Sunday, January 2, we did get our gas restored and learned that it would be a loooooong time before those who have intact houses in blasted neighborhoods will be able to have gas restored because of the damage to the gas infrastructure in those neighborhoods. Today, Monday, January 3, we had internet access restored. (Before that, cellular was iffy enough we mostly couldn’t get phone-based wifi hotspots to work.) We are very grateful that personally we now only face a “boil water” advisory and wondering which of the businesses we patronize are now gone or how long they will be offline for repairs. The more relieved we are about our personal situation, the sadder we feel for everyone who has suffered more grievous harm.

Today was a beautiful sunny day. I went on a walk and saw neighbors talking to each other on the street—something I haven’t seen on my many previous walks. Those who have been through a tragedy together can bond over that tragedy.

Update, January 6, 2022: Our tap water was declared safe without boiling today. Maps have come out showing where homes were destroyed or damaged. It is saddening.

Ugly Economists

In many professions, it is a huge advantage to be good-looking. In economics, one can be quite ugly and still honored—just look at a lot of photographs of Nobel laureates in economics sometime. As other professions draw in the especially good-looking folks because being good-looking is an advantage there, one can predict that economics will be left, at all levels, with folks who are less good-looking than other professionals. There is some evidence for this among academics, shown above. A nice blog post on “hotness” across disciplines can be found a few years back at crookedtimber.org.

To me, it is a credit to economics—or at least a blessing of economics—that it is the sort of discipline in which one can be successful despite being ugly. It points to an ability to determine reasonably well whether someone is doing good work, rather than have the quality of someone’s work often so unclear that one is tempted to rely on looks as a proxy for the quality of the work. Looking at the data, that certainly is not the only factor affecting the average hotness of those in a discipline, but it accounts for the data on quite a few disciplines, and then other interesting explanations come to mind for disciplines for which this doesn’t explain the data. (Look for particularly large advantages that good looks would give one in a discipline on the one hand, and an ability to blunt the negative effects of bad looks on the other hand.)

Christmas Dinner at the Kimballs', Anno Domini 2021

My son Jordan and his fiancee Caroline are visiting us for the holidays. Caroline put together the wonderful feast you can see above. You can see what Caroline did 3 years ago in “Christmas Dinner 2018 with the Kimballs in Colorado.” And a few days ago we did full-scale hot pot.

I am enjoying the feasting fully. I simply balance out the feasting with fasting before and after. See “Fasting Before Feasting.”

One nice thing is that by avoiding sugar and other easily digested carbs except on rare occasions, I have reduced the size of the insulin kick when on those rare occasions I do eat sugar—as in the pie and the eggnog—or other easily digested carbs—as in the rolls and the pastry clothing the Beef Wellington, as well as the pasta in the soup. (Note that this isn’t overall going halfway towards eliminating sugar. It is going more than 95% of the way towards eliminating sugar.)

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

The Gods of Science and of Speculation

Soon after I began attending the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor in 2000, I took Ken Phifer’s “Building Your Own Theology Course.” One product of that class was a talk I gave that Fall that I posted two weeks ago: “Miles Kimball: Leaving Mormonism.” Another product is the document that you see below, entitled “The Gods of Science and Speculation,” dated November 18, 2000.

I believe that the truth is very big---much bigger than any human conception of it.  Through the progress of science, I expect the coming centuries to bring astounding revelations about the nature of the Universe, and through the progress of the human spirit, I expect the coming centuries to bring astounding freely chosen visions of the place we will take in the Universe.  

Despite the limitations of current knowledge, I want to make meaning out of the best of current science and to speculate about things that might be true given current science. 

I take my view of current science from Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Randy Nesse, Jared Diamond, E.O. Wilson, Alan Guth, Carl Sagan, John Lewis, Stephen Drury and Julian Barbour, among others---and recently, also from my reading of The Skeptical Inquirer magazine. 

While science tells us something about the way things are, our attitude towards those things is up to us.  Despite all of its pain and imperfection, I think it is a wonderful Universe.  If the Universe is empty and meaningless, I see that as an opportunity for us to freely create our own meanings, individually and collectively. 

At some risk of misunderstanding, I will use the word “god” and “gods” freely to talk about certain wondrous aspects of the Universe and to talk about any being who attains a high enough level of intelligence, wisdom and goodness.  All of the “gods” I will talk about now are either part of the fabric of the Universe or are located squarely within the Universe.   

Traditional Christian theology attempts to unite in one God the Creator, God Who Speaks To Us, and the God of Perfection.  I believe these are separate aspects of the Universe.  I will call these aspects of the Universe the gods of the past, the gods of the present and the gods of the future. 

The gods of the past are the creative principles of the universe.  Science has come upon at least three incredibly powerful creative principles.  The best documented is evolution---the power of life itself to replicate itself, with inevitable variation and selection of those patterns that replicate best.  Carbon-based life on our planet is now in the process of begetting silicon-based life, with likely momentous consequences, for either good or ill.  But in the long-run of billions of years, I believe that evolution will inevitably create love, because I believe love is stronger than the absence of love and so will ultimately flourish once it gets a good start.  I believe that love of that which is different from oneself is higher than love of that which is identical to oneself.  Other-oriented love is hard to come by initially, but it is very strong once it arises. 

The second creative principle is the intricacy of quantum mechanics.  I believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says that each possible outcome of quantum branching exists.  Because of its quantum-mechanical aspect, the Universe has an extraordinary fecundity.   The multiplication of different possible worlds, side by side as coexistent, almost-entirely-non-interacting components of the wave function, means it was inevitable that life would arise somewhere in the universe on some branch of the quantum tree.  This indeed is the tree of life.

The third creative principle is eternal inflation.  In his book The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth describes the principle of cosmic inflation that he co-discovered.  Cosmic inflation helps to explain why the galaxies we can see through our telescopes look so similar in all directions.  Inflation allows a patch of space smaller than a pinhead to expand to a sphere billions of light-years across in a fraction of a second.  False vacuum is the name of the magical substance that can create more and more of itself from nothing at the speed of dark, then decay into the cauldron of energy that we later see as the start of the Big Bang.  Something can come from nothing despite the law of conservation of energy because inside the false vacuum, the pressure of space itself has enough negative energy to balance out the positive energy that is the source of all of the matter and energy we see around us.  Eternal inflation is the idea that the false vacuum generates more of itself faster than it decays into ordinary vacuum plus ordinary energy.  As a result, the true Universe is an infinite sea of false vacuum with an infinite sprinkling of islands that look like the visible Universe we see in our telescopes, (plus, perhaps other, stranger types of islands).   Most of the Universe is invisible, simply because with the false vacuum expanding at the speed of dark, trillions of times faster than the speed of light, there has not been time for light to reach us from more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Universe.   Even were it not for the fecundity of quantum branching, the vastness of the Universe created by eternal inflation makes it inevitable that life would arise somewhere. 

The god of the present is the god within.  When we pray, or meditate, perform rituals, or do good deeds, every once in a while at least, we get in touch with an inner wisdom that is so much greater than our ordinary level of wisdom that many humans down through the millennia have exclaimed that this wisdom must come from a source beyond themselves.  For many years, I thought my own spiritual experiences of this type pointed to a God beyond myself who heard and answered prayers.  Now, based on my understanding of science, I find it hard to locate the source of my experienced inspiration outside of my own brain and emotional processing systems, but I remain awed by the contrast with my usual level of intellectual and emotional processing.  Sometimes I wonder if those experiences of inspiration looked so remarkable not because they were anything remarkable in the context of human experience in general, but only because my normal level of functioning is emotionally stunted in crucial ways.  Even if this is so, I feel a great deal of gratitude that I have been able to access that higher level of functioning through prayer, long before that future day when I may have a more straightforward access to that higher level.  Looking beyond my own experience, I believe that prayer, meditation, rituals and good deeds are important ways to access our higher selves—the god within.  I believe even more firmly that all people should respect the power of spiritual experience as a human fact, even if we cannot agree on where that power comes from.  This fact deserves more scientific study as well as respect. 

The god of the future is our hopes and dreams and intentions, and the possibilities to which those hopes and dreams and intentions point.   We collectively create the future. 

For myself, as my part in that collective creation of the future, I choose to be one of those who represent the possibility of all people being joined together in discover and wonder. 

Five elements of my picture of all people being joined together in discover and wonder are (1) fun, (2) adventure into the unknown, (3) all people being empowered by tools of understanding, (4) human connection and justice and welfare, and (5) profound relationship.  Also, I believe that groups of interacting full-scale human beings, each fulfilling human potential, can be as much more intelligent and greater than an individual human being as the whole brain is more intelligent and greater than an individual neuron.   Full freedom and deep community are both necessary for this great thing we cannot fully comprehend to come to pass.  Sometimes, when a conversation takes on a life of its own, I think I begin to glimpse what can be. 

I have tried to be relatively sober in what I have said so far.  Let me now be more speculative.  If there is anything that could conceivably be distinct from the Universe that deserves to be called God, it is Consciousness itself.  Scientists have no trouble imagining how people could appear to have consciousness when looked at from the outside—this is the “easy problem of consciousness.”   The hard problem of consciousness, discussed by Colin McGuinn in his book ``The Mysterious Flame,’’ is how I appear to myself to be conscious, seen from the inside.  I like the idea that there is a single Consciousness---one light of Brahman shining through the many windows of individual selves.  In his book, The End of Time, Julian Barbour conceives of a timeless Universe of all possible configurations of matter and energy with a mist of quantum probability hovering over it.  It is the mist of quantum probability that creates the perception of time.  Could this mist of quantum probability be Consciousness itself?  It would be consistent with the one light of Brahman shining through the many windows of individual selves.  Among other things, this is a story I tell myself to quiet my fears of death. 

Is there any room for a personal god outside myself in the Universe?  I believe there is such a possibility, though it is not something I have any way of knowing to be true.  Having grown up reading science fiction, I thrill to the recent discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. Our galaxy is large enough I think it likely intelligent life has arisen more than once in the Milky Way.  If so, we are probably not the first, since our own sun and solar system is only about 5 billion years old, compared with a galaxy that is more than 10 billion years old.  Our galaxy is small enough---about 100,000 light-years across, that even at a tenth the speed of light, intelligent aliens from anywhere in our galaxy could reach us in less than a million years.  There need be no particular problem of finding us, since the power of replication mentioned above in connection with Evolution makes it easy for aliens to spread throughout the galaxy until they meet some other intelligent race.  The fact that they have not destroyed us, and do not seem to have enslaved us, gives us some warrant to hope that they have good intentions toward us.  One reason for these good intentions may be the very scarcity of intelligent life.  If there are only a few intelligent species arising in each galaxy, each one would seem valuable to another that had been searching for thousands and thousands of years for other intelligent life. 

The greatest objection to the idea of intelligent aliens in our galaxy has always been Enrico Fermi’s question ``Where are they?’’---meaning ``If they are there, why don’t we already know about them?’’  To me, the easiest answer to this question is that they are already here but they value our free development so much that are keeping themselves hidden.  Traditional monotheistic religions all have reasons to tell why their version of God has not already appeared in the public square, obviating the need for faith.  To the extent these reasons make any sense, they work just as well for beneficent intelligent aliens as for the one true God. 

Going out on a limb with speculation, in a version of the theodicy, how could beneficent intelligent aliens ethically put up with all of horrors we visit upon each other on this planet and the horrors that come to us from disease and other disasters?  First, they may avert some disasters, especially those that would utterly destroy all higher life on our world.  They may even go so far as to act to foster freedom, by, say, helping the founders of our own nation in the series of unlikely events that allowed us to separate from England and form a new type of nation.  Second, they may compensate for their hands-off policy by using high technology to save our memories and all that makes us individual egos into a cybernetic after-life.  This is another story I tell myself sometimes to quiet my fear of death. 

I do not know that these beneficent aliens exist.  What I do know, is that if they don’t and if we do not destroy ourselves, human beings in some far future have the potential to become that kind of guardian angels toward other intelligent species that we find in this and other galaxies. The hardest part will be learning how to live in harmony with each other for the millions of years on end it will require to reach these others.  So at the same time we reach out to establish ourselves throughout the solar system as the first step toward the stars, we must find it in ourselves to be good and just and peaceful.  I believe that free religion that is consistent with reason and science, along with art, music, literature and the like, are necessary in the endeavor to raise humanity to the level that it will some day be appropriate in every sense---goodness and wisdom as well as knowledge and power---to call our descendants gods. 

Don’t miss my 12 Unitarian-Universalist sermons:

  1. Leaving Mormonism

  2. UU Visions

  3. Godless Religion

  4. Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life (video here)

  5. The Egocentric Illusion (video here)

  6. Sharing Epiphanies (including the video)

  7. A Spiritual Autobiography

  8. The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists (video here)

  9. So You Want to Save the World (video here)

  10. The Mystery of Consciousness

  11. The Message of Jesus for Non-Supernaturalists (video here)

  12. Us and Them

Posts on Jesus:

Posts on Mormonism:

Other Posts on Religion:

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass:

How the Historical Jesus Set the Oppressed Free

“Jesus Unrolls the Book in the Synagogue” by James Tissot. Brooklyn Museum.

“Truly He taught us to love one another

His law is love and His gospel is peace

Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother

And in His name all oppression shall cease”
— 4th verse of "O Holy Night"

The accomplishments of many great religious figures become even more impressive if one is a nonsupernaturalist as I am. Many of them have made a big difference in the world, without, in my view, any supernatural aid.

The fourth chapter of Luke recounts how, after spending some time in the wilderness, Jesus came to preach in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth. Jesus read from the book of Isaiah these words (in accordance with the New International Version):

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Continuing, Luke writes:

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

In the almost 2000 years since then, there has been a remarkable turn away from the institution of slavery, owing in extraordinary measure to the influence of Christianity. And even without supernatural aid, the historical Jesus was a wellspring for Christianity.

In 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson eloquently makes the case for the contribution of Christianity toward the abolition of slavery:

This is not to say that Christianity, even in its incompletely realized form, was a failure. Quite the contrary: Christianity achieved the well-nigh impossible. The Christian doctrine elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law. Christianity insisted that even the king was only one among many. For something so contrary to all apparent evidence to find its footing, the idea that worldly power and prominence were indicators of God’s particular favor had to be radically de-emphasized. This was partly accomplished through the strange Christian insistence that salvation could not be obtained through effort or worth—through “works.” Whatever its limitations, the development of such doctrine prevented king, aristocrat and wealthy merchant alike from lording it morally over the commoner. In consequence, the metaphysical conception of the implicit transcendent worth of each and every soul established itself against impossible odds as the fundamental presupposition of Western law and society. That was not the case in the world of the past, and is not the case yet in most places in the world of the present. It is in fact nothing short of a miracle (and we should keep this fact firmly before our eyes) that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, under the sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong.

It would do us well to remember, as well, that the immediate utility of slavery is obvious, and that the argument that the strong should dominate the weak is compelling, convenient and eminently practical (at least for the strong). This means that a revolutionary critique of everything slave-owning societies valued was necessary before the practice could be even questioned, let alone halted (including the idea that wielding power and authority made the slave-owner noble; including the even more fundamental idea that the power wielded by the slave-owner was valid and even virtuous). Christianity made explicit the surprising claim that even the lowliest person had rights, genuine rights—and that sovereign and state were morally charged, at a fundamental level, to recognize those rights. Christianity put forward, explicitly, the even more incomprehensible idea that the act of human ownership degraded the slaver (previously viewed as admirable nobility) as much or even more than the slave. We fail to understand how difficult such an idea is to grasp. We forget that the opposite was self-evident throughout most of human history. We think that it is the desire to enslave and dominate that requires explanation. We have it backwards, yet again.

Steven Pinker points out how violence in general has declined over time in The Better Angels of our Nature. This too, in my view, owes importantly to the work of Jesus.

This Christmastime, I want to loudly proclaim Jesus as a hero for nonsupernaturalists as well as for those who believe in him as a supernatural being. We have a lot to celebrate.

Brain Plasticity: Neurons that Fire Together Wire Together

“Neurons that fire together wire together” is a typical way of summarizing the now very well-supported Hebbian theory that (in the words of the current version of the Wikipedia article “Hebbian theory”) can be described more precisely as

… an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from a presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of a postsynaptic cell.

The more often the firing of one neuron stimulates another to fire, the stronger and more efficient that causal connection becomes. Conversely, if a neuronal pathway isn’t used very often, that pathway becomes weaker. The upshot is that our brains are changing all the time. Otherwise we would never learn anything.

In Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at any Age, Sanjay Gupta lays out brain plasticity in some detail. Each bullet below is a quotation from that useful book (the bullet is added).

Remarkably, sometimes the changes in our brains from learning are big enough to be seen by the crude instruments we now have to look at neurons from outside those neurons:

  • … in William James’s 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, in which the Harvard University psychologist writes: “Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity,” but only in my lifetime have we begun to measure and visualize this phenomenon with technology. And with tools like fMRI, we can see the brain changes in response to certain stimulation. We can also see parts of the brain that are not in use being pruned away. The brain constantly and dynamically shapes and reshapes itself in response to experiences, learning, or even an injury. What’s more, what you choose to focus your attention on rewires the brain from a structural and functional perspective.

After a certain point, the key changes in the brain are not about size but about connections and function:

  • A newborn’s brain triples in size in the first year of life; after that, the rate of physical growth slows as we learn and pack more into our roughly 3.3-pound brains. What continues to develop, allowing this tremendous ability to process more and more information, is the complexity of the networks of neurons as they go through a process of pruning, whereby certain synapses that are not being used are trimmed to make room for new ones.

  • You know that as an adult, adding more information to your brain doesn’t increase the size of it (and imagine what people would look like if brain size increased with learning new information). But what does grow larger is the number of neurons—nerve cells—and the complexity of their network through ongoing and active pruning and “growth.”

The rewiring of the brain after an injury shows just how much potential there is for rewiring. The dramatic improvements in skills that are possible through practice are also testament to the potential for rewiring:

  • The brain remains plastic throughout life and can rewire itself in response to your experiences. It can also generate new brain cells under the right circumstances. Take, for example, what blind people experience, as parts of their brain that normally process sight may instead be devoted to exceptional hearing. Someone practicing a new skill, like learning to play the violin, “rewires” parts of the brain that are responsible for fine motor control. People who’ve suffered brain injuries can recruit other parts of their brain to compensate for the lost or damaged tissue. Intelligence is not fixed either.

  • If people who have suffered a devastating stroke can learn to speak again and those born with partial brains or who lose significant brain tissue to disease or surgical removal can propel their brains’ rewiring to work as a whole, think of the possibilities for those of us who just hope to preserve our mental faculties as we age. Even people who’ve had an entire hemisphere removed in childhood to treat rare neurological conditions such as intractable epilepsy or brain cancer can go on to function in adulthood. Their brains reorganize and various networks pick up the slack.

However, rewiring is not always an improvement. Both “Use it or lose it” and “You can get good at being dysfunctional” are genuine concerns:

  • It’s important to note that brain plasticity is a two-way street. In other words, it’s almost as easy to drive changes that impair memory and physical and mental abilities as it is to improve these things. I love how Dr. Michael Merzenich, a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research and professor emeritus at the University of California at San Francisco, puts it: “Older people are absolute masters at encouraging plastic brain change in the wrong direction.” You can change your brain for the better or worse through behaviors and even ways of thinking. Bad habits have neural maps that reinforce those bad habits. Negative plasticity, for example, causes changes in neural connections that can be harmful. Negative thoughts and constant worrying can promote changes in the brain that are associated with depression and anxiety. Repeated mental states, where you focus your attention, what you experience, and how you respond to situations indeed become neural traits. One of Dr. Merzenich’s often-cited quotes is the following: “The patterns of activity of neurons in sensory areas can be altered by patterns of attention. Experience coupled with attention leads to physical changes in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system.

On this point, also see

Mental Retirement: Use It or Lose It—Susann Rohwedder and Robert Willis

In many ways, the growing accumulation of different kinds of evidence for brain plasticity is simply a reminder of what we knew all along (and culturally almost caused ourselves to forget): that the capacity for human learning is powerful and doesn’t suddenly disappear when one becomes an adult.

On the dramatic potential for learnings, see:

There's One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don't

How to Turn Every Child into a 'Math Person'

The Most Effective Memory Methods are Difficult—and That's Why They Work

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

The Federalist Papers #45: James Madison Predicts a Small Federal Government

In the Federalist Papers #45, James Madison answers the charge that the proposed Constitution will reduce the power of the states by arguing:

  1. That if reduced state power had to follow unavoidably from the necessary powers of the federal government laid out in the proposed constitution, then so be it—the welfare of the people mattered more than the status of the states.

  2. That the federal government would, in fact, be relatively small.

  3. That history showed that people tended to have more loyalty to governments nearer to them.

  4. Because state legislatures choose the senators and the electors who choose the president, the states have a lot of influence over the federal government.

  5. The Articles of Confederation gave the national government most of the powers that the proposed Constitution would—but for real, not just on paper. So if the states meant what they said when they adopted the Articles of Confederation, then that any reduction in state power is something the states already promised.

The fifth argument is an exhortation to people to tell the truth: anyone who admits that a power is necessary should be OK with what it takes to make that power operative for real, or they don’t mean what they say.

The fourth argument was true for quite a while, but there was a conscious change much later to reduce state power. The 17th amendment to the Constitution provided for the direct election of senators; but it was not adopted until 1913. The choice of electors by popular vote also reduced state power, but not by a constitutional change. This is a matter of state choice. A state, if it so chooses, can revert to choosing electors by vote of its legislature. The main limitation is that a state legislature has to decide how it will choose its electors before election day. There is currently a move to reassert more state power over the choice of electors. In any case, if a state legislature goes the other way, as almost all did in the past, and chooses to reduce its own power by providing that presidential electors be chosen by popular vote, one should not cry about that voluntary reduction in state power.

The force of the third argument was shown by the US Civil War. For example, Robert E. Lee famously felt a greater duty toward the state of Virginia than he did toward the United States.

On the second argument, the victory of the North in the Civil War under the slogan that the Union must be preserved, followed by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution greatly strengthened federal power and correspondingly weakened state power. In the 20th century, the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War greatly strengthened federal power. but for many decades after the US Constitution was ratified, James Madison’s prediction of a relatively small federal government held true.

The first argument, that the welfare of the people matters more than preserving state power continues just as valid today. Civil rights have been enforced by an exertion of federal power against certain states. So much the better for federal power. James Madison writes eloquently:

… the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

On the margin, whether we should cheer for greater federal power or greater state power depends on which level of government is most likely to advance the “real welfare of the great body of the people,” without inappropriately privileging some people above others.

Below is the full text of the Federalist Papers #45.

FEDERALIST NO. 45

The Alleged Danger From the Powers of the Union to the State Governments Considered

For the Independent Journal.

Author: James Madison

To the People of the State of New York:

HAVING shown that no one of the powers transferred to the federal government is unnecessary or improper, the next question to be considered is, whether the whole mass of them will be dangerous to the portion of authority left in the several States. The adversaries to the plan of the convention, instead of considering in the first place what degree of power was absolutely necessary for the purposes of the federal government, have exhausted themselves in a secondary inquiry into the possible consequences of the proposed degree of power to the governments of the particular States. But if the Union, as has been shown, be essential to the security of the people of America against foreign danger; if it be essential to their security against contentions and wars among the different States; if it be essential to guard them against those violent and oppressive factions which embitter the blessings of liberty, and against those military establishments which must gradually poison its very fountain; if, in a word, the Union be essential to the happiness of the people of America, is it not preposterous, to urge as an objection to a government, without which the objects of the Union cannot be attained, that such a government may derogate from the importance of the governments of the individual States? Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form? It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object. Were the plan of the convention adverse to the public happiness, my voice would be, Reject the plan. Were the Union itself inconsistent with the public happiness, it would be, Abolish the Union. In like manner, as far as the sovereignty of the States cannot be reconciled to the happiness of the people, the voice of every good citizen must be,

Let the former be sacrificed to the latter. How far the sacrifice is necessary, has been shown. How far the unsacrificed residue will be endangered, is the question before us. Several important considerations have been touched in the course of these papers, which discountenance the supposition that the operation of the federal government will by degrees prove fatal to the State governments. The more I revolve the subject, the more fully I am persuaded that the balance is much more likely to be disturbed by the preponderancy of the last than of the first scale. We have seen, in all the examples of ancient and modern confederacies, the strongest tendency continually betraying itself in the members, to despoil the general government of its authorities, with a very ineffectual capacity in the latter to defend itself against the encroachments. Although, in most of these examples, the system has been so dissimilar from that under consideration as greatly to weaken any inference concerning the latter from the fate of the former, yet, as the States will retain, under the proposed Constitution, a very extensive portion of active sovereignty, the inference ought not to be wholly disregarded. In the Achaean league it is probable that the federal head had a degree and species of power, which gave it a considerable likeness to the government framed by the convention. The Lycian Confederacy, as far as its principles and form are transmitted, must have borne a still greater analogy to it. Yet history does not inform us that either of them ever degenerated, or tended to degenerate, into one consolidated government. On the contrary, we know that the ruin of one of them proceeded from the incapacity of the federal authority to prevent the dissensions, and finally the disunion, of the subordinate authorities. These cases are the more worthy of our attention, as the external causes by which the component parts were pressed together were much more numerous and powerful than in our case; and consequently less powerful ligaments within would be sufficient to bind the members to the head, and to each other. In the feudal system, we have seen a similar propensity exemplified. Notwithstanding the want of proper sympathy in every instance between the local sovereigns and the people, and the sympathy in some instances between the general sovereign and the latter, it usually happened that the local sovereigns prevailed in the rivalship for encroachments.

Had no external dangers enforced internal harmony and subordination, and particularly, had the local sovereigns possessed the affections of the people, the great kingdoms in Europe would at this time consist of as many independent princes as there were formerly feudatory barons. The State government will have the advantage of the Federal government, whether we compare them in respect to the immediate dependence of the one on the other; to the weight of personal influence which each side will possess; to the powers respectively vested in them; to the predilection and probable support of the people; to the disposition and faculty of resisting and frustrating the measures of each other. The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former. Without the intervention of the State legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all. They must in all cases have a great share in his appointment, and will, perhaps, in most cases, of themselves determine it. The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State legislatures. Even the House of Representatives, though drawn immediately from the people, will be chosen very much under the influence of that class of men, whose influence over the people obtains for themselves an election into the State legislatures. Thus, each of the principal branches of the federal government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the State governments, and must consequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a disposition too obsequious than too overbearing towards them. On the other side, the component parts of the State governments will in no instance be indebted for their appointment to the direct agency of the federal government, and very little, if at all, to the local influence of its members. The number of individuals employed under the Constitution of the United States will be much smaller than the number employed under the particular States.

There will consequently be less of personal influence on the side of the former than of the latter. The members of the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments of thirteen and more States, the justices of peace, officers of militia, ministerial officers of justice, with all the county, corporation, and town officers, for three millions and more of people, intermixed, and having particular acquaintance with every class and circle of people, must exceed, beyond all proportion, both in number and influence, those of every description who will be employed in the administration of the federal system. Compare the members of the three great departments of the thirteen States, excluding from the judiciary department the justices of peace, with the members of the corresponding departments of the single government of the Union; compare the militia officers of three millions of people with the military and marine officers of any establishment which is within the compass of probability, or, I may add, of possibility, and in this view alone, we may pronounce the advantage of the States to be decisive. If the federal government is to have collectors of revenue, the State governments will have theirs also. And as those of the former will be principally on the seacoast, and not very numerous, whilst those of the latter will be spread over the face of the country, and will be very numerous, the advantage in this view also lies on the same side.

It is true, that the Confederacy is to possess, and may exercise, the power of collecting internal as well as external taxes throughout the States; but it is probable that this power will not be resorted to, except for supplemental purposes of revenue; that an option will then be given to the States to supply their quotas by previous collections of their own; and that the eventual collection, under the immediate authority of the Union, will generally be made by the officers, and according to the rules, appointed by the several States. Indeed it is extremely probable, that in other instances, particularly in the organization of the judicial power, the officers of the States will be clothed with the correspondent authority of the Union.

Should it happen, however, that separate collectors of internal revenue should be appointed under the federal government, the influence of the whole number would not bear a comparison with that of the multitude of State officers in the opposite scale.

Within every district to which a federal collector would be allotted, there would not be less than thirty or forty, or even more, officers of different descriptions, and many of them persons of character and weight, whose influence would lie on the side of the State. The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security. As the former periods will probably bear a small proportion to the latter, the State governments will here enjoy another advantage over the federal government. The more adequate, indeed, the federal powers may be rendered to the national defense, the less frequent will be those scenes of danger which might favor their ascendancy over the governments of the particular States. If the new Constitution be examined with accuracy and candor, it will be found that the change which it proposes consists much less in the addition of NEW POWERS to the Union, than in the invigoration of its ORIGINAL POWERS. The regulation of commerce, it is true, is a new power; but that seems to be an addition which few oppose, and from which no apprehensions are entertained. The powers relating to war and peace, armies and fleets, treaties and finance, with the other more considerable powers, are all vested in the existing Congress by the articles of Confederation. The proposed change does not enlarge these powers; it only substitutes a more effectual mode of administering them. The change relating to taxation may be regarded as the most important; and yet the present Congress have as complete authority to REQUIRE of the States indefinite supplies of money for the common defense and general welfare, as the future Congress will have to require them of individual citizens; and the latter will be no more bound than the States themselves have been, to pay the quotas respectively taxed on them. Had the States complied punctually with the articles of Confederation, or could their compliance have been enforced by as peaceable means as may be used with success towards single persons, our past experience is very far from countenancing an opinion, that the State governments would have lost their constitutional powers, and have gradually undergone an entire consolidation. To maintain that such an event would have ensued, would be to say at once, that the existence of the State governments is incompatible with any system whatever that accomplishes the essential purposes of the Union.

PUBLIUS.

Links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Podcast: Miles Kimball on the Potential of a National Well-Being Index

I thought the podcast shown above turned out really well. Try it out!

The podcast adds a lot to our (Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz and my) Finance and Development paper “Measuring the Essence of the Good Life” that I mirrored on my blog last week. (You can see other articles in Finance and Development here.)

Aside from the IMF website shown above at https://www.imf.org/en/News/Podcasts/All-Podcasts/2021/11/30/miles-kimball-wellbeing, you can also find the podcast at:

The 11 Senses According to Sanjay Gupta

Flying blind is a bad idea. Indeed, if you can help it, trying to manage life without the full benefit of any of your 11 senses is a bad idea. Why I am I talking about 11 senses, when most of us were only taught about 5 in kindergarten? Sanjay Gupta explains in Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age:

You can likely name all five senses: sight (ophthalmoception), smell (olfacoception), taste (gustaoception), touch (tactioception), and hearing (audioception). But there are others with the “cept” ending, which is Latin for take or receive. The other six senses are also processed in the brain and give us more data about the outside world:

  • Proprioception: A sense of where your body parts are and what they’re doing.

  • Equilibrioception: A sense of balance, otherwise known as your internal GPS. This tells you if you’re sitting, standing, or lying down. It’s located in the inner ear (which is why problems in your inner ear can cause vertigo).

  • Nociception: A sense of pain.

  • Thermo(re)ception: A sense of temperature.

  • Chronoception: A sense of the passage of time.

  • Interoception: A sense of your internal needs, like hunger, thirst, needing to use the bathroom.

In addition, I have heard that in Buddhist tradition, the awareness of what is in one’s own mind is counted as a sense. The emotional side of that is not entirely separate from the internal senses in Sanjay Gupta’s list, since people are often aware of their emotions through noticing associated bodily sensations. Closely noticing those bodily sensations is not only a way to be more sensitive to your own emotions, but is also a way to distance yourself enough from the driving force of your emotions to make those emotions easier to manage and deal with skillfully: getting the information and oomph from your emotions without being controlled by them.

On the more physical side, being aware of your own internal state is valuable for many reasons. Most obviously, noticing your internal state can warn you of problems. Less obviously, noticing your internal state can give you a time series to match up to things such as diet and exercise time series to see what makes you feel good and what makes you feel crummy an hour or so after eating or exercising.

At a more philosophical level, to the extent you can stand to notice what is going on in all of your senses, and do so, the more complete the range of your experience as a human being. There is a beauty in that.

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

Miles Kimball: Leaving Mormonism

I am a Unitarian-Universalist lay preacher. I gave 12 sermons—annually from 2005 to 2016—to the Community Unitarian Universalists in Brighton. (In 2016 I moved to Colorado.) This post was the first of those, which in turn reprised the same account of what I believed at that point that I spoke in Fall 2000 to the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor. (Actually, it was “Church” rather than “Congregation” back then.) That talk in Fall 2000 came after I had taken Ken Phifer’s course “Building Your Own Theology” and three weeks after I officially joined the First Unitarian Universality Congregation of Ann Arbor by “signing the book.” I date my change in self-identification as a Mormon to self-identification as a Unitarian-Universalist to that moment. What you see below is very lightly edited from what I said in Fall 2000.

This now completes on my blog the full set of 12 Unitarian Universalist sermons that I have given. Here are the links in chronological order of when I gave each sermon:

I also have three of Ken Phifer’s sermons on my blog:

At the bottom of this post are links to some of my other posts on religion.

Hi, my name is Miles Kimball. I wish you could have heard all of the credos that I heard in the latest Building Your Own Theology course, but I may be the only one foolhardy enough to get up here at the pulpit to give mine. In any case, my credo is not in any way representative of the wonderful variety of different things people had to say. But here it is. 

I grew up in the Mormon Church. All of my ancestors for many generations have belonged to the Mormon Church and my grandfather was the President of the entire Mormon Church until he died in 1985. So why am I a Unitarian-Universalist now?

When I was young, Mormonism seemed true to me just like science is true and I reveled in the intellectual playground of Mormon doctrine. In addition to some standard Christian doctrines about Jesus, Mormonism has a set of doctrines that sound a lot like modern science fiction, despite being developed in the first half of the 19th century. It is no accident that Utah is now a kind of Mecca for science fiction writers. It is a common speculation among Mormons that God the Father is only one of a long line of gods, each of whom went off to create a new planet, had billions of literal spirit children and sent those spirit children down into physical bodies to gain experience and prove their worthiness to themselves become gods. What is official doctrine is that we can go on to become gods who create new worlds if we are totally faithful and valiant in adhering to the tenets of Mormonism.   

When I went off to college at Harvard, I vigorously defended Mormonism to my curious classmates. I soon realized that in the East, Mormonism to my classmates was whatever I told them it was. So in defending my religion, I started bit by bit to smooth off the sharp edges and modifying things to make Mormonism more consistent with what I knew of science and social justice. One of the most embarrassing things about Mormonism was its refusal to let African Americans be priests, when it made all faithful men of other races priests (including me). Even though my grandfather changed that racist policy in 1978, it still took a lot of explaining to rationalize why it had been there in the first place. 

On the side of science, the biggest issue was evolution, but without ever having studied evolution I was able to convince myself that the sequence of fossils in the fossil record would make plenty of sense as the way God would have done things. 

When I was 19, I took time off from college and spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Japan and had a positive experience with that, except for the constant pressure to work harder. I saw that Mormonism had a positive effect on the lives of those who chose to join it because they saw something valuable in it for them. 

I got married a year after I had started a Ph.D. program in Economics. Encouraged by the Mormon teachings about the importance of children, we immediately dived into childbearing. Of our five children, two died in infancy. The priesthood powers I held that were supposed to allow me, I thought, to heal by the power of God did not work in my case. Those losses drove me to a deeper searching for spiritual truth---or maybe it was psychological truth. I had four arenas to explore my religion in depth. I had many talks with my wife who was on her own religious journey; I talked on a regular basis to a group of Mormon men who had an uncompromising commitment to the truth; I led an adult Sunday School class that become more and more emotionally honest as time went on; and I taught a course on evolution at the University of Michigan, using Daniel Dennett’s hard-hitting book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea as the main text. I worked hard to spell out each new emotional and intellectual insight as a part of Mormonism. At first I felt I could successfully encompass my new insights within Mormonism, using texts from the large array of Mormon scriptures and quasi-scriptures. But I began to get an inkling that the leaders of the Mormon Church did not share my view of the doctrine when they began to excommunicate leading historians, intellectuals and feminists in the Mormon Church and fire others from their jobs at Brigham Young University (BYU).  Amazingly, I did not fully believe my ears and eyes about the thinking of the Church leaders until I had occasion to interview for a job at BYU and had a long talk with one of the Church’s apostles, my father’s cousin, who was himself the son of an eminent chemist. One of the main threads I heard in that conversation was the thought-control the apostle used on himself in order to not think too deeply about his own disagreements with his more senior colleagues. Along the way, they effectively made a decision that I was not orthodox enough for a job at BYU, though there was still some hope for my reformation. My growing knowledge of evolution and a greater awareness of the limitations of physics combined with this final loss of faith in the institution of the Mormon Church to erode my belief in miracles and in the afterlife. A year and a half ago, I was disturbed to realize I was no longer a Christian when I started to wonder at what terrible force could have created the necessity for him to suffer and die for our sins.

I wanted to have someplace where I could wrestle with thorny questions about God, Christ, the afterlife etc., without being scolded for raising such issues. I started attending the First Unitarian Universality Church of Ann Arbor at the beginning of 2000.  Not long after, my local bishop officially decided that I was unfit to teach or speak in the Mormon Church any more.  That made the transition much easier.  I feel very lucky to have had my whole family make the same transition, though as part of their own, very different, individual religious journeys.  For me, signing the book three weeks ago represented the start of a new life. 

I still can’t help the Mormon influences on my thinking about the Universe. I find myself trying to give a theological meaning to the science I read. For example, I wonder if the creative powers of evolution, cosmic inflation and quantum mechanics in its many worlds interpretation can be considered Creator Gods. I ponder the subjective spiritual experiences I read and hear about and that I have had myself and ask myself whether they point to a God within us, even if it that God within can ultimately be explained as the result of the laws of physics. I marvel at the emotional and intellectual depth of groups of human beings sharing the thoughts and feelings of their hearts and think I see the shape of a God arising from free human beings interacting that is as much greater than those individual free human beings as our brains are more intelligent than an individual neuron. 

These are now my Gods of the past, present and future. 

No one knows the future, but I know the kind of future that I would like to take part in building. I want to stand for all people being joined together in discovery and wonder. 

I want to stand for humanity going beyond just solving its problems. I hope to see humanity reach for the stars, not only in the science fiction sense that I have loved so well but in every dimension of the human heart and soul. 

Don't miss these posts on Mormonism:

Other Posts on Religion:

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass: