Excited

We move in two weeks. It would be surreal, if it weren't for all the boxes full of books littering our front room and the half finished bathroom floor repairs.

Still, there's a lot to be grateful for. My beloved wife is healthy, my daughter is precocious and adorable and healthy, I am moving to a dream job teaching science to middle-schoolers. Life is good.

There are upcoming bumps in the road. Not least of which is the fact that we are expecting our new baby about the same time we are moving and the job starts a few days later. But life is good.

I'm excited to see what wonders await.

Don’t Hate Me Because I Care

John Lennon’s “Imagine” reminds me of prison for two reasons. The first comes from an experience I had when I was 17 years old. I volunteered in my college public speaking class to apply what I was learning by speaking to the inmates of the Utah State Prison. They had a weekly motivational speaker come at that time to address those on good behavior, and my professor just so happened to be a coordinator for the program.

I never actually got to give my speech, but I did go and listen to one of the other speakers a few weeks before I was scheduled to speak myself, as required by my professor to understand the audience. I had to surrender my driver’s license at the visitor’s entrance, replaced by a clip-on, numbered ID badge. I wondered if they would still let me out if I lost it. Then I had followed my professor down the many cement corridors past thick steel bulkheads. I didn’t want them to close while I was in there. Eventually we arrived at the prison chapel, and I sat among the inmates, next to Bo. Bo was in for killing someone. Most of the inmates were friendly and starved for conversation. One showed me his sketch book, mostly pencil drawings of the five books on his shelf. Another offered me guitar lessons after he got out, though it’d be a few years before he did. All were dressed in white, which is why my professor called them “the men in white.” I was wearing a white shirt; I hoped my slacks were enough non-white color to get me out. Eventually, the program started and the prison band played after the introductions were given and a prayer said. The band played “Imagine” by John Lennon.

The speaker was boring and talked about avoiding self-directed pity-parties. I was frankly more interested in watching the guards, one of whom kept walking along the pews and looking anxious. My professor noticed as well. When the speech was finally over, my professor guided him and myself quickly out of the chapel and back through the corridors to the entrance. I was relieved to trade back my numbered ID badge for my driver’s license while the professor talked with the guards. He told me later that one of the inmates had been misplaced and the facility was about to go into lockdown. We just made it out in time. The guards searched my car including the trunk, hood, and undercarriage, and when I drove out of the prison, I was struck by the fact that the road into the prison was better paved than the one leading out of prison.

That was the first reason; it has more to do with association by experience than with the song itself.

The second is purely from the message of the song.

Lennon’s anthem for world unity is ambitious and admirable, but hopelessly tangled up in bad reasoning. “Imagine” invites the listener to picture a world where there are no borders and no causes worth fighting for. His iconic line “Nothing to kill or die for” imagines a world where the conflicts end because there is no cause for contention. But nothing to kill or die for also means nothing to live for. This is not a world of peace, but a world of apathy masquerading as peace. Another problem with this simplistic vision of Lennon’s Utopia is that people die with or without good reasons. Even with nothing to die for, you are still going to die. But if you were willing to die for something, then maybe something is worth more than maintaining your doomed pulse. The heart of conflict is a belief that there is something valuable in the world, the idea that things matter. People fight because people care deeply about things. Asking one to imagine a world without this fuel for conflict not only destroys contention, but also everything worth living for. Unlike animals, humans crave and need a reason for their existence; breathing and breeding are not enough to live for. We must live for something higher to believe that there is true and lasting value in our lives.

But the problems don’t end there:

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today...

As good as it is for people to live in the moment and appreciate the life around them, paying no attention to the future is a recipe for disaster. “Living for today,” at least in Lennon’s context, permanently disconnects the present from the future. A world without questions about, and faith in, the metaphysical nature of the human soul is one where this world and everything in it is meaningless. Today only means something in the context of yesterday and tomorrow. If people disagree about the nature of the soul and its fate beyond the grave, at least in the midst of the conflict they can appreciate their mutual faith that life is worth living. This very faith is only possible in a consistent manner through a belief in the beyond.

Lennon sings of apathetic inertness, with no spark to separate the living from the dead. There must always be right and wrong, questions about the philosophical nature of man, and a belief in the great beyond. Without these, Lennon’s world is not worth imagining.

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

Marriage and the Prisoner's Dilemma

The situation:

Bonnie and Clyde are arrested by a detective who knows that they are famous bank robbers. The trouble is, he can’t prove it.

So the detective makes this ploy.  He separates Bonnie and Clyde, putting them in separate cells with no way to communicate with each other. The detective then approaches each of them separately with this offer. 

Betray your partner, and I’ll see that you get only 1 year of prison time if your partner stays loyal, and your partner will go to prison for a minimum of five years. If your partner rats on you, but you stay loyal, then your partner gets one year and you get five years minimum. If both of you rat on each other, then you will both spend three years in prison each.

As Bonnie sits quietly in her cell, she weighs her options. “The detective might be bluffing, which would mean that Clyde and I could go free if we just stay loyal and don’t rat each other out. But If Clyde tells on me while I stay loyal, then I get a minimum of five years. If I tell on Clyde I get either one (1) year or three (3) years. But if I stay loyal, I get either none (0) or five (5).”

On the other side of the station, Clyde is thinking the exact same thing. 

The situation is dire. Each of these partners in crime makes their choice. No one is surprised when both partners betray each other, and each serves a three year sentence.

Bonnie and Clyde both know that their partner is not entirely trustworthy and will probably betray them. Because of this, each will choose to betray (rather than be betrayed).

This situation is a thought experiment from game theory called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Game theory, which is the study of decision making in strategic situations, operates on the assumption that people usually act out of a desire to further their own rational self-interest. Game theory provides the backbone of economics, national defense, and political theory.

The unsettling irony of this situation, however, is that exactly by pursuing their rational self-interest, both Bonnie and Clyde have wound up counting days in a cell.

This brings me to the subject of marriage. Marriage is a partnership similar (hopefully without the crime) to Bonnie and Clyde’s in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Conflicts arise constantly in marriage which force both partners to decide between their own rational self-interest (what they want) and the needs of their spouse/marriage/family.

Commitment in marriage is like staying loyal in the Dilemma. If both partners sacrifice their rational self-interest and personal wants, then both receive the highest possible benefits. But if either spouse is in it for their own happiness, the whole thing falls apart and everyone is miserable. This has been made even more visible with no-fault divorce laws, but a marriage does not need to end in divorce to be a failure.

This terrifies me, and I assume other rational, sane people feel the same way. Personal commitment and self-sacrifice are not enough to make a marriage work if only one partner is in the game. It takes both partners 

willingly sacrificing themselves for the marriage to succeed, but it only takes one to destroy it. You are at your spouse’s mercy, just as they are at yours.

However, as afraid as we may be, if we act on that fear, then we have failed before we have even started. Marriage is an integral part of human happiness, but if you go into marriage seeking your own happiness, you are likely to lose it.

This is something worth thinking about. What quality could be more important to find in a future spouse than loyalty? Forget the looks, or even the people-skills. Loyalty is of supreme importance.  In yourself, cultivate reliability and trustworthiness. Meet your commitments, always.

Remember that for marriage to benefit personal happiness, it cannot be about personal happiness.  Laws and politics which speak of marriage as a vehicle for personal fulfillment are missing the point.

Mathew 10: 39 "^aHe that findeth his life shall ^blose it: and he that ^closeth his^dlife for my sake shall find it."

KJV 

Moving Forward in a New Semester

Life is great. And busy. My three-and-a-half-month-old daughter Adelaide has discovered her hands and Aubrey and I have discovered mobiles. I always thought that mobiles were a myth.  Nothing that simple could possibly entertain a child, but lo and behold, it works.  Aubrey is hard at work designing a creative mobile for Little Adelaide this week.

The new semester just started here at BYU-Idaho only one week after the last one finished.  The break was brief but sufficient, and the new semester has both Aubrey and me back in the saddle. She is amazing. My dear Aubrey has landed a job as adjunct faculty teaching English for the university in addition to all the full-time effort required to feed, love, and entertain our baby. Babe, you rule. As for me, I am still working hard on my undergraduate degree in English with a full load of 15 credits. This semester I am studying medieval literature and will be memorizing passages in Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English for class. I am so excited!
In addition to my regular classes I am busy trying to get the Philosophy Society  up and running and managing/instructing the Taekwondo Club. As I said. Life is great, we are busy, and good things are happening.

Looking back on the post I wrote for the start of last semester, the changes are starkly apparent. I have been growing personally as a result of my marriage, education, and numerous prayers for strength and guidance. Going to school is not the burden it once was, and I know that life is going to continue getting even better.

Gratefully,
Joseph Bjork

New thoughts on the word “Old”

“Dude, your computer is ancient. That thing has to have come from the stone-age.”

In the modern word, “Old” means bad.  “Old” has connotations of “outdated,” “outmoded,” “irrelevant,” “inefficient,” “inferior,” and so forth. 

“New,” on the other hand, seems to mean “better,” “relevant,” “effective,” bigger, better, faster, stronger. Newer computers, cell-phones, games and etc. are better than older ones. But does that apply to ideas as well? Often we (modern people) think so.  “Cutting edge solutions” and the like.

But is that really the case?

A hundred years ago (and even more recently than that) the word “old” wasn’t a bad thing.  “Old” also meant “tried and tested,” “reliable,” “mature,” and “refined” (think of fine wines and cheeses). “New” was just the opposite. “Untried,” “risky,” etc.  

I think this is very interesting. New ideas are not always better than old ones. (If you even believe in new ideas, most “discoveries” in politics and philosophy have been around for millennia.) "Nihil novi."

Just a quick thought.  Listen when old people talk.  You stand a good chance of learning something valuable.  Don’t throw out old ideas just because they are old. Some things don’t get outdated.

The Gift of Distraction

When I was a missionary in the Netherlands and Belgium it boggled my mind that so many people had never once stopped to wonder about the big questions.  Who are we? Who am I? What is the point of all this? Where did it come from? Why?

These questions are of critical importance to everything we do in life.  It is critical to know what is worth pursuing and what our long term goals should be when deciding what direction to take in life.  But people don’t live that way. 

How often have you sat still and wondered about your place in the universe? Or pondered the dark, and somewhat awkward, question of the meaning of life? Is there anything after this life?  Does being alive even mean anything? How do I even know that I am alive? Perhaps it was in the moment when you were away from the city lights and saw the night sky full of stars.  In quiet moments when you felt empty and alone.  Maybe when choosing a college major or making some other life changing decision.

However, most of the time, we don’t think about it.  We worry about the tasks of the day, we watch TV, we get distracted, and we distract ourselves.

After years of tearing my hair out over this observation, I think distratction might be a good thing in moderation.

This is why.

Before setting out on a journey, it is important to know the goal.  “Begin with the End in mind” as the saying goes.  Without the big picture none of the smaller steps have any meaning or direction and nothing can be achieved except by accident or dumb luck. Understanding long term goals can be critical to one’s happiness and success.  The trouble with that is this.  What bigger goal is my big goal working toward? The scale can always increase to a larger plain.

This is a problem.  If you wait until you have the journey completely planned, “with the end in mind,” you will never start walking, and you will get absolutely nowhere.  This is the paradox of beginning with the end in mind. 

The beauty of the big questions is in their relevance and monumental importance.  The trouble with them is that they do not always have answers.  There will always be things (sometimes answers monumentally important things) that we will not know.  What makes something good?  Why are wrong things wrong? Good luck trying to figure that one out.

Our entire lives are a balance between the powers of reason and distraction.  Reason asks the questions, and if left alone with them, drives itself insane asking them. Distraction doesn’t bother with the questions, ignoring them entirely, and living on assumptions and dogmas.  Clearly, there is danger in each of these.  The danger of obscurity and an infinite regress on the one side, and of ignorance and dogma on the other. 

Reason helps us to question our beliefs and to trim away false ones so that the truth may thrive.  But like a set of overzealous pruning shears, reason alone continues to cut away at beliefs until none remain.  The entire branch of philosophy called Epistemology is dedicated to correcting this problem, and so far, there has not been any progress. Reason cannot even prove that there is a real world outside my head (think Matrix), let alone what that world is like.

Thus the need for distraction. And an even greater need for faith.  At some point, we need to be able to step back from the questions to live our lives.  This does not mean abandoning critical thinking and living in ignorance.  It simply means being able and willing to admit ignorance and keep living anyway. 

Gratitude Follow Up

The week after my last post on gratitude was incredible.  I found a few small ways to serve (mostly my wife and a friend who needed some help), and at the end of the week I was asked to give a talk in Church on service.  It was an interesting experience to think about, and try to practice, gratitude and service in a concentrated way. What I learned was to serve where I am.  There are plenty of opportunities here and now without rushing off to “somewhere else” to do service.