Pretty Spicy Stuff

First – A big thank you to all who came to hear us live at The Mercury Lounge. More to come on that later. In the meantime, I have made a Spotify playlist of the studio tracks for all the songs that we played. Where’s the Soul is of course missing Huck Tim’s great rap, and a few tracks don’t have horn parts, which were added later once we got real horns in the band. Enjoy.

Now back to the blog post:

In Season 4 of the series The West Wing, in the episode titled "INAUGURATION PART I" the following conversation takes place between President Bartlet and newly hired speechwriter Will Bailey. (Kundu is a fictional country in Africa.):

Bartlet picks up the speech off Will's desk.

BARTLET
"A new doctrine for a new century, based not just on our interests, but on our values across the world." Well, that's pretty spicy stuff.

WILL
You wrote it, sir.

BARTLET
Yeah, I know. Why is a Kundunese life worth less to me than an American life?

WILL
I don't know, sir, but it is.

There was a time (e.g. Trump’s first term), when rewatching The West Wing served as a kind of palliative for political distress. Sadly, these days I think we need stronger stuff, and I have yet to find anything that fills the bill. Please send any promising ideas my way, forthwith. I guess there’s always the option of doing something.

But, back to the question of whose lives are worth more than others. Rumor has it that loving your neighbor isn’t just a Christian concept:

Many of the great religious traditions of the world hold to the idea of “Love thy neighbor”—Baha’i, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism, and Unitarian Universalism.

But what if you’re not religious?

In noted atheist Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, he discusses how Harvard biologist Marc Hauser has “…wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ.” In a study, Hauser and philosopher Peter Singer posed three moral dilemmas to both atheists and “religious people.” They found no statistical difference between the two groups in how they answered, leading Dawkins to conclude that “… we do not need God in order to be good—or evil.”

And, in his song Good is Good, noted armchair observer of the human condition Guy Story observes that

And If it’s good versus bad
[I] Believe I want to be good

I mean, it seems to me that, pretty much by definition, good is better than bad, right? And it’s natural to prefer things that are better, right? I mean, they’re better, right? Right?? Case closed?

Richard Dawkins’ book includes a fascinating discussion of a possible Darwinian rationale for altruism. There are folks who really practice this with energy and devotion. I am not among them, although I like to think I am aligned with the principle – coupled with a not so healthy dose of guilt for just standing by when I could do more. Why are we not uniformly on-board with practicing an idea that most faiths as well as non-believers support?

Typically, each of us is at the center of our own crude set of concentric circles – self, immediate family, close friends, extended family, members of the same geographical or faith community, inhabitants of a state, a nation, Mars, etc etc. There are lots of exceptions, messiness, overlap, and so on, and it seems obvious that it should be so, right? For example, our instinct for self-preservation must be deeper and stronger than our desire to save someone whom we don’t know. Dawkins again:

The logic of Darwinism concludes that the unit in the hierarchy of life which survives and passes through the filter of natural selection will tend to be selfish. The units that survive in the world will be the ones that succeeded in surviving at the expense of their rivals at their own level in the hierarchy.

I leave it to you to read the book (or not) and form a more complete view on all this. In the near term, just enjoy this new song (click the image to listen):

And in conclusion, if you’re going to love your neighbor, then you’re undoubtedly going to love Storytown. Lean into that love!! Pretty spicy stuff.

Thanks for listening.