Month: January 2026

My Comfort Thermometer

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January 25, 2026

By Steve Stofka

In cities across the U.S. emergency shelters are preparing for the Arctic front descending from Canada. The first effects of the front were felt in the Rockies. Denver’s temperatures dropped 30° from Thursday to Friday. Plains states are preparing for crippling ice storms before the snow blanket. There are routinely many challenges to being homeless. Severely cold temperatures make it doubly uncomfortable to live outdoors. This week I want to explore the idea of comfort, our internal weather map.

We understand the adjective comfortable as a gradient word, not an on-off switch. We can be more or less comfortable. We can grow less comfortable in a situation until our level of discomfort prompts us to take some action. We are emotional capacitors, similar to how an electrical capacitor works. A certain level of charge must build up in a capacitor until it acts to close or open an electrical circuit. Throughout our lives, we experience this sequence where a gradual process prompts a yes/no decision. We speak of being “fed up” or we “just couldn’t deal with it anymore.” Then we did something. In the American form of government, policy changes are often incremental. Public sentiment gradually becomes disaffected with some policy but it takes a great deal of dissatisfaction before voters usher in a change.

When we are comfortable, we are satisfied and less likely to want change. That is why advocacy groups sometimes use tactics that make the general population uncomfortable. They want voters to notice, to care. Caring is the second axis I want to explore. We care more about an issue when we are uncomfortable because we care a great deal with our comfort. From our first days outside our mother’s womb, we care about our comfort. That level of caring is instinctual. Caring about the comfort of others is not instinctual. We are social animals who develop that type of caring. We are especially drawn to the plight of children whose natural dependence exposes a universal vulnerability that we can relate to.

In a complex society, we are often faced with the tricky task of balancing comfort and care. Naturally, we care for our own comfort more than that of strangers. People who own property in urban districts zoned for single family homes may resist rezoning efforts to permit more dense housing in their district. These owners, called NIMBYs, are often blamed for the housing affordability crisis, writes Roberta Gratz in the Nation magazine (Source). She argues that private equity investors support multi-family rezoning in order to build megaprojects that give them the most return on their investment. They erect functional apartment boxes that rise five to eight stories above the ground. In Denver, these ugly boxes block any enjoyment of the mountain landscape that borders the city. When homeowners vote to preserve single family zoning, they vote against ugly, not against multi-family housing. Gratz cites several examples of homeowner groups who rejected larger projects that were out of character with the neighborhood, but did approve of a less ambitious project. Homeowners do care about affordability, the value of their homes and the character of their neighborhood. People are accustomed to caring about several conflicting issues at once. Some of us are better at juggling our priorities than others.

The AIDS crisis in the 1980s illustrates how comfort and caring intersect. Beginning in the 1950s, Greenwich Village in Manhattan was a gathering place for folks who belonged to the counterculture. These included beatniks, later hippies, then gays. St. Vincent’s Hospital, closed in 2010, was four blocks away from the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. In the summer of 1969, a routine police raid at the Stonewall Inn led to several days of riots by gay people protesting their marginalization by mainstream society. These Stonewall Riots, as they were called, were probably the spark of the gay rights movement.

In the 1980s, St. Vincent’s treated many gay men for a mysterious disease, later identified as AIDS, that often proved fatal even to young people. After several years, the hospital devoted a floor to those afflicted with the disease.  Gay men were only a small percent of the population and were thought to have brought this on themselves by their immoral behavior. Gay lovers were not considered family and were refused visitation. Early on, there was little understanding of how people got the disease. Did it spread through casual kissing or sexual contact only? Gay rights groups struggled to get funding for medical research from policymakers. A group called Act Up conducted several demonstrations at St. Vincent’s Hospital, then organized a “kiss-in” in 1988 near the hospital that blocked all four lanes of busy 7th Avenue (Source). The demonstration was one of many in cities across the country (Source).

Unlike the instinctual cry of a baby, these were planned demonstrations organized without the use of cellphones or social media. Even local phone calls on a landline telephone could be expensive in some areas so the main form of spontaneous communication was face-to-face at work, school, and places of shared interests. Everyone became aware of public events through a few highly regulated public media channels on TV and radio. The kiss-ins made a lot of people uncomfortable but they got the public’s attention.

In 1993, just five years after the 1988 kiss-ins, the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting marriage on the basis of sex violated Hawaii’s constitution (Source). In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriages (Source). Whether comfortable with gay marriage or not, many people now cared about an issue that had received little attention two decades earlier. The AIDS crisis helped people became aware that the institution of marriage conveyed legal and medical privileges that were not available to gay partners. Voters who were uncomfortable with gay marriage were even more uncomfortable with hospital policies that banned visitation by a gay partner. Within a decade after the passage of DOMA, 36 states had passed laws recognizing gay marriage. In its 2015 Obergefell v Hodges decision, a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states must recognize same-sex marriages (Source).

Roberts, Thomas and Alito, three of the four justices who dissented in Obergefell, are still on the court. Justice Thomas has publicly urged the Supreme Court to revisit Obergefell. Roberts and Alito have expressed a greater respect for the court’s precedent than their own misgivings about the decision (Source). All three justices are Catholic and have now been joined on the court by three more Catholics – Justices Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh.

Neither the Catholic Church nor conservative Catholics are comfortable with change. Catholic doctrine has long prohibited same-sex marriage just as they prohibited the teaching of heliocentrism for many centuries. In1822 the Church finally lifted its ban on heliocentrism, and in 1992, the Pope admitted the Church’s error in jailing Galileo for teaching heliocentrism (Source). The Supreme Court may have issued its decision in Roe v Wade but it was never settled law and the court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization overthrew Roe. While those six justices are not likely to overturn Obergefell on purely religious grounds, their sense of faithfulness to church doctrine competes with their respect for court precedent. Like the rest of us, the conservative justices are motivated to reduce their discomfort but they have not yet found a rationale. Advocacy groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council continue to lobby against gay marriage. Don’t underestimate the power of persistent political action.

Comfort and caring work together. Knowing the limits of our discomfort helps us better understand ourselves, but we don’t act on that discomfort until we care enough about an issue that we trip the action switch and do something. Stay warm and I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Artur Solarz on Unsplash

Speech Control

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January 18, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

This week, as I was waiting in a checkout line at the store, a couple a few lines away pushed a grocery cart with a toddler sitting inside. The toddler screamed uncontrollably, and the sound killed several of my brain cells, I was sure. I glanced their way, wanting to see if the child was hurt. She wanted her mother’s keys. When the mother relented and gave her toddler the keys, the child immediately grew quiet. What I thought was the uncontrollable anguish and rage of a toddler was a controlled performance designed to achieve a specific goal.

This week I want to take a look at the topic of control. Human beings are engineers by nature. We domesticate animals to serve our needs. We cultivate crops to produce a more pleasing taste and higher yields. We control the actions of other people to serve our wants. In his book The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, Jonathan Turley examines the history of speech control from ancient Greece to the present. America was the first country to stipulate a right to free speech in the First Amendment to its Constitution. In 1798, several years after the Constitution’s ratification, the passage of the Sedition Act tossed aside the First Amendment. The act prohibited newspapers from publishing anything critical of the administration of President John Adams, the successor to George Washington (Source).

The Constitution had recognized the danger of regional factions but not the formation of political parties. Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were the leaders of the Federalists, advocating a strong central government. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison represented the Democratic-Republicans, an opposition party that supported state and local control. For Adams, it was especially inconvenient that his Vice-President, Thomas Jefferson, actively opposed many of his policies. The Sedition Act was an attempt to quell criticism from media outlets owned by people who were sympathetic to the ideas of the Democratic-Republicans.

Three decades earlier, when the American colonies were under British rule, John Adams had been an outspoken rebel against the British monarch, the Parliament and the colonial governors. Now that Adams was the leader of the new nation, he regarded any criticism of his policies as outright sedition. When we are in control, challenges to our rule come from those who are out of control. When we are not in control, we may regard the actions of those who are in control as  uncontrollable. This duality of control makes the formation of at least two political parties inevitable. That is the second topic I want to look at this week, inevitability.

Whenever there is a disaster, an investigation often uncovers a chain of events that gives us the impression that the disaster was inevitable. No one can predict the likelihood of a severe hurricane like Katrina, but the consequences of Katrina seem inevitable in retrospect. In 1968, the Army Corp of Engineers built the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet through residential neighborhoods, particularly the lower ninth ward where 15,000 African Americans lived (Source). The outlet made it easier for ships to transition from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico but put many people at risk. In those decades following WW2, urban planners often constructed highways and other thoroughfares through poorer neighborhoods with little political power.

It is inevitable that rulers want only consensus from those they rule. A political leader fancies himself as the captain of a large ship. Any criticism of the captain’s direction is a threat of mutiny and must be suppressed for the safety of all, the captain reasons. Any crew members who are not willing to take orders from the captain are dismissed or thrown overboard. Disagreements are not tolerated. That is the policy of the current administration.

For several decades, the governors of the Federal Reserve have demonstrated an independence that is unique among federal agencies. The governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate but often express views that are contrary to those of the President and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Federal Reserve conducted monetary policy that was compliant with the President’s wishes. The result was soaring inflation. Lesson learned. Congress has given the Fed a dual mandate to promote two policies that are at odds with each other, full employment and moderate inflation. Helping the President’s reelection chances or popularity is not one of those goals. To accomplish those goals, the Fed must conduct unpopular policies like higher interest rates. More demand for labor tends to create inflation. Higher inflation creates less demand for labor. Balancing these two objectives is a difficult task. Some governors give a priority to employment and favor what is called a dovish monetary policy. Others prefer a hawkish monetary policy that chokes off any signs of inflation even if that lowers employment. Again we see a conflict of two perspectives.

Multiple perspectives are inevitable. Suppressing speech aims to suppress the voices of those who are not in control of policy at a particular moment. We are aware that China, Russia and N. Korea control their media and actively prosecute dissidents. That’s bad. When college campuses block controversial speakers, that is also a form of speech suppression on a reduced scale. Advocates for such policies claim that suppressing harmful speech is itself a form of free speech.

Turley reminds us of John Stuart Mill, the 19th century author of On Liberty who argued against this very practice in his time (p. 260). Mill advocated a harm principle that limited government action to protecting us from harm by others while allowing us to exercise our rights (p. 256). In a complex society, we are connected to and affected by the actions of others. A controversial speaker appearing on campus may cause me some anxiety. That level of harm does not meet Mill’s threshold to justify me organizing a campaign to pressure the administration to ban the speaker from appearing on campus.

Governments invoke their own expansive definition of harm to prohibit free speech. They are acting in the cause of public safety, promoting social harmony, and reducing conflict and controversy that might upset some people. China has a centuries long history of civil war. They justify one party rule and media control as a way to avoid another civil war. Just the possibility of harm becomes a basis for speech suppression. That reminds me of the 2002 film Minority Report where police act on the advice of psychics to interrupt and prosecute crimes before they are committed.

Given our nature as engineers who want to control our environment, it is inevitable that leaders want to control unwanted speech while allowing and promoting favorable speech. Few of us, however, want to live in a leashed society where information is fed to us like dog food. We cherish our autonomy and do not want to be treated like pets. We do not want to be caged by government police because we expressed an unfavorable opinion. The desire to control and the resistance to control will continue to create conflict in human societies for centuries to come. That much is inevitable.

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Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Keywords: free speech

Blurb: Few of us want to live in a leashed society where information is fed to us like dog food.

Me and Not Me

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January 11, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

An infant rests in the crook of his mother’s arm and gazes at her face. The infant may have been separated physically at birth from his mother, but the infant knows no boundaries of self. Fast forward a number of decades. When a parent dies, a child learns that the property of the dead parent forms a new self, a legal entity, that can be party to a contract. This new agent, called an estate, is even given an identification number (Source). This week I want to explore the space between self and non-self. What do we mean by self? I will leave a discussion of Atman, and other mystical variations, for another day.

At first glance, the idea of self seems rather binary. There’s Me and everything else which is not Me, the rest of the universe. But our lives are lived by degrees. We may not feel like the same person we were ten years ago, but our identity remains the same. A person may excuse their behavior by saying they weren’t themselves when they did such and such. Is Me the identity that began on the day of my birth? Does that Me end on the day of my death? That identity is objective. It was recognized by others even when I was lying in my crib and unaware of my identity. I could be lying in a coma in a hospital oblivious of my identity but that identity would persist.

Or is Me the person that experiences change, that acquires and loses abilities and characteristics? That is the subjective perspective. Perhaps Me includes both of these aspects, the objective identity and the subjective experience. As we reach our teenage years we experience an awareness of our presentation to those around us. Integrating this subjective awareness of the objective aspect of ourselves can be emotionally painful.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle built a metaphysics of a unified self experiencing change. He was a nature guy, a philosopher who speculated that things and people in the world behaved the way they did because they wanted to realize their nature. This sense of purpose, called teleology, was the central foundation of Aristotle’s thinking. He thought there was a universal form, an essence that directed a person toward a purpose. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, had thought the essence lived somewhere in the heavens. Aristotle taught that it was within us. Of course, I wouldn’t trust Aristotle to diagnose a problem with my car but they didn’t have cars back in ancient Greece when Aristotle lived.

If I fast forward in my time machine to the late 19th century, I would get a more mechanistic view from the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He thought that if there was any unity of self, it was a fragile union, a lull in an internal battle between the id and superego. The id was our primitive drive for pleasure. The superego was a collection of societal and parental norms that we had internalized. Negotiating the conflict was the ego, who was like a person walking an ill behaved dog (the id) that constantly yanks on the leash (the superego). Aristotle thought that we expanded our sense of self outward to family, friends and our local community. Freud imagined that we internalized our family and society, that we struggled to incorporate their ideals, commands and prohibitions. Somewhere in the space between these very different views of the self we can develop our own sense of what the self is.

The other axis I want to explore is care. Adam Smith was an 18th century philosopher and economist who noted that we care the most about those who are closest to us. We would be more upset by the loss of our own fingertip than we would if a million people in China died in an earthquake. It’s as though caring behaved like gravity, a caring force that grows weaker as the distance between two people increases. Smith wrote a century before Charles Darwin but we can understand how this mechanics of caring helps guarantee our survival. Charities recognize this force in their outreach to the public, and try to bring us closer to the plight of those in far off countries.

We care about ourselves a great deal and this helps our survival. People who are at risk for suicide may have a diminished sense of self-care. Some of us have a grandiose sense of our importance to others, lack empathy for others and seek admiration to reinforce our sense of our own importance (Source). This condition is called narcissistic personality disorder, and yes, it has its own billing code (Source).

Let’s return to that pastoral scene of mother and child. A woman experiences many hormonal changes after childbirth that can make it difficult to take care of herself while coping with the demands of a newborn (Source). Increases in the hormone chemical oxytocin help increase a sense of bonding with the infant (Source). A woman’s sense of self expands to integrate and accommodate the infant’s needs as well as her own, similar to the expansionist model of self Aristotle taught. In his philosophy, the self is directed outwards. His emphasis was on unity of self seeking to fulfill a purpose. He understood that a woman’s nature was to act as care giver and keeper of the household (Source).

Freud, on the other hand, focused on the conflict within the self. The self is not a given as in Aristotle’s metaphysics. It is built from the surrounding society, our family, friends and community. It is built through managing our instinctual urges. Given all that, it is no wonder that a parent, particularly a mother, would have a prominent role in a Freudian diagnosis. In his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky notes that the dominant explanation for schizophrenia until the 1970s was schizophrenogenic mothering. Yes, ladies, if your kid is a schizophrenic, it’s because you were a terrible mother. A history of such pseudoscientific quackery fosters public distrust in science, yet our modern society is ever more dependent on scientific expertise.

Does caring diminish with distance, as Adam Smith noted? Maybe so. People around the world responded when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for none minutes. Chauvin didn’t care when Floyd protested that he couldn’t breathe. The video and accounts of that incident shrunk the emotional distance between George Floyd and the public. Viewers cared. Around the world, they protested the brutal disregard of life shown in the video. Many believed that Chauvin was an example of a systemic prejudice against minorities. He was the mushroom that pokes its head out of the ground, an indication of a widespread fungal network below ground.

The spread of broadcast, cable, internet and social media has accelerated the expansion of each individual self. We become outraged at the sight of a flagrant violation of basic human rights. Internet networks have evolved to promote rage bait, content that is designed to elicit anger and outrage (Source). We see elements of both visions of the self, those of Aristotle and Freud. We are a bridge between an ancient idea that humans have a natural purpose and a more modern notion that we are a disjointed assemblage of impulses and influences. There is both unification and fragmentation. We are drawn to new experiences yet shrink from the conflict of so many different points of view. To simplify our lives, we contract and consolidate our media feed so that we consume only certain points of view. This Balkanization resists any unified vision, any common agreement of principle, of ethics, of acceptable behavior. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

Moral Responsibility

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January 4, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

If I am late for my bus because of a brief delay leaving home, will I miss the bus and be late for work? That depends on many factors. The bus might be a few minutes behind schedule. The driver could have been late to start his run because he forgot something at the terminal. Road construction or an accident might have delayed the bus before it got to my stop. Let’s say that the bus is on time. I miss my bus, I’m late to work and my boss is displeased, but I am not to blame if I live in a deterministic world. The things that didn’t happen are as much to blame for my being late as the things that did happen. The boss cares only that I navigate the public transit system so that I arrive on time. I am responsible for a certain outcome, being on time for work. We are using different philosophies to assess my lateness.

Last week I took a walk in the idea space that lies between libertarian free will and fatalism. This week I want to explore the domain of moral responsibility and see how the two connect. Libertarians postulate a self, a soul, some kind of animating force in each of us that makes choices in a free and rational manner. The choice is not necessarily when the outcome occurs. Take the case of drunk driver. At the time he hit a pedestrian or bicyclist, his senses and judgment were impaired. If he freely chose to drink and to the point of intoxication, then he is morally responsible. If someone spiked his drink or gave him a drug without him knowing it, then he is probably not responsible.

On the opposite end of that idea space is fatalism, the idea that all that occurs is destined by fate, some uberforce that is the agent of that destiny. John Calvin (1509 – 1564) preached that God knew whether a person was saved before they were even born. Calvin is classified as a theological determinist. To me that feels like fatalism, that people are not responsible for their actions, but Calvin insisted that choices did matter and that people were morally responsible for their actions. If God is omniscient, omnitemporal and omnipresent, then all of reality is a replay.

In a 2014 blog post, James N. Anderson uses the term divine determinism and explores several varieties of determinism and how Calvinism differs from fatalism. A fatalist would argue that something will happen regardless of what we do. Calvin argues that we are the means through which something occurs. God knows the future and allows it to happen although he could change it if he wanted to. Perhaps he did change it. We will never know. I think Calvin might liken God to an author who determines the path of his characters toward the ending of a novel. The characters in the novel are the means through which the author arrives at the ending. If we are characters in a divine novel, I think our moral responsibility is limited.

The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche rejected both free will and moral responsibility. The first was invented and the second was a form of self-hatred. He was a determinist who believed that instincts, upbringing and physiology were the root cause of our actions. In a 1930 New York Times op-ed, Albert Einstein expressed a belief in a strict causal determinism. In the opening line, he wrote “Everything that men do or think concerns the satisfaction of the needs they feel or the escape from pain” (Source). In his 2023 book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argued the case against the concept of free will, echoing Nietzsche and Einstein but with much more neurological evidence (Source). He analyzes free will from a neurological perspective, at the level of electrical signals crossing the axon-dendrite junction of nerve cells. This reductionist view seemed too mechanistic to me but the book contains many surprising research findings.

I will review the two varieties of determinism, hard and soft. Sapolsky included these at the start of his book. The first is that the world is deterministic and there is no free will. Sapolsky calls this hard incompatibilism, as in incompatible with free will. In last week’s post, I referred to this as hard determinism. Sapolsky advocates this position. A second type of determinism is compatible with free will, what I called soft determinism. Most philosophers and legal scholars are of this type, according to Sapolsky.

Sapolsky also discusses the intersection of free will and moral responsibility. The most popular position holds that there is free will and moral responsibility. Some claim that there is no free will and therefore, no moral responsibility. Sapolsky favors this position and distinguished moral responsibility from legal responsibility. There is a practical use of punishment as a deterrent to future unwanted behavior. Another intersection also claims no free will but people can be held morally responsible for their actions. The last position is an outlier and admits free will but not moral responsibility.

Does finding a solution to any problem depend on knowing the cause of the problem? We may intuit a solution without pinning down a cause. In his book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist quoted the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss “I have had my results for a long time; but I do not know yet how I am to arrive at them.” In The Matter With Things and a previous book The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist examined the roles that each side of our brain plays as we navigate the world (Source). If each side of our brain perceives and engages with the world differently, where does moral responsibility lie?

The right brain understands events and facts within context and experience, a practical wisdom similar to Aristotle’s phronesis. The left brain does not. It extracts those events and facts from their context in order to form a model, a theory of the world. It is the right brain that applies those theories to the different contexts we encounter each day. The left side processes text; the right side comprehends the meaning and context of the text. While there are similar patterns in perception and decision making among individuals, the synergy between the two sides of our brain is creative and unique to each individual. Choices flow from perception. McGilchrist rejects biological determinism.

So much of what we experience is a web of complex causes. Outcomes may depend on our frame of reference. Here’s an example. In normal time, a photo finish in a horse race might look like a tie. Before the introduction of high speed cameras, human judges decided the winner. Sometimes there were arguments over the winner and some races were declared a “dead heat,” or tie. In 1937, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in Hollywood featured a slit camera pointed at the finish line and was able to describe the finish in fractions of a second (Source). The causes of the horse’s win are too numerous to count. In reviewing film of the race, some might point to a hesitation or a slip as the losing horse rounded the  final curve. Was it the condition of the track or the horse’s competitive spirit or its mood? A complete identification of a multi-causal event is improbable, if not impossible.

Instituting a standard of legal responsibility must incorporate complex causality and our decision making in the face of that complexity. In our legal system, instances of injustice are more frequent than we would like to admit. Governments decide legal responsibility but individuals and private institutions decide moral responsibility. Advocacy groups lobby lawmakers to make their sense of moral responsibility the legal standard for everyone. If someone is to blame, some government body should impose a punishment as a deterrent. If there is praise, that behavior should be rewarded.

Philosophers, ethicists and legal scholars might express a coherent philosophy of free will, determinism or fatalism, but we often utilize versions of all three philosophies in our daily lives. Many of us inhabit the space between two pure concepts. There are degrees of free will and moral responsibility that we adapt to varying circumstances. We offer excuses to evade the blame for an incident, but hold others responsible if they have had an impact on our well being, particularly if that impact is negative.

The 19th century poet Walt Whitman embraced the complexity of our contradictions, beliefs and experiences when he wrote in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Do you believe that we have free will? Is there justice in holding people morally accountable for their actions? I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by David Vives on Unsplash