When an Open Society Closes Down

The process by which a capitalist society becomes a fascist dictatorship has been articulated by writers such as Umberto Eco, Lawrence Britt and Milton Mayer. Now comes Naomi Wolf with her book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot in which she describes the process in terms of our Constitutional democracy and the current state of the American psyche and historical consciousness or lack thereof.. I found her image of an open society progressively closing down very powerful. As she describes the process in Germany there are almost exact correlates for what has happened in the United States following 9/11. This is a process in the earlier stages of which people go on about their business and entertainment as usual as their democracy is being dismantled, usually by manipulating some catastrophic event attributed to persons or groups already demonized - Hitler’s Reichstag fire in the case of Nazi Germany. It is the acceptance of dramatic changes in the constitutional stricture of a democracy by an indifferent citizenry, in our case we were told to go shopping, that I find most chilling. It is far easier to lose our democratic guarantees of freedom and due process than to reclaim them.

I think we are at a point in the process where it is imperative that we vigorously appeal to that fragment of our Constitutional democracy that remains, namely the vote. We have this, perhaps last, chance to elect a president and congress that are pledged to undo the great harm that has been done and demonstrates the capacity to undertake the task of undoing what the Bush/Cheney cabal have created. Wolf doubts that the Homeland Security Department can be undone because of the vast amount of corporate wealth now derived from that source. It is so large that some experts now refer to it as the security-industrial complex rivaling the military- industrial complex.

Another feature of despotic development described by Wolf is the creation of an external and an internal enemy. This is necessary to achieve control over a society and use the same instruments internally and externally. As we watch the merging of the military and the police to control both external enemies and internal dissident citizens it becomes imperative that the political will be developed to do this. When the U.S. military shifts its strategic training from the open battlefield to the slums of the world you know city dwellers in this country are not immune to similar treatment. Some of you may remember Operation Urban Warrior, a mock invasion of Oakland California by the military in 1999.

At the expense of a long post, I think the best thing I can do is include an article by Naomi Wolf outlining her 10 steps to fascism. I cannot urge you too greatly to take this matter vary seriously. As Wolf points out in her book, the Founding Fathers were not at all sure that ordinary people could govern themselves and hence create a democracy. Ours is one of those times that put this democracy to the test. The list of steps below indicates why.

Bob Newhard

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1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.

The Ultimate Contest for Planet Earth

Yesterday, December 10, 2007 Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, issued a call for Google, Goldman Sachs and Wal-mart and other corporations to get the UN commitment to the poor “back on track.” As the UK Guardian put it “Gordon Brown plans to harness at least 20 of the world's biggest multinational companies, including Google and Vodafone, to tackle a "development emergency" in the world's poorest countries and put the international community back on course to achieve seven UN development goals by 2015.” Short of global warming this request betrays one of the most ominous threats the world faces, namely the implied dependence of government on corporations to finance what governments can no longer do. This is privatization on a planetary scale. It acknowledges that corporations have corralled the wealth of the planet. In an earlier blog I mentioned another instance of this phenomenon in which Al Gore has joined a venture capitalist firm to fund profit making solutions to global warming instead of, for instance, working with the UN to create the coordinated governance this problem requires. What Gore is saying by such action is that this dire planetary situation is not going to be dealt with unless a profit is to be made and the corporations will determine how much they will do and how much it will cost. Democracy cannot flourish in such an environment of the rich and the dependent poor.

There is a way, however, to begin dealing with the problem of the world’s poor through the instrument of democratic government. It is called the Tobin Tax.

Instead of relying on the largesse of the corporations, we do what governments have always done; impose a tax to obtain the necessary revenue. But, it may be asked, how are you going to tax multinational corporations that simply move to another country to obtain lower taxes? First it is necessary to identify a global tax base. That is a global activity that will generate the necessary revenue to begin transferring the needed funds to the world’s poor. The Tobin tax would tax all global trades in currency between 0.1% and 2.5%. The daily volume of these global money transactions is between 1.2 and 2 trillion dollars a day. This tax would also discourage short-term speculation, a manifest source of recession and depression. Billions of dollars in currency trades cross the globe daily 24/7.

Now Gordon Brown is aware of the Tobin Tax. It has been introduced in various forms for consideration by various European Union countries. It has been introduced in the past into the United States Congress. Billionaire George Soros even supports a form of it even though, as he says, it would hurt his money trading profits. A successful resolution to support the Tobin Tax if other nations do was passed by Congress in 2000. It had, among its supporters, Dennis Kucinich. The resolution is languishing because it was contingent upon other nations adopting the tax. Why then did Brown call for the corporations to practice charity by providing funds for the relief of poverty in Africa instead of pursuing the Tobin Tax along with other wealthy countries? Perhaps you recall the first President Bush pushing his “thousand points of light” volunteer charity approach to solving the problems of the poor in this country. Charity, as a social remedy, must be rejected. It tacitly denies the right of every individual to the resources of our planet. We need to create a world where people have a right to a decent standard of living. This is what FDR stipulated in his four freedoms speech, one of which was the freedom from want.

For those of you interested in understanding the Tobin Tax there is an excellent article in Wikipedia with links to other sites. We must make people see that we are engaged in a fight with the corporations to preserve democracy for the people. Great wealth and great poverty are enemies of democracy as is unregulated capitalism.

Bob Newhard

Our Bifurcated Nature

The late Carl Sagan wrote his last book, Billions and Billions with the knowledge that he was dying. Presumably one wants to convey what is of utmost importance under these circumstances, yet in an early chapter he is concerned with Monday night football. He asks why this rabid concern for team sports among males. He notes that it gets so heated that murder and mayhem have been the consequence of some soccer games. Sagan gives an excellent account of how this penchant for team sports finds a significant, often defining, place in almost every culture and has been taken so seriously that the penalty for losing was sometimes, as in Mayan culture, death. Why? Sagan traces it back through millions of years of pre-human and human experience of hunting upon which human survival depended and which evolved into war using the same weapons and strategies. He is very good at conveying the importance of the hunt for survival, the risk and teamwork necessary. Additionally, status was conferred on the successful hunter because he provided for group survival. Think millions of years of this and we can begin to grasp the dimension of the problem that this ancient, highly rewarded and necessary skill, has produced for our technologically evolved and overpopulated world. The acclamation given to the hunter, both individual and group for their accomplishment and the required bravery were acknowledged by all repeatedly for thousands of generations. These male hunting groups, Sagan speculates, may be the first “brotherhoods,” The result is that quite possibly the disposition to the hunt, to war and to glory is hardwired into human males. In an age of nuclear weaponry and biological warfare this predisposition is not only irrelevant; it is dangerous to the human species. It is our monumental task to find a way to overcome this primordial male propensity before it does us in.

The only chance we have is to use our unique capacity to think. Can we sublimate this male instinct in sports? William James thought this could be done; Sagan seems to doubt it, witness the mayhem sports can turn loose in men. Can sex, at least an equally potent drive in men, offset this attachment to violence? There is a thread running from ancient Greece to the 1960’s that suggests some potential. The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in his play Lysistrata apparently thought so, (Lysistrata literally means “"she who disbands armies") as did the make-love-not-war anti-war slogan of the 1960s. Bonobos, the chimpanzee said to be our closest primate relative, use sex to repair the disharmony of community squabbles. How this could be implemented into our society is another matter. Another possibility is to seek societal change into a matriarchy, which has much lower rates of violence. An interesting study in this regard titled Indonesia's matriarchal Minangkabau offer an alternative social system may be found at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-05/uop-imm050902.php. As this study indicates, matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy in which females dominate instead of males. Rather it is a society that is a more co-equal arrangement than one of female domination.

These are but examples. What is imperative is that we understand ourselves much better, that we search our evolutionary past for possible offsets to mass violence, that we use this as evidence, not answers, because humans have never been in the situation that now faces them. Our past can provide evidence, perhaps ideas, but not answers because human beings have never before been faced with their ability to destroy our species. This is new and requires not only facts, but the understanding of the implications of those facts.

Sagan’s understanding of the roots of organized violence and their utter incompatibility with the technological world our intelligence has produced is an instance, I think, of the most profound and increasingly relevant question we can ask. Can the evolved human being, with all the instinctive, cultural and emotional baggage instilled over millions of years, deal with the consequences that evolution has produced. Put another way, can evolved human intelligence overcome human emotion as the primary determinant of human behavior. Our minds have produced a destructive capacity that can destroy the species. Our emotions and their ingrained cultural expressions, e.g. the violence of war and the wanton treatment of our planet now have at their disposal the nuclear and biological ability to destroy our species. While we can look to our past for suggestions of what might be possible, we cannot look to it for solutions. The failure to understand this is what constitutes both the gross error of the conservative traditionalists and their danger to continued human existence. Cases in point are religions bred in tribal cultures that are being promulgated, with increasing violence, as “solutions” to this modern dilemma or the notion of property that asserts that people can “own” portions of this planet and do what they will with it. This planet is briefly inhabited by each of us and is then left to future generations, far larger than ours in cumulative total, with little regard for their needs. We need to shape up. Terrorism is not the fundamental issue of our time – survival is. As a society we must start thinking instead of believing. There is no precedent for humans who are able to destroy their own species. This planet, not our nation, must be the focus of our concern. We must find our own way.

Bob Newhard