Our Hollowed Out Society

This country in its economics (finance replacing manufacturing), culture (sensations replacing thought) and politics (trivia replacing substance) is a mere shell of its former self. It is the politics that I wish to explore here.

The anomaly is that this country and this planet have never faced a more daunting future and we know it. In the face of this we let the powers that be parade the equivalent of small town gossip as relevant political debate. Do the people of this nation and this world mean so little to our politicians and political parties that they are prepared to write them off to further a blind pursuit of power? As a democratic people we must stop this nonsense. We must define the issues, not the politicians. It is our future not theirs that matters. Our politics refuses to deal with this very real world and this very real future. Why?

In the depths of that question lies the most disturbing and dangerous of realities; a giant nation bereft of purpose except stalking about the earth with the only resource it has left – its military. After sixty plus years of the greatest societal affluence the world has ever known the American people have lost their grasp on reality. They have been saturated with a massive daily dose of delusive advertising (about 3,000 ads a day). Their technology has created a virtual world on television, and increasingly on the Internet, that routinely subverts their connection to reality. The absolute ludicrousness of the April 16^th ‘debate’ between Obama and Clinton amply illustrates this. This want of connection to reality fosters dangerous fantasies, whether of values destructive of human well being (there shall be no abortion or birth control as increasing human populations devastate the planet and destroy the future for their progeny), foreign relations (war is more productive than negotiation.), or politics (spin is more important than truth or relevance.) The danger lurking in this state of affairs is that the American people will either let their very powerful government devastate the rest of the world or, if panicked by the impending chaos, look for a scapegoat, say China and follow some white-horse-mounted deliverer into World War III, which will be the War to End All Wars, because there will be no one left to fight World War IV.

The only reality operative in our society as a whole is the pain and suffering of a declining economy and that for reasons that most American’s cannot comprehend. At least the progressives of the 19^th century understood the source of their suffering. William Cullen Bryant’s “Cross of Gold” speech was directed at the wealthy and the corporations. We no longer have a political party much less a prominent politician who will stand for the people against the wealthy.

One of the missions of progressives is to restore the sense of reality to this society. This is a precondition for any substantive improvement. Unfortunately, if the PDA web site is any indicator, so-called progressive democrats have expressed no outrage at ABC’s Clinton-Obama ‘debate’. These progressives seem too caught up in Democratic Party politics to be outraged at ABC’s deliberate effort to trivialize this country’s politics by substituting school-yard taunting for the massive national and global problems that should be the focus of our presidential debates. My suspicion is that the last thing corporations, including media corporations, want to see is a serious discussion of these overriding issues because such a discussion would inevitably point to corporate front groups such as the World Bank, the IMF and the variety of corporate-dictated trade agreements. Real progressives would be pointing the finger of accusation at the corporate media for this glaring travesty of their legal obligation to provide useful public information in exchange for their very profitable use of the public’s airwaves.

Bob Newhard

The Age of Fundamentalism

For reasons I am not sure I thoroughly understand, fundamentalism has shown up vigorously in this “advanced” stage of human history. It is not just in religion. It also has become predominant in economics and popular culture. It poses, in my judgment, an insidious and significant danger to a democratic society.

Religious fundamentalism is now found world wide. Christian fundamentalism is rampant in the United States, as is Muslim fundamentalism from the Mideast to Indonesia and Western China and Hindu fundamentalism has reversed that society’s effort to be secular. In all of these places it has already produced very destructive conflicts. It is an enemy of reason and science and its dogmatic rigidity makes it extremely inflexible at a time that is, and increasingly will be, demanding societal multiculturalism and reliance on the freedom to think and speak that science demands of itself and of the society that would produce the needed scientists.

In economics we have a rampant fundamentalist “free market” capitalism in which the operating assumption is a rigid laissez faire with no room for the regulation and transfer of wealth to society as a whole rather than a few exceptionally wealthy people. This has resulted in gross inequities and the largest gap between the rich and the poor since the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century. This is an economics that has forgotten its origins in political economy.

In popular culture there is mass participation in violent video games whose violence is justified in the context of good versus evil. Even the police have adopted the good guys/bad guys dichotomy of children. There is no room for the complexity of human beings. They must be classified one or the other. This leads to gross injustice and the largest prison population next to China’s.

As J. B. Bury points out in his book A History of Freedom of Thought, democracy is a very fragile form of government. The vast majority of civilized history has been autocratic. Fundamentalism, by its very nature, is autocratic. The modern surge of fundamentalism can, if successful, return us to a latter day form of the Dark Ages, in which curiosity, the passion for understanding, and the freedom of inquiry and expression they require will be lost. Samuel P. Huntington, who would have us believe in a clash of civilizations between East and West, is mistaken. Our basic problem is the clash of fundamentalism and freedom.

We must understand that fundamentalism, whether religious, economic, political or cultural, is an enemy of democracy and must be resisted wherever it occurs. If American’s understood this they would not be gulled so easily by religious fundamentalism seeking to dominate society under the guise of the freedom of religion. When one’s freedom of religion aims at the submission or demise of other religions, it is no longer operating under the freedom of religion provision of the Constitution.

A further point and one addressed by Sara Robinson in a two part essay titled Two Kinds of Americans: Us Versus Them to be found on the Internet at www.ourfuture.org, is the use of fundamentalism to divide and thereby rule a society. In the essay Robinson details how the Republican Party deliberately departed from a 25 year shared governance in 1968 and set out on a path to gain power by using racist fundamentalism to divide the country and thereby destroy the common good that had been the focus of United States governance since FDR’s New Deal. I strongly recommend reading the essay the second part of which is due to be published on the same web site on Tuesday April 8, 2008.

To my mind progressives have to make fighting fundamentalism in all its forms a focus of their effort. They should no more shy about bringing fundamentalist religion to task for its antidemocratic intentions and practices than they are about fighting fundamentalist economics.

Bob Newhard