On Abstraction

The human ability to abstract is a two edged sword. It has been the source of major human accomplishments and major human deception and unnecessary misery.

What do the Mars Rover and the murderous U. S. soldiers in Hidatha have in common? They are both the results of the human ability to abstract. Somewhere in our evolutionary history we humans developed the ability to abstract from our observations. An abstraction may begin with generalizations about the common elements in the phenomena we observe, but in rather short order they take on a life of their own as an abstraction. Humans became so fascinated with their abstractions that we began drawing relationships among them, using these to build abstract structures, which they endowed with meaning superior to that found in our ordinary experiences. An example of this process is found in plane geometry. The Egyptians had learned to triangulate the Nile flood plain using knotted ropes so that after the annual flooring they could reallocate the land to the owners. Eventually the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras derived the properties of the right triangle independent of any application. Pythagoras and his followers were so impressed with the symmetry and power of their geometry that they built a religion around it. Plato held that everything we witnessed was a pale reflection of its perfect form, called a universal. These universals were where reality resided.

I think one lesson to be learned from our power to abstract is that it is very productive when applied to the natural world, but problematic and even deadly when we apply it to human beings. When applied to human beings abstractions can easily result in bigotry, violence and mass slaughter. In bigotry we usually abstract one or a few characteristic of the members of a group and disregard all individuality within the group and any other group characteristics. Thus derogatory terms such as japs, gooks and now ragheads are used to describe opponents in combat.

The military is notorious for its efforts to “objectify”, that is making objects out of the enemy by abstracting some presumed characteristic and applying it to all members of the defined enemy class. This allows soldiers to be more efficient in killing enemy humans because they do not have to treat them as humans. Currently we are seeing the results of this form of abstraction play out in the “prosecutions” of the soldiers that slaughtered a family, including children, in Hidatha Iraq. Although many participated in this slaughter, only one has been convicted and he will serve several years in prison whereas if he had done this to an American family he would have been sentenced to die. Even in the administration of “justice” these Iraqis remain objectified.

Lt. Col. David Grossman has written a book titled On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Grossman describes how the U. S. Army, in comparing the combat kill rate for American troops to the ammunition they fired in the Civil War and World Wars 1 and 2, determined that the kill rate was far below what they expected. Upon further investigation they found that the majority of troops in combat were avoiding killing the enemy soldiers by firing over their heads. These citizen soldiers could not bring themselves to kill another human being even when being fired upon. As a result the U. S. Army began a vigorous desensitization effort in training its soldiers. In my judgment, this may be a reason why the military is trying to place increasing amounts of technology between its soldiers and the enemy. When one fires a missile from a destroyer at sea one does not have to see the consequences in an Iraqi village over the horizon and hence one performs more reliably. The only casualty is our humanity, which happens to bind our species together, and hence is fundamental to civilized society. One additional question is, of course, what happens when these desensitized people return to civilian life?

One more example of abstraction gone grievously awry can be found in economics. The problem began with an abstraction we call money. Prior to money as a medium of exchange, economic transactions were basically barter. In my own lifetime my maternal grandmother would take the eggs and garden produce of their Iowa farm to town and trade them for salt and other necessities. When money was introduced as a medium of exchange, goods could be much more broadly distributed. All sorts of erstwhile local human products and services could find their monetary equivalencies and be interchangeably sold and purchased. However, money soon created a world of its own in which people began to make money off of money itself. Even Jesus saw there was something wrong with this (competing abstractions?) when he threw the money changers out of the temple. Thus began a world of business detached from human need. An enormous space was created for speculative deviousness, fraud and manipulation of a society’s economy. Of late, the inequalities and environmental disasters caused by money-based abstraction has led to an economic reaction called “true cost accounting” which aims at restoring the environmental and social damage caused by our money-based capitalism. It requires that all effects, e.g. pollution, social degradation, environmental destruction, waste etc. be built into the cost of products and services so that our economic activities do not lead to disastrous consequences for the human species.

Finally, there is that most dangerous threat to our species the abstraction called religion. As a recent article in the Providence Journal (April 28, 2008) asks, why in the repeated crises mankind is now experiencing, for example the current global food crisis, do we call in such experts as the economists, the agronomists and the political scientists to analyze the problem and offer possible solutions, but we never call in the demographers who analyze population explosions. Why indeed! Could it be the fear of backlash from the religions that promote higher birth rates? After all, the Vatican tried to kill the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt in 1999.

We know as certainly as we know the contribution made by fossil fuels to climate change, indeed more so, that the human population explosion is the fundamental cause of the damage we are doing to our planet and to ourselves. Yet we have major religions such as Catholicism and Islam promoting maximum population growth. If, in ordinary life, we saw a person pouring gasoline on a house fire we would act immediately to stop the crime. In the case of a similar threat to our species we give tax breaks to the criminals.

One aspect of abstraction-based structures is that, because they can be independent of all constraint either of fact or reason, they are ideal hosts to the play of human emotions. This often gives those abstractions applied to humans their power to affect humans.

Given our mass societies and their complex interrelationships, social abstractions in the form of law are necessary. However that necessity may reflect the problems of massive groupings of human beings more than anything intrinsic to human nature. In brief the lesson to be learned here is that our ability to abstract has very powerful consequences and that we should examine any abstraction-based proposal or practice for all its consequences before allowing its implementation. However, to require this kind of precaution, in the face of massive religious, cultural and advertising hype focused only on the so-called benefits of their abstractions saturated with emotionalism, will take a much higher level of sophistication and self control than now exists in our society. This change can either be accomplished through education, hopefully undertaken by progressives, or the realities of environmental and social collapse will induce humanity to learn the hard way – if it survives the learning process.

Bob Newhard

Taxation and Democracy -- the Deviousness of George Skelton

George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times political columnist in Sacramento, has raised the question of whether, especially in these hard times, public employees get too much in the way of salary and benefits. (June3,2008 issue.) In so doing he subtly suggests they do. Skelton also wrote a column (May 5, 2008) on taxes as a solution to the State budget crisis in which he says “Least stable is an income tax system that depends too heavily on the wealthy. Their incomes rise and fall steeply with the economy -- and therefore so do state budget deficits. In 2005, million-dollar earners comprised only one-third of 1% of all taxpayers but paid 36.5% of the income tax.” Putting these two statements together we get the hackneyed pit-classes-of-working-people-against-each-other conservative approach to fiscal problems. This time it goes to the ludicrous extreme of saying the rich should not be fairly taxed because their radically varying income is not a stable base for taxation. Presumably the middle and poorer classes of citizens whose income consists mainly of regularly taxed and reported salaries should bear the brunt of taxation. Furthermore, he offers the typically deceptive statement that “…million-dollar earners comprised only one-third of 1% of all taxpayers but paid 36.5% of the income tax.” without indicating what proportion they had of the total income. This is the point of the well known story about Bill Gates greatly increasing the average wealth of customers at a bar the moment he walked in. This kind of dishonesty permeates our consideration of one of the most important democratic issues, namely, a basic society-wide economic equity.

Every once in a while citizens get fed up with this gross and continuing inequity and force legislators to do something. Usually the response is to fix a particularly glaring tax loophole. This band aid approach to tax fairness has contributed to a massive wealth and income disparity between the rich and the poor not seen since the end of the 19^th century. In what follows I want to offer a few suggestions on what should be done to correct this staggering imbalance.

First, there is a profound need to establish the basis for a tax system. I suggest that in a democracy that basis is the welfare of society as a whole. That welfare should define all other tax values such as fairness. That welfare requires that the distribution of wealth not be so disparate that democracy cannot function. Conventionally the tax basis has been some form of fairness, violated though it may be. This is, for example, the basis for our income tax system or our sales tax in which the monetary value of an item stipulates the amount of tax paid, unless the tax is being used for some other purpose, e.g. to reduce tobacco use. I think the tax system must be more firmly rooted than this because “fairness” can be variously defined, e.g. “It is fair that a person keep all the wealth he/she has managed to acquire,” or “It is fair that parents pass on all their wealth to their progeny.” This sense of fairness is deadly to a democracy. Taxes are essential to our democracy; without them we would have a society of the rich and the poor in which a democracy cannot exist. In the capitalist system wealth is better positioned to acquire more wealth than is the absence of wealth. Wealth thus inevitably becomes concentrated in the hands of a few and wealth is power. This being the case it is necessary to redistribute a portion of the gross national product to those with less income to insure the continuance of democracy. Our method for doing this is taxation. The wealthy, because of their economic and hence political power are continually contriving ways to avoid paying taxes. What is needed is an ongoing strategy for capturing taxes with the assurance and regularity that we exercise with worker salaries.

The tax system is already rigged in favor of the rich. My wife and I recently got a taste of this when we sold some property we had held for twenty years. Our profit was taxed at only 15% instead of the 28% we were accustomed to pay on our salaried earnings. Additionally the wealthy have a variety of ways of earning income, stock options, government subsidies, depletion allowances for extracting oil and minerals from public land (Notice, the worker can not depreciate his body, his only asset, as he ages.) and hiding income in the Cayman Islands.

I want now to suggest a way a vast amount of wealth, which is not now taxed, can be. It is called the Tobin Tax in recognition of James Tobin, an economist, who first proposed it. It is, like the sales tax and the value added tax, a transaction tax. Tobin was concerned with ameliorating the gross imbalance of wealth between the northern and southern halves of our planet. He was impressed with the billions of dollars that flow 24/7 around the globe. This is an enormous quantity of fiscal transactions. If these transactions could be taxed a small amount billions of dollars could be transferred to the poorest areas of our planet. The wealthy may hide their money in the Cayman Islands or disguise it in other forms of transactions, but increasing their wealth requires fiscal transactions. These are almost always electronic and the transactions themselves must be noted. Even money laundering requires a transaction. The importance of this source of revenue is further evidenced by the fact that the financial segment of our annual gross domestic product has replaced manufacturing as the predominant segment. Finance is now our major “industry.” A Tobin tax in California would do much to level out the tax contribution of the wealthy that Skelton is concerned about.

While taxation may seem a dull subject, its crucial role in protecting our democracy should be a focus of progressive thinking and action.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and Courage

As of this writing Hillary Clinton in, justifying her continuing campaign, pointed out that other presidential Democratic candidates ran their campaigns into June including, gratuitously, Bobby Kennedy whose campaign was cut short by assassination. She knew that possible assassination was being used to argue that Obama was “unelectable.” Though she later apologized for the remark, the intentional damage was done. She was playing on the continuing argument against Obama that if he is elected he, as a black man, would be exceptionally liable to be assassinated. I have heard this argument from otherwise well meaning people. The logic of the argument is, of course, that those who may threaten a candidate in this manner control our elections. This raises an issue I see all too seldom discussed, namely, the courage it takes to live and participate in a democracy. Being that democracy ultimately rests upon human reason, not humankind’s strongest characteristic, it is therefore exceptionally vulnerable to attacks that are emotionally driven, e.g. fear.

When people express their concern that Obama could be assassinated they often express it as a concern for Obama’s welfare. The fact that Obama, an obviously intelligent person, decided to run means that, at best people do not want to experience one more presidential assassination, at worst they see this argument as a way to keep a black man out of the presidency. Either way it is racist at its core because it assumes that being black is a cause for assassination. For a society to rise above its past it must have the courage to accept and challenge its imperfections. We have a candidate who is willing to do that. We should support him in his efforts to remedy this cultural blight. Martin Luther King accepted that he would possibly be assassinated. Should all of his accomplishments be diminished because he was assasinated? The same holds for Gandhi and the massive changes he wrought. There are violent elements in any society. Should society make no progress because of this?

As I have noted previously, progressives should look at Obama’s candidacy and presidency as a unique opportunity to take a major step in rectifying racism in this country. This is a disease that will eventually consume our society. Obama is offering us an opportunity to take this major step. We must take it.

As long as societies are the instruments for human improvement we must have the courage to use them for that purpose.

Bob Newhard