You may have read an August 7, 2008 report in the Californian (Remote-control warriors suffer war stress, too) regarding Predator drone operators at March Field. In case you did not, the article describes the daily life of these operators. They remotely fly Predator drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Their daily mission is to pilot their drones and fire the Predator’s weaponry to kill people that have been assigned them as targets. The Predator’s cameras are so accurate that they can distinguish between a man and a woman and image a person sitting on a bench. At the end of their shift they go home to their families, take the kids to a soccer game and carry on as a normal family. Or do they? Some of these soldiers say they can handle the daily job to kill and their family relations by keeping them separate. At what price? Others seek the help of psychiatrists caringly provided by the military.
What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.
We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.
This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.
Robert Newhard
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
Intellectual Honesty in Desperate Times
It is said the truth is the first casualty of war. I believe honesty precedes it.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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