A Passion for Ignorance

When the cultural history of the period following World War II is written, I suspect one of the most interesting (baffling) questions will be, "Why did our country, in the midst of the unprecedentedly successful application of science, e.g. man on the moon, discovery of DNA, etc. undertake such a massive, deliberate, dumbing down of its culture in which more people knew less than in the preceding generation?

I believe there were a number of causes, e.g. the substitution of the image for print as in television, affluence itself, but I want to dwell on a primary source: religion.

To begin, why is it that "people of faith" is an honorable, respect-laden, descriptor? Why do we not hear "people of reason" as such? Faith is a form of ignorance. The fundamental necessity of faith occurs when we must act, but we have less than adequate evidence to do so. It should be noted that even then we would prefer evidence or knowledge, but the exigencies of life require action in its absence. However, as is so often the case, we humans transform necessity into desire. Because faith has sometimes seen us through some of life's exigencies it must have some efficaciousness. As I mentioned in an earlier post we abstract from a specific event or events to a general proposition. In consequence believing has become, in our time, more important than thinking.

At a time when society must think its way out of a complex multifaceted threat of global disasters, violence and indeed the continued existence of our species, we have the most pronounced calls to religious faith. Indeed, knowledge itself is massively opposed by people and institutions of faith. Evolution is not only denied, but replaced by religious dogma. Population reduction is vigorously opposed despite the evidence that its growth is a major cause of violence. Faith has become a threat to our continued existence.

In our society it is considered bad form to criticize religion. Why? Let me suggest at least one reason: the Constitution. The Constitution's first amendment, in addressing the relationship between government and religion, elevated religion to the highest prominence. I sometimes wonder what religion's place in our culture would be if the first amendment had read, Congress shall make no law abridging the citizen's freedom of conscience, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. By using religion, an organized body of great power, it incorporated a force that could and does oppose or manipulate the state for its own benefit. Had this right been framed in terms of individual conscience it would not have such political power. In any event religion has become a prominent political player and yet would hold itself above criticism.

As a result religion now has corporate-like power to influence our government. It is as adept as corporations at getting public funds for its own purposes. It pressures our public institutions, e.g. schools, to become vehicles for its propaganda. In so doing it introduces a dumbing down process into public education. I have witnessed courses in religion being introduced into a public school district on the premise that students could not understand cultural clichés derived from religion unless the religion was taught. There would, of course, be no proselytizing.

Because religion does not have to take the real world seriously as does science, e.g. there are no empirical tests, it can make outlandish claims, do anything to appeal to human emotions and still be followed by the thoughtless. Hence we have the barbarities of Mumbai, the spraying of battery acid on Muslim girls who dare try to get an education or the promotion of maximum birth rates on a vastly over populated planet. Even the most benign of religions has an element of irrationality to it, which makes it difficult for its adherents to condemn the barbarities of fundamentalist adherents on doctrinal grounds.

Religion has the temerity in most cultures to define and become the guardian of morality. With the Age of Reason an effort to divorce religion and morality began. So far this effort has not been a stunning success. It is even a philosophical maxim of secular Western philosophy that you cannot derive a moral proposition from a factual one. This has led to an unnecessary cultural bifurcation in Western culture. Immanuel Kant, in my estimation, provided a clue to how we might reduce this cultural chasm. As an instance, he argued that lying was not wrong because some religion or its deity said it was. It was wrong because if everybody lied society could not function. This is a factual, empirical, justification for not lying. Suppose we tested every so-called moral proposition in this manner. Those that had a deleterious effect on the functioning of human societies would be regarded as immoral those that did not were matters of personal preference. While some problems would obviously remain, e.g. how does one separate morality from prudence (To which I would respond that cultural prudence may lie at the evolutionary root of morality.) These problems would have far less adverse impact on human beings and their societies.

Considerations of this sort may have to be pursued if we are to minimize the enormities that passionate ignorance has and will increasingly inflict on society. It must become a maxim of society that faith is not knowledge and belief is not reason if we are ever to live in concert with the planet, the two edged sword that science has given us and the common plight we all share.

Bob Newhard

Financial Tsunamis

In the last few days I have read a few articles on the effect of the global financial crisis on Japan. The owners of much of the world’s liquid wealth, having withdrawn their funds from U. S. and European financial markets to cut their losses, have decided that the Japanese yen is the safest major currency in which to place their money. This has created a monumental problem for the Japanese because it has rapidly increased the value of the yen by about 12%. This has commensurately increased the price for Japanese products. For a nation as dependent upon exports as Japan, this is a real blow to their economy. Thus because of the crash of the American economy and in consequence a debased dollar the Japanese are faced with selling expensive products that the world cannot buy. What does this tell us about an economic tsunami that can slosh back and forth across the world’s societies with no control?

The first thing it says, I believe, is that the world needs some mechanism by which, for starters, the size of the tsunami can be reduced. Capitalism has always had the boom and bust cycle so we know that this will happen again and again and in the globally integrated economy we now have it will have repeated disastrous consequences. To reduce the magnitude of the tsunami waves we need to reduce the over speculation that produces them. This speculation goes on globally 24 hours a day every day in the foreign exchange market, i.e. making money by exploiting the constantly changing relative values of the different national currencies. To quote from the Global Policy Forum,

“The foreign exchange market is the largest market in the world, with an estimated $1.9 trillion currency traded per day (2004). This means that in less than one year, currency worth 10 times the global GDP is traded. Of this massive amount, international trade in goods and services, which requires foreign exchange, accounts for only a small percentage ($9 trillion per year) of the total trading.”

That such a massive amount of money is in motion around the globe and not focused on any human need creates, in my view, a wild beast capable of great harm at any time and any place. It also indicates that the resources exist to deal with humanity’s oppressing needs. Controlling this beast that can devastate a nation’s or a region’s (Southeast Asia in 1997) or the global economy should be of the highest priority for the world’s leaders and especially that of the United States. A good device for doing this, as I have mentioned previously, is the Tobin Tax on global financial transactions.

James Tobin and others have proposed tax rates ranging from 0.005 to 0.25 percent that would generate between $15 and $300 billion per year for the benefit of the poor areas of the planet or addressing the social problems at the root of conflict. A UN study has estimated that about $150 billion per year is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals, including halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, ensuring primary schooling for all children, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases.
To my mind, this tax verges on a no brainer. We negotiated the GATT, NAFTA, etc. for the benefit of the corporations. It is high time we did the same for the benefit of humanity. We ordinary people have long lived with transaction taxes such as the sales tax. It is also high time that the wealthy of this planet pay a transaction tax as they move their wealth around the world manipulating money to make even more money. We badly need to bring this money market into some conformity with the world’s real economy. The wealthy and the Far Right will and are fighting it, usually as that hated economic practice called socialism, which has been made a bogeyman in the campaign against Obama. Which brings me to my final point (at last?). Several countries, e.g. France and Belgium, have already adopted the Tobin Tax conditional upon other major economic powers adopting it also. If the G8 plus India, China and Brazil could be persuaded to use this tax to mitigate the massively destructive over speculation of the global capitalist system’s impact on their own economies, the benefits to world economic stability would be substantial. By using the tax proceeds to progressively enhance the lives of the world’s poor, humanity just might find its way through the chaos of global warming and overpopulation.

Bob Newhard