Many have speculated on the diametric difference between Obama's campaign message of fundamental change and the fundamental lack of change in his actions and policies as President. Some say Obama did not bring change because the office of President changed him. Others, with whom I agree, say that Obama never intended to bring change, that he is the great deceiver. From his very first decision to name Rahm Immanuel as his Chief of Staff and his ouster of Howard Dean as head of the Democratic National Committee it was clear that nothing resembling the change he trumpeted during his campaign was going to take place. It has only gotten worse. There is a large and chilling lesson to be learned from this enormous deception. That lesson is crystal clear in telling us who is in charge of this country and what their intentions are for those of us who live here and those on this planet that may suffer from the use of America's power both economic and military.
From his 700 million dollar bailout of major US banks (talk about "trickle down"), to his pursuit of American oil hegemony on the shores of the Caspian Sea, otherwise known as the Afghanistan surge, Obama has demonstrated his allegiance to the wealthy of this nation and the continued political domination of corporations. It is, in my judgment, imperative that the people of this country become focused on corporate America as the single largest threat to their democracy and personal well being. Profit, not people, has been the articulating dominator of this country far too long. It is now a question of them or us. Obama, with a mandate no president has had since Ronald Reagan, refused to use it to redirect this country to the welfare of its citizens instead of the welfare of its wealthy.
The depth of Osama's commitment to the wealthy and their corporations is portrayed in an excellent, well documented report by David DeGraw titled Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down. The report can be found at http://ampedstatus.com/af-pak-war-racket-the-obama-illusion-comes-crashing-down. DeGraw describes how the Afghanistan surge is actually directed at denying Russia and China access to one of the world's largest oil reserves located on the Kazakhstan coast of the Caspian Sea. More accurately, it is aimed at providing that oil to United States oil corporations. Wall Street firms, especially Goldman-Sachs, are involved in this effort by way of setting up an oil commodities market outside the United States to handle the world-wide competition for this oil. Thus, to make the depth of the deception that is the Afghanistan War a little clearer, the United States military is waging war, killing and being killed, for the benefit of oil corporations who will not only make immense amounts of money from that oil, but will, in addition, manipulate the speculative market for this oil to further raise the oil's cost and their profits. This monstrous undertaking involving the killing and maiming of the innocent in the thousands for the benefit of egregiously wealthy corporations, their officers and investors, is but an instance of the capitalist greed we have unleashed upon the world. We progressives must make clear the depths of calumny that the people are being subject to. DeGraw's essay is a good place to start.
As a result of Obama's abandonment of progressives it is, in my judgment, fruitless to continue the pursuit of some sort of accommodation with him. He patently is not interested. The problem is what is to be done to save our democracy in the absence of political clout. Some, such as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are focused on electing progressive candidates to national, state and local political offices. Commendable as this is, I do not think we have time for this approach. The Copenhagen climate conference, for example, has demonstrated that the wealthy portion of the planet is prepared to sacrifice the poorer southern nations of the world, especially Africa, by way of "cap and trade" the market for which strongly favors the wealth of the rich countries. The United States is a major player in this effort, which would lock in this market approach until at least 2020, which is way beyond the time we have to act on this most momentous of issues. As I say, we do not have time for an incremental approach to changing our government and our national priorities.
To my mind progressives have to organize to take the issues and the short term impacts that they will generate to the people. As an example, Sam Pizzigati has proposed that instead of just increasing the taxes on the rich, who, with their time and money, will energetically seek to reverse them, we need in addition to cap both the top and the bottom of the annual income scale. Sam's essay can be found at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109pizzigati.html . Decades ago Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income for all citizens. He saw that, with the advancement of technology and the consequent elimination of jobs, the job could no longer be the sole vehicle for distributing the gross national product. A guaranteed annual income or some surrogate would "cap" the bottom of the economic scale. Capping the maximum income that a citizen could receive would not only create a more equitable society, it would, by linking the welfare of the rich and the poor with these "caps," provide a constant awareness among the citizenry of equity, especially when the wealthy begin their often devious efforts to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of society. The importance of this latter point can be demonstrated by reflecting on how Reagan persuaded the average American that increasing the wealth of the already wealthy by tax breaks and other measures would stimulate the economy and thereby provide jobs for the rest of us. In this connection it should also be noticed that we have been indoctrinated to accept the "business cycle" as normal. What is seldom pointed out is that since the advent of modern technology, especially computers and robots, after every recession there have been fewer jobs available. In other words the "normal" business cycle is now in the business of eliminating jobs. As long as the job remains the basic means of distributing the gross national product this problem can only increase.
I think we can now see more clearly what Ralph Nader has been saying for years, namely, that in the area of corporate domination of American society there is no significant difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They are both wedded to corporate domination of our country and our world. As for the latter matter Arundhati Roy, in her book of essays titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers has described the corporate pillaging of India by the very same corporations that have been so detrimental to our own society. What David DeGraw has shown us about Obama and what Sam Pizzigati has proposed as a remedy for the dominating role of wealth in our society reflects both the cause of our terrible times and the kind of remedy progressives need to pursue. Lacking a political party progressives need to push both the underlying cause of our dysfunctional and increasingly dangerous societal behavior and the kind of remedies need. This is exactly what the progressives did at the turn of the 20th century with their push to base our currency on silver and gold rather than the much scarcer gold alone, which the wealthy could so easily control. This is the significance of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. Let us go forth and do likewise.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Progressivism Reborn or A New Progressive Paradigm
One of the salient failures of contemporary progressivism is the absence of a basic progressive paradigm. The conservatives under Ronald Reagan used the paradigm of an inept malmotivated government as the enemy to overcome. Government was portrayed as the enemy of freedom. The "positive" side of this paradigm was "freedom" from government, indeed as we have seen, from democracy itself. That is because the freedom of the wealthy is at war with the democracy that secures freedom for the rest of us. The genius in this "freedom" paradigm is that it appeals to a basic human desire. The range of political games that can be played between the paradigms of big brother and the self identity that is the basic motivator of freedom, is enormous and the conservatives have played them to the point of the ME generation," Greed is Good", and the moose-skinning individualism of Sarah Palin. However, the real name of the game was not big brother and freedom, but corporate capitalism's takeover of an otherwise distracted country. By the rigging of this country for maximum corporate profit conservatism is and has been a profound enemy of democracy. Our voting has been about as effective as that of Soviet Russians voting for members of the Duma. We no longer have a democracy, but a plutocracy.
It is instructive, however, to understand why the conservatives have been so successful in transferring massive amounts of wealth to the rich with no uproar from the populace. As noted above, they have a designated enemy and a positive remedy. Progressives, I suggest, need a similar paradigm used for the benefit of the people and honest in portraying the world as it is. A progressive paradigm, I think, must posit excessive wealth as the enemy. Highly concentrated wealth is what has created a dominant source of power, deprived us of an effective vote and hollowed out our economy by substituting finance for industry and shipping jobs off shore. It is the wealthy that formed G. W. Bush's acknowledged base, i.e. "the haves and the have mores" and generated the Iraq war to maximize corporate profit. In brief, excessive, maldistributed wealth has been the source of massive harm to our citizens and mankind in general. Progressives need to forcefully detail the magnitude of the harm that excessive wealth has done. We need to detail the effects of the greatest gap between the rich and the rest of us in nearly a century.
The "positive" part of a progressive paradigm will, in my judgment, require deeper thought and understanding of human motivation than we now have. When Ronald Reagan tapped freedom as the goal of society he called into play a basic human desire. Progressives must find an equally fundamental element in human nature to call upon. The problem can be understood when one reflects upon the fact that the whole of human civilization has been accomplished in the face of basic human predilections. Civilization is not in our primitive genes. It was built up substantially as a result of thought and the overcoming of our basic human predilections. Thought, for most human beings, is not a fundamental response mechanism, which accounts for our species' increasingly terrible short sightedness. What to do? I suspect that we must make clear the necessity of the group for our survival as a species. We are after all a social animal. We can begin this process by making widely known the many times that group responses to danger have saved us when individual responses would have or did fail. Why, after all, do we gather together when threatened? Thus the paradigms of the destructiveness of excessive wealth and the value of groups (some say communities) as vehicles for mitigating conflicts that would otherwise be extremely deleterious to humankind could provide a focus for progressive proposals and practices.
This still leaves the larger and much more difficult question as to what progressivism should pursue in the long or very long run. Questions of this sort force one to get very clear about what one means by progressivism. I suspect at root progressivism means creating a society in which the community sees its task as optimizing the potential of its citizens and citizens see their responsibility to carry forward a society that will optimize the potential of future citizens. This will require a much longer range of forethought than is currently permitted by the extremely short term next-quarter's-profit thinking of contemporary corporate horizons. The whole of capitalism, as now practiced, is made both irrelevant and dangerous by such a requirement. But human beings have practiced the art of responsibility to the future. The five nation Iroquois Confederation, at the time of this nation's founding, considered all of their proposed actions in terms of the welfare of those to the seventh generation in the future. They could do this because their world changed relatively little from generation to generation. They controlled birth rates to maintain their relationship to their natural resources. For us to do likewise we will not only have to control our reproduction rate, we will have to slow our uncontrolled development and deployment of new technology. Considerations such as these begin to highlight the immensity of the task facing progressivism. It prompts me to ask as some have asked of democracy itself, is it up to the task? We have, however, little choice if our species is to persist.
Bob Newhard
It is instructive, however, to understand why the conservatives have been so successful in transferring massive amounts of wealth to the rich with no uproar from the populace. As noted above, they have a designated enemy and a positive remedy. Progressives, I suggest, need a similar paradigm used for the benefit of the people and honest in portraying the world as it is. A progressive paradigm, I think, must posit excessive wealth as the enemy. Highly concentrated wealth is what has created a dominant source of power, deprived us of an effective vote and hollowed out our economy by substituting finance for industry and shipping jobs off shore. It is the wealthy that formed G. W. Bush's acknowledged base, i.e. "the haves and the have mores" and generated the Iraq war to maximize corporate profit. In brief, excessive, maldistributed wealth has been the source of massive harm to our citizens and mankind in general. Progressives need to forcefully detail the magnitude of the harm that excessive wealth has done. We need to detail the effects of the greatest gap between the rich and the rest of us in nearly a century.
The "positive" part of a progressive paradigm will, in my judgment, require deeper thought and understanding of human motivation than we now have. When Ronald Reagan tapped freedom as the goal of society he called into play a basic human desire. Progressives must find an equally fundamental element in human nature to call upon. The problem can be understood when one reflects upon the fact that the whole of human civilization has been accomplished in the face of basic human predilections. Civilization is not in our primitive genes. It was built up substantially as a result of thought and the overcoming of our basic human predilections. Thought, for most human beings, is not a fundamental response mechanism, which accounts for our species' increasingly terrible short sightedness. What to do? I suspect that we must make clear the necessity of the group for our survival as a species. We are after all a social animal. We can begin this process by making widely known the many times that group responses to danger have saved us when individual responses would have or did fail. Why, after all, do we gather together when threatened? Thus the paradigms of the destructiveness of excessive wealth and the value of groups (some say communities) as vehicles for mitigating conflicts that would otherwise be extremely deleterious to humankind could provide a focus for progressive proposals and practices.
This still leaves the larger and much more difficult question as to what progressivism should pursue in the long or very long run. Questions of this sort force one to get very clear about what one means by progressivism. I suspect at root progressivism means creating a society in which the community sees its task as optimizing the potential of its citizens and citizens see their responsibility to carry forward a society that will optimize the potential of future citizens. This will require a much longer range of forethought than is currently permitted by the extremely short term next-quarter's-profit thinking of contemporary corporate horizons. The whole of capitalism, as now practiced, is made both irrelevant and dangerous by such a requirement. But human beings have practiced the art of responsibility to the future. The five nation Iroquois Confederation, at the time of this nation's founding, considered all of their proposed actions in terms of the welfare of those to the seventh generation in the future. They could do this because their world changed relatively little from generation to generation. They controlled birth rates to maintain their relationship to their natural resources. For us to do likewise we will not only have to control our reproduction rate, we will have to slow our uncontrolled development and deployment of new technology. Considerations such as these begin to highlight the immensity of the task facing progressivism. It prompts me to ask as some have asked of democracy itself, is it up to the task? We have, however, little choice if our species is to persist.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Malicious Doubt
Doubt has had a checkered history in Western Civilization. For long periods during the Dark and much of the Middle Ages it was dangerous to express doubt on religious matters. However, with the rise of science doubt found a definite role in human inquiry. Doubt is essential to science. It is what allows science to avoid dogmatism and encourage inquiry and not infrequently controversy. With science doubt became essential to the establishment of fact. Doubt is also an acknowledgement of human noetic finitude. However, doubt is also an emotional response to the world about us and to other humans.
With the advent of advertising, and its applied psychology, doubt as an emotional response became a fundamental tool for promoting corporate agendas. David Michaels in his book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health begins his account with the tobacco industry's campaign against the mounting evidence that tobacco smoking caused cancer. This has been a 50 year battle against mounting scientific evidence including the Surgeon General's declaration of the danger of tobacco smoking and eventually fighting the accusation that tobacco advertising was targeting children. To this day we permit the sale of a known addictive carcinogen. The primary ingredient in the tobacco industry's defense was doubt. The evidence against tobacco smoking was statistical. The tobacco company argued that until a laboratory test could demonstrate the connection between smoking and cancer in human beings, forget mice, regulation of their product was unwarranted. Thus the companies were able to raise doubt (the emotional variety) in the public's mind by opposing the "hard" sciences of physiology and chemistry to the supposed "soft" science of statistics, i.e. the public belief that if you can lie with statistics all statistics are suspect. The tobacco companies would have you forget the fact that all epidemiology is founded on statistics. Thus doubt so used in advertising was as good as disproof, without disproof's risk of being exposed. One can't be sued for doubting something. Doubt is not false advertising.
This Madison Avenue technique of using unjustified doubt to defeat truth moved with alacrity to politics. A most notable case was the defeat of the Clinton health care plan. The Harry and Louise television ad promoted by the pharmaceutical corporations did much to defeat this effort to get a national health plan. The ad did not say that a national health plan was dangerous, unethical, destructive of free enterprise, un-American, etc. It even granted that some improvement was necessary. It merely had Harry and Louise, in conversation at home, express reservations as to whether this plan was the right one. In other words it instilled doubt in the viewer's mind. That was as good as proving the health plan was wrong with no risk of contradiction and much less controversy.
Another, and for the purposes of this column final, example of the use of doubt not only to dissuade masses of people, but to replace knowledge with myth, is the modern rise of creationism. This is not merely a subversion of knowledge, but a direct attack upon it. The proponents of creationism begin by casting doubt on evolution, by calling it "merely" a theory thereby leaving it open to doubt and justifying the teaching of competing theories in public schools. They did this by equating the scientific meaning of theory and the common notion that a theory is nothing but an opinion. In science a theory is, first of all, capable of acquiring evidence and thereby increasingly verifiable. Theories may thus have more or less evidence for them and to that extent constitute knowledge. Because the popular mind equates knowledge with certainty, theories are always less noetically reliable than knowledge. It should be pointed out that the only area in which we actually have certainty is when conclusions are logically drawn from premises that have the conclusion imbedded in them. We call this discipline mathematics. Discoveries can be made here because we may be unclear about the premises we use. For example, for centuries Euclid's geometry was believed to be the only possible geometry and as such described the real world. However, in the 19th century two perfectly consistent non-Euclidian geometries were developed, one by Riemann, the other by Lobachevsky. Among other things two parallel lines could intersect in these geometries. Further when Einstein was looking for a geometry to describe the universe of relativity, which Euclid's did not, he found that Riemann's system worked perfectly. Thus pure mathematical innovation became a function of an empirical science. This, in very rough outline, exemplifies how scientific theories are developed. They are not insubstantial speculations.
Another approach to trying to get the public to understand the nature of scientific knowledge is undertaken by Richard Dawkins in a Free Inquiry article titled The Fact of Evolution adapted from his new book The Greatest Show On Earth:The Evidence for Evolution. In this article Dawkins seeks to articulate the nature of evidence. In it Dawkins describes some of the consequences of denying evolution's facticity. He points out that the evidence for evolution is far more substantial than, for example, that of the Jewish holocaust, yet even though there are holocaust deniers there is no mass belief that the holocaust did not happen. More important to my mind, is pointing out the scientific consequences of denying evolution. Evolution is necessary to the study of genetics and to the understanding of the relatedness of all life forms. To quote Dawkins, "Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond, sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Yet people will doubt it, which is what I mean by the psychological response we call doubt and it is this "doubt" that is fed, manipulated and promoted by those having powerful interests other than truth. The searchers after profit and power are not to be trusted as searchers for truth.
What are the perils that confront a society that has been conditioned to emotional responses to its problems, in this case the emotional correlate of doubt, in place of the factual, evidentiary use of the term? First there are no built in limits to the emotional use of language. The only test is whether it solicits the emotional response of the user. The truth or falsity of language, its facticity, is not only independent of its emotional use, it is often deliberately contravened by the emotional use. Thus a society that cannot distinguish between fact and emotion is doomed to be a continuing victim of deception, untested decision making and the cruelest of social consequences. The whole catastrophe of our Middle East involvement, the horrendous death rates, the societal destruction and the massive waste of money drastically needed for humane purposes can be laid at the feet of a massive substitution of the emotional connotations of language for its cognitive uses. Language matters!
Bob Newhard
With the advent of advertising, and its applied psychology, doubt as an emotional response became a fundamental tool for promoting corporate agendas. David Michaels in his book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health begins his account with the tobacco industry's campaign against the mounting evidence that tobacco smoking caused cancer. This has been a 50 year battle against mounting scientific evidence including the Surgeon General's declaration of the danger of tobacco smoking and eventually fighting the accusation that tobacco advertising was targeting children. To this day we permit the sale of a known addictive carcinogen. The primary ingredient in the tobacco industry's defense was doubt. The evidence against tobacco smoking was statistical. The tobacco company argued that until a laboratory test could demonstrate the connection between smoking and cancer in human beings, forget mice, regulation of their product was unwarranted. Thus the companies were able to raise doubt (the emotional variety) in the public's mind by opposing the "hard" sciences of physiology and chemistry to the supposed "soft" science of statistics, i.e. the public belief that if you can lie with statistics all statistics are suspect. The tobacco companies would have you forget the fact that all epidemiology is founded on statistics. Thus doubt so used in advertising was as good as disproof, without disproof's risk of being exposed. One can't be sued for doubting something. Doubt is not false advertising.
This Madison Avenue technique of using unjustified doubt to defeat truth moved with alacrity to politics. A most notable case was the defeat of the Clinton health care plan. The Harry and Louise television ad promoted by the pharmaceutical corporations did much to defeat this effort to get a national health plan. The ad did not say that a national health plan was dangerous, unethical, destructive of free enterprise, un-American, etc. It even granted that some improvement was necessary. It merely had Harry and Louise, in conversation at home, express reservations as to whether this plan was the right one. In other words it instilled doubt in the viewer's mind. That was as good as proving the health plan was wrong with no risk of contradiction and much less controversy.
Another, and for the purposes of this column final, example of the use of doubt not only to dissuade masses of people, but to replace knowledge with myth, is the modern rise of creationism. This is not merely a subversion of knowledge, but a direct attack upon it. The proponents of creationism begin by casting doubt on evolution, by calling it "merely" a theory thereby leaving it open to doubt and justifying the teaching of competing theories in public schools. They did this by equating the scientific meaning of theory and the common notion that a theory is nothing but an opinion. In science a theory is, first of all, capable of acquiring evidence and thereby increasingly verifiable. Theories may thus have more or less evidence for them and to that extent constitute knowledge. Because the popular mind equates knowledge with certainty, theories are always less noetically reliable than knowledge. It should be pointed out that the only area in which we actually have certainty is when conclusions are logically drawn from premises that have the conclusion imbedded in them. We call this discipline mathematics. Discoveries can be made here because we may be unclear about the premises we use. For example, for centuries Euclid's geometry was believed to be the only possible geometry and as such described the real world. However, in the 19th century two perfectly consistent non-Euclidian geometries were developed, one by Riemann, the other by Lobachevsky. Among other things two parallel lines could intersect in these geometries. Further when Einstein was looking for a geometry to describe the universe of relativity, which Euclid's did not, he found that Riemann's system worked perfectly. Thus pure mathematical innovation became a function of an empirical science. This, in very rough outline, exemplifies how scientific theories are developed. They are not insubstantial speculations.
Another approach to trying to get the public to understand the nature of scientific knowledge is undertaken by Richard Dawkins in a Free Inquiry article titled The Fact of Evolution adapted from his new book The Greatest Show On Earth:The Evidence for Evolution. In this article Dawkins seeks to articulate the nature of evidence. In it Dawkins describes some of the consequences of denying evolution's facticity. He points out that the evidence for evolution is far more substantial than, for example, that of the Jewish holocaust, yet even though there are holocaust deniers there is no mass belief that the holocaust did not happen. More important to my mind, is pointing out the scientific consequences of denying evolution. Evolution is necessary to the study of genetics and to the understanding of the relatedness of all life forms. To quote Dawkins, "Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond, sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Yet people will doubt it, which is what I mean by the psychological response we call doubt and it is this "doubt" that is fed, manipulated and promoted by those having powerful interests other than truth. The searchers after profit and power are not to be trusted as searchers for truth.
What are the perils that confront a society that has been conditioned to emotional responses to its problems, in this case the emotional correlate of doubt, in place of the factual, evidentiary use of the term? First there are no built in limits to the emotional use of language. The only test is whether it solicits the emotional response of the user. The truth or falsity of language, its facticity, is not only independent of its emotional use, it is often deliberately contravened by the emotional use. Thus a society that cannot distinguish between fact and emotion is doomed to be a continuing victim of deception, untested decision making and the cruelest of social consequences. The whole catastrophe of our Middle East involvement, the horrendous death rates, the societal destruction and the massive waste of money drastically needed for humane purposes can be laid at the feet of a massive substitution of the emotional connotations of language for its cognitive uses. Language matters!
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Context of Freedom
Democracy has been defined in our founding documents and in our beliefs about society as equality on the one hand and as merit-based on the other. We have "All men are created equal" in our Declaration of Independence on the one hand and the Horatio Alger myth of the self-made man on the other. Both of these archetypes are rooted in the European rebellion against monarchy and inherited wealth and status. The conflict between these two democratic values has been glossed by asserting that equality means equality of opportunity not equal access to society's resources. Jefferson sought to bridge this gap by using education as a device for creating upward mobility based on accomplishment. This is the duality that underlay Ronald Reagan's attack on the Rooseveltian consensus - the rights of merit versus the rights conferred on humans as such. We are now living with the results of this unresolved duality.
Politically, in England the conflict between egalitarianism and meritocracy played out this way. Prior to the Thatcher government the Labour Party supported programs closely analogous to those promulgated by Franklin Roosevelt in this country. The major domestic thrust was to promote the well being of the population at large. Thatcher, like Reagan, who was in many respects her protégé, set out to destroy the world labour had built since the end of World War II. You may recall her attacks on the unionized coal miners and the privatizing of the British railway system. She did this on the premise that Britain had to free its best talent (the corporations) to energize a new economics driven by profit. Under Tony Blair the Labour Party, seeking to compete with the Tories, substituted upward mobility for equality as did Bill Clinton's substitution of workfare for welfare, which gave us the working poor - exactly the kind of labor that corporations desire. Notice the high incidence of Walmart employees who qualify for food stamps, which means the American taxpayer is subsidizing this commercial behemoth.
This issue is addressed in a recent study "In Pursuit of
Egalitarianism - And why social mobility cannot get us there" by Rebecca Hickman that raises the question whether the value of freedom is better served by a culture based on merit-driven upward mobility, or by a society based on equality. This document may be downloaded at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/ . In this paper Hickman argues that freedom is better served by egalitarianism than by meritocracy. The reason is that freedom is a product of society, which meritocracy by rewarding those having "merit" more than others debilitates. Merit is, by definition, scarcer than the average. Hence a society's wealth will inevitably migrate to those having merit thereby creating a bifurcated society in which not only wealth and power, but freedom itself are agglomerated to those having merit. Hence a meritocracy cannot distribute freedom any more than it can wealth and power. This is why Republicans were so freaked out when Obama said wealth should be spread around a little. They know that wealth is power and spreading wealth around means spreading power around, which is democracy. A meritocracy thus is, in fact, an enemy of democracy. Meritocracy is a version of an old story, going back at least to Plato, in which personal values such as merit, when applied to society as a whole, result in gross unfairness and despotism. With Plato the primacy of knowledge led to the philosopher king, a dictatorship. Perhaps the most revealing statement of the American meritocracy was George W. Bush's message to a banquet of wealthy supporters. He told them "You are my base." This is about as anti-democratic as a politician can get. Yet, tellingly, I have been unable to find any such characterization of that utterance; so deep has become the American acceptance of inequality.
Egalitarianism, contrary to what conservatives would have people believe, makes every citizen a stakeholder and not only distributes wealth, power and freedom more evenly, but it greatly diminishes a society's internal friction and promotes cooperation thereby mitigating such disasters as as the governmental abandonment of Katrina victims. Egalitarianism is an old bugaboo of conservatives that is said to lead to domination by the majority and the stifling of personal merit. This is the burden of Ayn Rand's writing, the ideological roots of libertarianism. And as George Orwell observed in his allegory Animal Farm, some people are more equal than others. However, this is merely to observe that any virtue can be subverted. Obviously in a meritocracy some people are, of necessity, more equal than others. Because Communism used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" it does not mean it makes sense. The dictator of the Soviet Union was, for example, Joseph Stalin who was not above murdering dissenting proletarians just as capitalist dictators such as Mussolini, Pinochet and China's leadership have done. Dictatorships can arise in any society, but in a society where fairness and concern for all is the operative narrative it is much less likely to do so.
The failure to grasp the significance of the distinction between meritocracy and egalitarianism in practice has led to Ronald Reagan's war on the poor, the beginning of a massive shift of national wealth to the rich and the debasement of the Democratic party as it fell prey to the wealthy and tried to emulate the Republicans' pernicious use of merit to deprive our society of the resources it needs to assure something of a level playing field to all of its citizens.
Bob Newhard
Politically, in England the conflict between egalitarianism and meritocracy played out this way. Prior to the Thatcher government the Labour Party supported programs closely analogous to those promulgated by Franklin Roosevelt in this country. The major domestic thrust was to promote the well being of the population at large. Thatcher, like Reagan, who was in many respects her protégé, set out to destroy the world labour had built since the end of World War II. You may recall her attacks on the unionized coal miners and the privatizing of the British railway system. She did this on the premise that Britain had to free its best talent (the corporations) to energize a new economics driven by profit. Under Tony Blair the Labour Party, seeking to compete with the Tories, substituted upward mobility for equality as did Bill Clinton's substitution of workfare for welfare, which gave us the working poor - exactly the kind of labor that corporations desire. Notice the high incidence of Walmart employees who qualify for food stamps, which means the American taxpayer is subsidizing this commercial behemoth.
This issue is addressed in a recent study "In Pursuit of
Egalitarianism - And why social mobility cannot get us there" by Rebecca Hickman that raises the question whether the value of freedom is better served by a culture based on merit-driven upward mobility, or by a society based on equality. This document may be downloaded at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/ . In this paper Hickman argues that freedom is better served by egalitarianism than by meritocracy. The reason is that freedom is a product of society, which meritocracy by rewarding those having "merit" more than others debilitates. Merit is, by definition, scarcer than the average. Hence a society's wealth will inevitably migrate to those having merit thereby creating a bifurcated society in which not only wealth and power, but freedom itself are agglomerated to those having merit. Hence a meritocracy cannot distribute freedom any more than it can wealth and power. This is why Republicans were so freaked out when Obama said wealth should be spread around a little. They know that wealth is power and spreading wealth around means spreading power around, which is democracy. A meritocracy thus is, in fact, an enemy of democracy. Meritocracy is a version of an old story, going back at least to Plato, in which personal values such as merit, when applied to society as a whole, result in gross unfairness and despotism. With Plato the primacy of knowledge led to the philosopher king, a dictatorship. Perhaps the most revealing statement of the American meritocracy was George W. Bush's message to a banquet of wealthy supporters. He told them "You are my base." This is about as anti-democratic as a politician can get. Yet, tellingly, I have been unable to find any such characterization of that utterance; so deep has become the American acceptance of inequality.
Egalitarianism, contrary to what conservatives would have people believe, makes every citizen a stakeholder and not only distributes wealth, power and freedom more evenly, but it greatly diminishes a society's internal friction and promotes cooperation thereby mitigating such disasters as as the governmental abandonment of Katrina victims. Egalitarianism is an old bugaboo of conservatives that is said to lead to domination by the majority and the stifling of personal merit. This is the burden of Ayn Rand's writing, the ideological roots of libertarianism. And as George Orwell observed in his allegory Animal Farm, some people are more equal than others. However, this is merely to observe that any virtue can be subverted. Obviously in a meritocracy some people are, of necessity, more equal than others. Because Communism used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" it does not mean it makes sense. The dictator of the Soviet Union was, for example, Joseph Stalin who was not above murdering dissenting proletarians just as capitalist dictators such as Mussolini, Pinochet and China's leadership have done. Dictatorships can arise in any society, but in a society where fairness and concern for all is the operative narrative it is much less likely to do so.
The failure to grasp the significance of the distinction between meritocracy and egalitarianism in practice has led to Ronald Reagan's war on the poor, the beginning of a massive shift of national wealth to the rich and the debasement of the Democratic party as it fell prey to the wealthy and tried to emulate the Republicans' pernicious use of merit to deprive our society of the resources it needs to assure something of a level playing field to all of its citizens.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 1, 2009
On Reading Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-rich Can Save Us"
I am reading Ralph Nader's new book, a novel, titled "Only the Super-rich Can Save Us." I have not yet finished it, but I believe I am far enough along to discuss Nader's view of the state of the union and its desperate need for radical change, albeit within the constraints of capitalism. Nader's shift to dependence upon the super rich may well reflect his sense of the depth of trouble, both current and immanent, this nation faces. It may even be his non-violent antidote to a plight for which the violence of revolution has so frequently been the result.
Reviewers have drawn attention to the disparity between Nader's decades-long opposition to the role of wealth, especially corporate wealth, in our society and a book with the title Only the Super-rich Can Save Us. What happened? My thought is that Nader has determined that there can be no successful social or political movement in this country without sufficient access to the media. Our society is too big, too complex, and too disparate to do it the way it was done in the 1930s. Then, thousands of people worked in the same plant, where communication and organization were facilitated by that simple fact. Today, technology has scattered workers for the same corporation all over the planet. Because we never required a substantial support for public discourse when we licensed the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum, todays privately controlled media can trump any public policy it dislikes with a media barrage. For purposes of national discourse we have thus made ourselves hostage to wealth and privilege and the power that goes with it. Nader has fought long and hard for forty years. It is a dire warning for progressives when a person of his dedication, intelligence and knowledge finds no other way to initiate the changes we need without the cooperation of the wealthy. This is an indicator of how bad it really is.
Not only has Nader decided access to wealth is absolutely necessary to a progressive overhaul of government, he has also apparently decided that that Tom DeLay's FreedomWorks approach to generating political clout is desirable. In this book his billionaires group repeatedly undertakes "stunts" ala FreedomWork's Tea Party program to stimulate public involvement on the group's progressive goals. Whereas FredomWorks is funded by the likes of the Mellon fortune's Richard Scaife, Nader's group is dependent upon billionaires and multimillionaires of a progressive persuasion, e.g. Warren Buffet and Ted Turner. In these money terms alone it would seem progressives are bound to lose because most of these kinds of people are very conservative. However, it appears that Nader believes that once the gross injustices and wealth disparity of our society are laid bare and made manifest to the public the desired changes will take place.
One of the questionable premises of the book is that government needs to be brought much more proximate to people's daily lives. While I agree, I have yet to find a way, given our large population, the impact of modern technology and what history and the social sciences tell us about human behavior, that government can be downsized to the community level Nader supposes. One of Nader's fictional groups, which sets itself this downsizing goal, winds up admitting that such functions as national security and dealing with major disasters will require a sufficiently strong national government. My question of this supposed arrangement is what makes Nader think that, over time, wealth and hence power will not gravitate to a national government that controls the military?
All in all, this book, by a very intelligent, beltway knowledgeable and profoundly concerned progressive is well worth reading. Of the 40,000 first edition print run, thirty five thousand sold in the first week. If, after finishing the book, changes in the above perceptions or significant other approaches to creating a just democracy become apparent, I will update this assessment.
Lest I appear too dour and serious about the book I should say it is something of a rollicking romp as the billionaires plot their strategies to initially disrupt the corporate world while employing strategies and tactics to replace it with a citizen-driven economy and politics. It is anything but a boring read and it is focused on initiating and installing a progressive agenda.
One final observation: We now have two giants of the progressive movement Nader and Michael Moore in his "Capitalism: a Love Story"; pleading with progressives to deal with the horrors that corporate capitalism has produced. One of the great civic questions of our time is why so little outrage has been demonstrated. Nader, I believe, thinks it is due to a want of effective communication. Moore has communicated his heart out in his films to the point that if his latest film does not generate something of an uprising, he may give up the effort. What has been done to the American people that when they know they were lied into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, seen a major city destroyed by hurricane and left destitute and seen how the wealthy and their greed have pillaged their economy to the point of a major depression, remain either cowed or indifferent except for a lunatic fringe that attributes all these calamities to God's will and man's sin. Are we looking at the psychological consequences of almost sixty years of unmitigated prosperity that through technologies such as television have produced a citizenry so given to delusion that they no longer believe there is a reality for which political leaders can be held accountable? If so, the rich have found a way to demoralize a society without the exhaustion of war.
Bob Newhard
Reviewers have drawn attention to the disparity between Nader's decades-long opposition to the role of wealth, especially corporate wealth, in our society and a book with the title Only the Super-rich Can Save Us. What happened? My thought is that Nader has determined that there can be no successful social or political movement in this country without sufficient access to the media. Our society is too big, too complex, and too disparate to do it the way it was done in the 1930s. Then, thousands of people worked in the same plant, where communication and organization were facilitated by that simple fact. Today, technology has scattered workers for the same corporation all over the planet. Because we never required a substantial support for public discourse when we licensed the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum, todays privately controlled media can trump any public policy it dislikes with a media barrage. For purposes of national discourse we have thus made ourselves hostage to wealth and privilege and the power that goes with it. Nader has fought long and hard for forty years. It is a dire warning for progressives when a person of his dedication, intelligence and knowledge finds no other way to initiate the changes we need without the cooperation of the wealthy. This is an indicator of how bad it really is.
Not only has Nader decided access to wealth is absolutely necessary to a progressive overhaul of government, he has also apparently decided that that Tom DeLay's FreedomWorks approach to generating political clout is desirable. In this book his billionaires group repeatedly undertakes "stunts" ala FreedomWork's Tea Party program to stimulate public involvement on the group's progressive goals. Whereas FredomWorks is funded by the likes of the Mellon fortune's Richard Scaife, Nader's group is dependent upon billionaires and multimillionaires of a progressive persuasion, e.g. Warren Buffet and Ted Turner. In these money terms alone it would seem progressives are bound to lose because most of these kinds of people are very conservative. However, it appears that Nader believes that once the gross injustices and wealth disparity of our society are laid bare and made manifest to the public the desired changes will take place.
One of the questionable premises of the book is that government needs to be brought much more proximate to people's daily lives. While I agree, I have yet to find a way, given our large population, the impact of modern technology and what history and the social sciences tell us about human behavior, that government can be downsized to the community level Nader supposes. One of Nader's fictional groups, which sets itself this downsizing goal, winds up admitting that such functions as national security and dealing with major disasters will require a sufficiently strong national government. My question of this supposed arrangement is what makes Nader think that, over time, wealth and hence power will not gravitate to a national government that controls the military?
All in all, this book, by a very intelligent, beltway knowledgeable and profoundly concerned progressive is well worth reading. Of the 40,000 first edition print run, thirty five thousand sold in the first week. If, after finishing the book, changes in the above perceptions or significant other approaches to creating a just democracy become apparent, I will update this assessment.
Lest I appear too dour and serious about the book I should say it is something of a rollicking romp as the billionaires plot their strategies to initially disrupt the corporate world while employing strategies and tactics to replace it with a citizen-driven economy and politics. It is anything but a boring read and it is focused on initiating and installing a progressive agenda.
One final observation: We now have two giants of the progressive movement Nader and Michael Moore in his "Capitalism: a Love Story"; pleading with progressives to deal with the horrors that corporate capitalism has produced. One of the great civic questions of our time is why so little outrage has been demonstrated. Nader, I believe, thinks it is due to a want of effective communication. Moore has communicated his heart out in his films to the point that if his latest film does not generate something of an uprising, he may give up the effort. What has been done to the American people that when they know they were lied into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, seen a major city destroyed by hurricane and left destitute and seen how the wealthy and their greed have pillaged their economy to the point of a major depression, remain either cowed or indifferent except for a lunatic fringe that attributes all these calamities to God's will and man's sin. Are we looking at the psychological consequences of almost sixty years of unmitigated prosperity that through technologies such as television have produced a citizenry so given to delusion that they no longer believe there is a reality for which political leaders can be held accountable? If so, the rich have found a way to demoralize a society without the exhaustion of war.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Progressives, Quo Vadis?
I have asked myself repeatedly why progressives have failed to make Rupert Murdoch a poster child for what is wrong with this country. He has spawned the demagogues of hate, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and now Glenn Beck. He has turned political debate into the emotion-driven rancor usually found at professional wrestling matches or a Jerry Springer show. He has eviscerated American television news by turning it into sex, violence and entertainment. He has done these things while commanding the largest media empire on earth. And yet progressives have failed to pillory Murdoch with a constant well-developed persona. He remains in the background manipulating American politics as he wills. During the great depression there was no hesitation about repeatedly portraying the fat cat J. P Morgan as an enemy of the people. Why have progressives, not to mention Democrats, been so timid in their attacks on this enemy of democracy? MoveOn did bring out a faux edition of the Wall Street Journal in an effort to stymie permission for his purchase of that paper, but this was a one time stunt, not part of a consistent effort to create and provide the public with an appropriate image of the man. Upton Sinclair had no trouble characterizing the railroad barons' control of California politics as an octopus. Presumably the same image would be appropriate for Murdoch and his multiple media tentacles, to effectively articulate and continuously draw attention to his deleterious impact on our democratic processes. This is a man who owns every means of communication and information transfer known to man and seeks to establish his communications control world wide. This is far too much power for a single human being to possess and constitutes a threat to democracy world wide. He has demonstrated his willingness to cooperate with dictatorships in China. He indulges in massive tax avoidance. And he overwhelms the political discourse of this country with his raucous appeal to raw human emotion bent on vilifying those who oppose his agenda of wealth.
Murdoch has been the subject of satire in a John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, movie entitled The Octopus. The British have a much firmer grasp on this man's persona and ambition. We need to stigmatize him with the truth repeatedly, to draw the connection between Fox News and the effort to defeat health care for all. He himself undoubtedly has a personal physician in attendance on demand. Excessive wealth needs to be pilloried as the enemy of democracy and what better icon than Murdoch?
This all needs to be done before democracy sinks in the face of the multipronged onslaught of wealth. Why have progressives not taken up the challenge of a sustained focus on the threat of excessive wealth?
This issue was brought more clearly in focus for me as I recently read the Coal King by Upton Sinclair. This is a novel based on a 1914 Colorado coal mine strike. In it Sinclair portrays the abject lives of poor immigrant miners, most of whom could not speak English. As in his novel The Jungle, Sinclair describes their harsh and dangerous working conditions, low pay and, in the case of these miners, the total control the corporate mine owners exercised over these trapped human beings. He tellingly portrays the struggle of union progressives to bridge the gap between themselves and the illiterate miners, often drawing attention to the erroneous assumptions these well-intentioned people made. The corporate mine owners lived their lives of elegance within 35 miles of their mines.
This latter fact struck a resonating chord with me because I was also reading Thom Hartman's new book Threshold at the same time. In it Hartman draws a distinction between regional corporate CEOs who remain in the main decent human beings for whom it is still important to keep in mind at least some of the human consequences of their decisions and multinational corporate CEOs who lack such concerns to the extent that they are properly regarded as psychopaths. I was recently talking to a marketing consultant for corporations who used the same term to describe major corporate CEOs. The point here is that between 1914 and toddy the regional CEO has become somewhat humanized. It is the large national and multinational corporate CEO that has assumed the mantle of callous indifference as a requirement of business "success." Could this be called progress? Hartman asked himself an interesting question, namely, why are major multinational corporate CEOs paid up to a billion dollars a year? The corporate boards of directors say they have to pay those sums to get the best talent and ability. Hartman asked why the number of these people is so small. Why is there no one available in a large pool of well trained, experienced, MBAs willing to do the job for, say, 800 million dollars? Why, in short, does this kind of money not create a larger employment market? Hartman's answer is that the best profit-generating CEO's of major multination corporations unique qualification is not education or business acumen. The sole major difference between the highest paid CEOs and others is their willingness and ability to treat employees as objects. These people can easily merge corporations, sell off unneeded assets and thereby lay off thousands of people as easily as they can sell off surplus buildings and equipment.
Herein lies, I believe, one of the major reasons progressives have been relatively ineffective. In addition to the obvious fact that movements can be better organized in factories and mines in which thousands of workers are brought together in one place, the corporate decision makers have been so removed from the society of ordinary people that progressives do not know how to deal with them. In the early part of the 20th century one could close down an auto plant, severely impacting corporate profit. How do progressives close down Fox News using people from a wide variety of occupations, sometimes with very different agendas, distributed around the country and increasingly around the world? Do we not need to reconceive the means of progressive change from the job and all it entails to society itself? Instead of the strike do we not need to find the solution in changing our society's preoccupation with money and profit to a people-first use of economic productivity? If we do not undertake such a fundamental revaluation, it will not be long before the coalition of the wealthy will totally dominate humanity and destroy what remnants of democracy we still have.
Bob Newhard
Murdoch has been the subject of satire in a John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, movie entitled The Octopus. The British have a much firmer grasp on this man's persona and ambition. We need to stigmatize him with the truth repeatedly, to draw the connection between Fox News and the effort to defeat health care for all. He himself undoubtedly has a personal physician in attendance on demand. Excessive wealth needs to be pilloried as the enemy of democracy and what better icon than Murdoch?
This all needs to be done before democracy sinks in the face of the multipronged onslaught of wealth. Why have progressives not taken up the challenge of a sustained focus on the threat of excessive wealth?
This issue was brought more clearly in focus for me as I recently read the Coal King by Upton Sinclair. This is a novel based on a 1914 Colorado coal mine strike. In it Sinclair portrays the abject lives of poor immigrant miners, most of whom could not speak English. As in his novel The Jungle, Sinclair describes their harsh and dangerous working conditions, low pay and, in the case of these miners, the total control the corporate mine owners exercised over these trapped human beings. He tellingly portrays the struggle of union progressives to bridge the gap between themselves and the illiterate miners, often drawing attention to the erroneous assumptions these well-intentioned people made. The corporate mine owners lived their lives of elegance within 35 miles of their mines.
This latter fact struck a resonating chord with me because I was also reading Thom Hartman's new book Threshold at the same time. In it Hartman draws a distinction between regional corporate CEOs who remain in the main decent human beings for whom it is still important to keep in mind at least some of the human consequences of their decisions and multinational corporate CEOs who lack such concerns to the extent that they are properly regarded as psychopaths. I was recently talking to a marketing consultant for corporations who used the same term to describe major corporate CEOs. The point here is that between 1914 and toddy the regional CEO has become somewhat humanized. It is the large national and multinational corporate CEO that has assumed the mantle of callous indifference as a requirement of business "success." Could this be called progress? Hartman asked himself an interesting question, namely, why are major multinational corporate CEOs paid up to a billion dollars a year? The corporate boards of directors say they have to pay those sums to get the best talent and ability. Hartman asked why the number of these people is so small. Why is there no one available in a large pool of well trained, experienced, MBAs willing to do the job for, say, 800 million dollars? Why, in short, does this kind of money not create a larger employment market? Hartman's answer is that the best profit-generating CEO's of major multination corporations unique qualification is not education or business acumen. The sole major difference between the highest paid CEOs and others is their willingness and ability to treat employees as objects. These people can easily merge corporations, sell off unneeded assets and thereby lay off thousands of people as easily as they can sell off surplus buildings and equipment.
Herein lies, I believe, one of the major reasons progressives have been relatively ineffective. In addition to the obvious fact that movements can be better organized in factories and mines in which thousands of workers are brought together in one place, the corporate decision makers have been so removed from the society of ordinary people that progressives do not know how to deal with them. In the early part of the 20th century one could close down an auto plant, severely impacting corporate profit. How do progressives close down Fox News using people from a wide variety of occupations, sometimes with very different agendas, distributed around the country and increasingly around the world? Do we not need to reconceive the means of progressive change from the job and all it entails to society itself? Instead of the strike do we not need to find the solution in changing our society's preoccupation with money and profit to a people-first use of economic productivity? If we do not undertake such a fundamental revaluation, it will not be long before the coalition of the wealthy will totally dominate humanity and destroy what remnants of democracy we still have.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Illusions and a Remedy
When I despair of the rampant triviality of our society, the substitution of emotion for thought and the increasing removal from the real world that conditions our species' existence, I find it useful to retrace the path of human development from prehistory on. To see where we came from the proto humans, the species that branched off from the tree that became us; to witness the gradual rise of brain size and organization; to see how we began to apply that increased reasoning ability to our surroundings and to ourselves; these are the realities from which we come. These form the foundation of what we are and what we can be.
Recently Chris Hedges published his new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle in which he shares the same despair. With chapters titled the Illusion of Literacy, of Love, of Wisdom, of Happiness and of America, he unleashes a withering analysis of our extremely decadent society. He begins the book with a quote from James Baldwin as follows, "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." This is the consequence that people have to understand. Shallowness breeds violence
However, Hedges' remedy for this state of affairs is a return to God. He begins the first chapter with a quote from John Ralston Saul's book Voltaire's Bastards in part as follows, "Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence." As is so frequently the case, even with the Religious Right that Hedges despises, a litany of the ills of our society is followed with a prescription for a return to God. But is not God one of the most pervasive and destructive of our illusions? It is especially dangerous because it asserts an untreatable reality, inevitably imposes absolute values on a world of great variability and thereby leads humans to non-negotiable conflicts resolvable only by violence.
If humans are to achieve the peace they so deeply desire in a culturally shrinking world of increasing population, they will have to appeal to something other than their gods. One possibility I find useful is substituting humanity itself and the context of our development for a deity, not as an object of worship, but as a unifying reference point. Everything we value has arisen in the course of our development. The civilization we seek to preserve and enhance has arisen in the context of this long history of our development as humans. We need badly to understand this development and hence to understand ourselves. We need to understand as well what has propelled us so frequently to disaster and multiply that by our increasing capacity for self destruction. For those who find such an undertaking too mundane, who require something immensely larger than themselves, something mysterious, something spiritual, let them contemplate a natural universe whose immensity Carl Sagan tried to capture in his mantras of "billions and billions of galaxies" and "we are all stardust," which none the less is addressable by human reason. A shift of cultural focus of this sort will make our common humanity, our dependence upon this planet and our shared commonality with the other species of this planet the source for our values and inspiration for our further development. That human beings are capable of this species-wide commonality is evidenced by our response to huge natural disasters such as the Indonesian earthquake/tsunami which disregarded religious and cultural differences that in other contexts have bred enmity and violence. In brief, the remedy for the perils of illusion is not another illusion, but a much better understanding of our humanity and the natural roots from which it has evolved. We had the intelligence to master our environment, now let us use that intelligence to master ourselves.
Bob Newhard
Recently Chris Hedges published his new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle in which he shares the same despair. With chapters titled the Illusion of Literacy, of Love, of Wisdom, of Happiness and of America, he unleashes a withering analysis of our extremely decadent society. He begins the book with a quote from James Baldwin as follows, "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." This is the consequence that people have to understand. Shallowness breeds violence
However, Hedges' remedy for this state of affairs is a return to God. He begins the first chapter with a quote from John Ralston Saul's book Voltaire's Bastards in part as follows, "Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence." As is so frequently the case, even with the Religious Right that Hedges despises, a litany of the ills of our society is followed with a prescription for a return to God. But is not God one of the most pervasive and destructive of our illusions? It is especially dangerous because it asserts an untreatable reality, inevitably imposes absolute values on a world of great variability and thereby leads humans to non-negotiable conflicts resolvable only by violence.
If humans are to achieve the peace they so deeply desire in a culturally shrinking world of increasing population, they will have to appeal to something other than their gods. One possibility I find useful is substituting humanity itself and the context of our development for a deity, not as an object of worship, but as a unifying reference point. Everything we value has arisen in the course of our development. The civilization we seek to preserve and enhance has arisen in the context of this long history of our development as humans. We need badly to understand this development and hence to understand ourselves. We need to understand as well what has propelled us so frequently to disaster and multiply that by our increasing capacity for self destruction. For those who find such an undertaking too mundane, who require something immensely larger than themselves, something mysterious, something spiritual, let them contemplate a natural universe whose immensity Carl Sagan tried to capture in his mantras of "billions and billions of galaxies" and "we are all stardust," which none the less is addressable by human reason. A shift of cultural focus of this sort will make our common humanity, our dependence upon this planet and our shared commonality with the other species of this planet the source for our values and inspiration for our further development. That human beings are capable of this species-wide commonality is evidenced by our response to huge natural disasters such as the Indonesian earthquake/tsunami which disregarded religious and cultural differences that in other contexts have bred enmity and violence. In brief, the remedy for the perils of illusion is not another illusion, but a much better understanding of our humanity and the natural roots from which it has evolved. We had the intelligence to master our environment, now let us use that intelligence to master ourselves.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The American Way and the Learning Society
In his recent speech to Congress President Obama said “There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada's, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.
I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have.”
Aside from erroneously assuming some sort of parity of relevance between these two positions, Obama says that single payer would disrupt the health care that people currently have. This is part of Obama's mealy mouthed approach to the fundamental issue of this society's health care for its citizens. Currently 40 million are uninsured and the cost of health care is skyrocketing. Obviously something “disrupting” has to happen. Further, If social disruption is a significaant factor then why does he continue the adventurism in Afghanistan? The provisions of billions of dollars to bail out banks will be disruptive for this generation's children, but that seems acceptable. It is clear that the current health care “system” is being run in the interest of some of the wealthiest people and some of the most powerful corporations in this country. It is high time some “disrupting” goes on if we are ever to be able to have a reasonably equitable society.
But there is, to my mind, a deeper reason to be concerned by this kind of “reasoning.” It posits that this capitalist society cannot have a form of health care enjoyed by other democratic countries. Obama mentioned Canada specifically. What is so different about Canada? There are few, if any countries, more like the United States than Canada. Is Obama saying that the United States is incapable of learning from other countries? When such an inability occurs in individuals we call it a leaning deficit and seek a remedy. Is Obama saying American hubris prevents us from learning from others? It is long past the time to get over that trait. The world is shrinking very rapidly. We share a planet with nearly seven billion others and the problems we humans present to this planet are many, impending and coalescing. In our own interest, if we cannot consider those of others, we need to grow up and do so quickly. A significant step in this direction would be the adoption of a single payer health care system. Finally, I cannot help thinking that Obama's statement reflects his fear of, or collusion with, the clout of the pharmaceutical, insurance and hospital corporations, as well as the corporate media involved. In a corporation-dominated society like ours this fight is going to have to take place sometime if we are to get our democracy back. I can think of no nobler cause for this president to pursue than the restoration of democracy and civic decency.
There is, however, another possibility for explaining Obama's behavior, at least in part. I suspect that Obama is more cognizant then most of us of the racist potential of this society. We have all seen the bizarre behavior of the Radical Right so far during Obama's presidency. Maureen Dowd in a New York Times column has made it quite evident that racism is a large, if not the largest element in the vociferous attacks by the Far Right orchestrated by Murdoch's demagogic minions, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and, now apparently becoming the worst of the worst, Glenn Beck. Dowd points out that Representative Joe 'You lie! Wilson “belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol.” She argues that he and the rest of his ilk cannot tolerate having a balck president and are prepared to do anything they can to ruin his presidency. It may be that Obama, aware of the potential for a racist inferno in this country, believes pushing a genuine progressive agenda could ignite it. If so, this raises a question for progressives, Are we prepared to push the progressive agenda at this price? My own view is that we cannot let the welfare of this nation's population be held hostage by threatening radical rightists.
I will add that I think the fundamental flaw in political conservatism is their worship of the past, which as with worship in general, pretty well precludes learning from the past. This singular focus also precludes learning from current experience. The past is definitive of values for conservatives therefore they can only react to changed circumstances by appealing to it. Hence, the denial of global warming, evolution, the humanity of gays and other threats to humanity's future such as a looming food and water shortages of unprecedented dimensions. This is why the responsibilities of progressives to humanity's future have to be thoroughly thought our, articulated, and made politically viable.
Bob Newhard
I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have.”
Aside from erroneously assuming some sort of parity of relevance between these two positions, Obama says that single payer would disrupt the health care that people currently have. This is part of Obama's mealy mouthed approach to the fundamental issue of this society's health care for its citizens. Currently 40 million are uninsured and the cost of health care is skyrocketing. Obviously something “disrupting” has to happen. Further, If social disruption is a significaant factor then why does he continue the adventurism in Afghanistan? The provisions of billions of dollars to bail out banks will be disruptive for this generation's children, but that seems acceptable. It is clear that the current health care “system” is being run in the interest of some of the wealthiest people and some of the most powerful corporations in this country. It is high time some “disrupting” goes on if we are ever to be able to have a reasonably equitable society.
But there is, to my mind, a deeper reason to be concerned by this kind of “reasoning.” It posits that this capitalist society cannot have a form of health care enjoyed by other democratic countries. Obama mentioned Canada specifically. What is so different about Canada? There are few, if any countries, more like the United States than Canada. Is Obama saying that the United States is incapable of learning from other countries? When such an inability occurs in individuals we call it a leaning deficit and seek a remedy. Is Obama saying American hubris prevents us from learning from others? It is long past the time to get over that trait. The world is shrinking very rapidly. We share a planet with nearly seven billion others and the problems we humans present to this planet are many, impending and coalescing. In our own interest, if we cannot consider those of others, we need to grow up and do so quickly. A significant step in this direction would be the adoption of a single payer health care system. Finally, I cannot help thinking that Obama's statement reflects his fear of, or collusion with, the clout of the pharmaceutical, insurance and hospital corporations, as well as the corporate media involved. In a corporation-dominated society like ours this fight is going to have to take place sometime if we are to get our democracy back. I can think of no nobler cause for this president to pursue than the restoration of democracy and civic decency.
There is, however, another possibility for explaining Obama's behavior, at least in part. I suspect that Obama is more cognizant then most of us of the racist potential of this society. We have all seen the bizarre behavior of the Radical Right so far during Obama's presidency. Maureen Dowd in a New York Times column has made it quite evident that racism is a large, if not the largest element in the vociferous attacks by the Far Right orchestrated by Murdoch's demagogic minions, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and, now apparently becoming the worst of the worst, Glenn Beck. Dowd points out that Representative Joe 'You lie! Wilson “belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol.” She argues that he and the rest of his ilk cannot tolerate having a balck president and are prepared to do anything they can to ruin his presidency. It may be that Obama, aware of the potential for a racist inferno in this country, believes pushing a genuine progressive agenda could ignite it. If so, this raises a question for progressives, Are we prepared to push the progressive agenda at this price? My own view is that we cannot let the welfare of this nation's population be held hostage by threatening radical rightists.
I will add that I think the fundamental flaw in political conservatism is their worship of the past, which as with worship in general, pretty well precludes learning from the past. This singular focus also precludes learning from current experience. The past is definitive of values for conservatives therefore they can only react to changed circumstances by appealing to it. Hence, the denial of global warming, evolution, the humanity of gays and other threats to humanity's future such as a looming food and water shortages of unprecedented dimensions. This is why the responsibilities of progressives to humanity's future have to be thoroughly thought our, articulated, and made politically viable.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, September 6, 2009
The Unhinged Society
I know I have written before on America's lost grip on reality, but there is, in my judgment, new evidence of this phenomenon and that it is becoming very dangerous. I have previously remarked the flight to fantasy evident in substituting creationism for evolution and the concomitant use of politics to replace science in the pursuit of that goal. I have also remarked that celebrities have replaced heroes in the minds of children; that the passion to be noticed, Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, has produced multimillion dollar industries such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter; that millions of people avidly adopt avatars and endlessly play global fantasy games, etc. But, as I said in my last column on this subject, it is dangerous. Witness the recent rash of death “jokes” about Obama by Republicans, e.g. hunting tags for Obama and as I write this column Fox News' Glenn Beck broadcast his hope that poison is added to Nancy Pelosi's wine. The Republicans believe these tactics, including the psychotic but effective assertion that Obama intends, through his healthcare plan, to kill your grandmother, have turned the political tide that ran so strongly against them in the 2008 election—and this in 6 months. If they are right and some liberal writers seem to agree, then the American people are obviously and dangerously unhinged. People now feel free to brandish firearms at political meetings.
Democracy cannot withstand this indifference to reality. It will give way to the chaos generated by emotion-driven conflicts over myths of race, religion, gender and age difference. In the latter case there is a developing effort to pit the young against the old as the movement of wealth to fewer and fewer people deprives society of the resources needed to insure the broad economic base a democracy requires.
Another indicator that this society has lost its bearings can be found in a recently published book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement in which the authors, two professors of social psychology, are mainly concerned with cultural as distinct from individual narcissism. Their judgment, with an abundance of evidence, is that there has been something like a sea change in American culture and it is not for the good. They list a number of social ills that are attributable to this social narcissism to a greater or lesser extent. These ills range from the mortgage debacle to plastic surgery and the whole makeover industry to the plague of “reality” shows. The major result is, of course, social disintegration and all that can flow from that. Under the best of circumstances there is an inherent conflict in democracy between the individual's liberty and the requirements of the democratic society necessary to assure that liberty. Jefferson sought to bridge this bifurcation by making the aim of the state to assist individuals in realizing their full potential. It was assumed, perhaps naively, that such self realization would be consistent with a democratic society.
In trying to understand why society appears to be falling apart I have begun to wonder if, along with the pressures of over population and the fragmenting effect of technology, a new awareness of human fragility is contributing to this disintegration. Never before in human history have humans known so clearly that their world can be destroyed and perhaps is in that process already and that tey are the cause. Aware of the willingness of humans to destroy each other, mankind now fears that it could, and perhaps will, destroy itself.
I remember a final scene in the movie version of Neville Shute's novel On the Beach, in which a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States has unleashed an enormous radioactive cloud that was progressively killing all life as it circulated around the planet. Australia would complete the cloud's globe-girdling trip. People knew it was coming. They fragment into those who pray and passionately declare that Jesus is returning, by which method they supposedly escape the impending doom, and those who accept their fate and have an enormous beach party. Mankind is increasingly aware of its destiny. Is it starting to fragment into the religious deniers and the entertainment addicted accepters? I personally think Shute should have had a third group indulging in violence as they displayed their anger at such a fate. Somebody had to be responsible! We keep telling ourselves that there is still time, if we act quickly, to avoid the various catastrophes awaiting us. Can we really expect the bulk of mankind to act quickly? At its best, will not such an effort create massive conflict as humans fight for diminishing resources and this in the context of nuclear destructiveness? If some external intelligence were to observe humanity playing out this scenario, would it not think the efforts of those who seek to avoid the cascading convergence of such species-ending forces pitiful in their irrelevance? We must, in my judgment, be brutally honest before we can be productively progressive, else we too live in a fantasy.
Bob Newhad
Democracy cannot withstand this indifference to reality. It will give way to the chaos generated by emotion-driven conflicts over myths of race, religion, gender and age difference. In the latter case there is a developing effort to pit the young against the old as the movement of wealth to fewer and fewer people deprives society of the resources needed to insure the broad economic base a democracy requires.
Another indicator that this society has lost its bearings can be found in a recently published book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement in which the authors, two professors of social psychology, are mainly concerned with cultural as distinct from individual narcissism. Their judgment, with an abundance of evidence, is that there has been something like a sea change in American culture and it is not for the good. They list a number of social ills that are attributable to this social narcissism to a greater or lesser extent. These ills range from the mortgage debacle to plastic surgery and the whole makeover industry to the plague of “reality” shows. The major result is, of course, social disintegration and all that can flow from that. Under the best of circumstances there is an inherent conflict in democracy between the individual's liberty and the requirements of the democratic society necessary to assure that liberty. Jefferson sought to bridge this bifurcation by making the aim of the state to assist individuals in realizing their full potential. It was assumed, perhaps naively, that such self realization would be consistent with a democratic society.
In trying to understand why society appears to be falling apart I have begun to wonder if, along with the pressures of over population and the fragmenting effect of technology, a new awareness of human fragility is contributing to this disintegration. Never before in human history have humans known so clearly that their world can be destroyed and perhaps is in that process already and that tey are the cause. Aware of the willingness of humans to destroy each other, mankind now fears that it could, and perhaps will, destroy itself.
I remember a final scene in the movie version of Neville Shute's novel On the Beach, in which a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States has unleashed an enormous radioactive cloud that was progressively killing all life as it circulated around the planet. Australia would complete the cloud's globe-girdling trip. People knew it was coming. They fragment into those who pray and passionately declare that Jesus is returning, by which method they supposedly escape the impending doom, and those who accept their fate and have an enormous beach party. Mankind is increasingly aware of its destiny. Is it starting to fragment into the religious deniers and the entertainment addicted accepters? I personally think Shute should have had a third group indulging in violence as they displayed their anger at such a fate. Somebody had to be responsible! We keep telling ourselves that there is still time, if we act quickly, to avoid the various catastrophes awaiting us. Can we really expect the bulk of mankind to act quickly? At its best, will not such an effort create massive conflict as humans fight for diminishing resources and this in the context of nuclear destructiveness? If some external intelligence were to observe humanity playing out this scenario, would it not think the efforts of those who seek to avoid the cascading convergence of such species-ending forces pitiful in their irrelevance? We must, in my judgment, be brutally honest before we can be productively progressive, else we too live in a fantasy.
Bob Newhad
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The Shadow Falls
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
So wrote T. S. Eliot in his poem The Hollow Men.
The speculators are back, flipping property. The real revitalization—repairing and renting the homes—will have to wait.
So wrote Alyssa Katz in her article There Goes the Neighborhood in the September 2009 issue of The American Prospect magazine.
There is an amorphousness in the processes of modern societies that was not there for the vast majority human existence. It is that murky, ill-defined area between decision and act. which when institutionalized (think government or corporations), is responsible for much of what goes wrong in our societies. Because of it we are much less sure of how our decisions will eventuate. We consume vast amounts of our resources in this gray area.
Ever since civilization began to appear there has been the gap between what G. W. Bush called the deciders and the rest of society. However, it was quite clear what was the king's or the priest's and what was that of the ordinary person. There was little “grayness” in the difference although there was in the use the king or priest made of his resources. Nowadays however, with huge populations and complicated technology that generates a near impenetrable fog, (some would call it a black hole) mankind has been put adrift in a fog of its own making.
I think the recent rash of anger experienced by politicians as they returned to their constituents, while much of it may have been triggered by the bigots of religion and race and loud-mouthed sound biters, reflected an effort on the part of much of this country's citizenry to penetrate the grayness which confronts them. Who is responsible for our situation? How did it happen? How will it be remedied? These questions are fundamental to people at this time and search as they may they basically get no answers. As Katz points out, massive amounts of public debt incurred to keep people in their homes by reducing their mortgage payments have been waylaid by the institutions that government chose to do this job. They have been largely consumed or made less effective by the grayness. This is among the reasons that progressives much preferred FDR's approach of creating jobs so the necessary remedy is made explicit to the people. The remedy does not trickle down through the very institutions that caused the problem in the first place.
This shadowland is the playground of the devious and manipulative among us. It provides the ability to intercept communication between the governed and the governors and makes for decisions and agreements made in secret. It is the root cause for the continuing call for accountability. Why, for instance, do the wealthy have no three strikes law for fraud or are sentenced to minimum security prisons or house arrest when the common burglar is sent to the harshest of overcrowded jails?
One of the greatest threats in an era of increasing instability is that a “savior” in fascist garb will come riding out of this fog of confusion and increased alienation with a clear and simple message, usually rooted in the society's myths and prejudices. One need only examine the cultural myths and bigotries Hitler and Mussolini appealed to in order to acquire absolute power.
Finally, all of this is compounded by humanity facing global realities it has not faced in 10,000 years and this time we know it in advance.
When one writes in the above terms one is expected, in this wildly optimistic society, to present some sort of remedy. However, every possible remedy seems fraught with its own perils. It is tempting to say, as some have, that our societies are too big. They must be reduced in size so that citizens have at least some acquaintance with those that govern them and the mechanisms employed in governing, but how is this to be done when we have a technology that is global in scale and generates wealth and power on that scale?
There are those who say we need to remove much of the technology we have created and live much closer to the land and elements, which were the cradle of our existence for the vast majority of our species' existence. But even if we tried, there is not enough land and resources left to provide an “acre and a horse” for each family, We are, in short, living on the edge of chaos lost in a miasma of deliberate ambiguity and focused on ourselves rather than our species.
Bob Newhard
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
So wrote T. S. Eliot in his poem The Hollow Men.
The speculators are back, flipping property. The real revitalization—repairing and renting the homes—will have to wait.
So wrote Alyssa Katz in her article There Goes the Neighborhood in the September 2009 issue of The American Prospect magazine.
There is an amorphousness in the processes of modern societies that was not there for the vast majority human existence. It is that murky, ill-defined area between decision and act. which when institutionalized (think government or corporations), is responsible for much of what goes wrong in our societies. Because of it we are much less sure of how our decisions will eventuate. We consume vast amounts of our resources in this gray area.
Ever since civilization began to appear there has been the gap between what G. W. Bush called the deciders and the rest of society. However, it was quite clear what was the king's or the priest's and what was that of the ordinary person. There was little “grayness” in the difference although there was in the use the king or priest made of his resources. Nowadays however, with huge populations and complicated technology that generates a near impenetrable fog, (some would call it a black hole) mankind has been put adrift in a fog of its own making.
I think the recent rash of anger experienced by politicians as they returned to their constituents, while much of it may have been triggered by the bigots of religion and race and loud-mouthed sound biters, reflected an effort on the part of much of this country's citizenry to penetrate the grayness which confronts them. Who is responsible for our situation? How did it happen? How will it be remedied? These questions are fundamental to people at this time and search as they may they basically get no answers. As Katz points out, massive amounts of public debt incurred to keep people in their homes by reducing their mortgage payments have been waylaid by the institutions that government chose to do this job. They have been largely consumed or made less effective by the grayness. This is among the reasons that progressives much preferred FDR's approach of creating jobs so the necessary remedy is made explicit to the people. The remedy does not trickle down through the very institutions that caused the problem in the first place.
This shadowland is the playground of the devious and manipulative among us. It provides the ability to intercept communication between the governed and the governors and makes for decisions and agreements made in secret. It is the root cause for the continuing call for accountability. Why, for instance, do the wealthy have no three strikes law for fraud or are sentenced to minimum security prisons or house arrest when the common burglar is sent to the harshest of overcrowded jails?
One of the greatest threats in an era of increasing instability is that a “savior” in fascist garb will come riding out of this fog of confusion and increased alienation with a clear and simple message, usually rooted in the society's myths and prejudices. One need only examine the cultural myths and bigotries Hitler and Mussolini appealed to in order to acquire absolute power.
Finally, all of this is compounded by humanity facing global realities it has not faced in 10,000 years and this time we know it in advance.
When one writes in the above terms one is expected, in this wildly optimistic society, to present some sort of remedy. However, every possible remedy seems fraught with its own perils. It is tempting to say, as some have, that our societies are too big. They must be reduced in size so that citizens have at least some acquaintance with those that govern them and the mechanisms employed in governing, but how is this to be done when we have a technology that is global in scale and generates wealth and power on that scale?
There are those who say we need to remove much of the technology we have created and live much closer to the land and elements, which were the cradle of our existence for the vast majority of our species' existence. But even if we tried, there is not enough land and resources left to provide an “acre and a horse” for each family, We are, in short, living on the edge of chaos lost in a miasma of deliberate ambiguity and focused on ourselves rather than our species.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, August 9, 2009
American Lumpen or the Politicization of Ignorance
There is, I believe, a developing political movement of the uneducated by choice. By this I mean a flaunting of ignorance for political purposes with the intention of appealing to the ignorant as being just like them. Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin are prime examples. To be ignorant is to be trustworthy.
Despite the fact that the founders of this country included a high incidence of intellectuals aware and engaged in the philosophy, science, economic and political thinking of the day, our country turned against intellectualism early in its history and it became fashionable to condemn intellectuals as “elitists.” Richard Hofstadter remarks this process in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Adlai Stevenson was so branded in my own time.
I suggest that the current form of politicized ignorance began with Richard Nixon's sending the Republican Party south to get the popular constituency it needed. This was done deliberately by a corporate America that had already moved the New England textile industry south to take advantage of cheap labor and anti-union state governments using a typically American contradictory euphemism, right to work laws. Hence we have the anomaly of the poor and middle class Southern whites in the service of the wealthy Northerners. Only in America!
The South, especially the Deep South, has been an intellectually backward part of this country since its founding, mainly because of racism. This continues today principally because Southerners are trapped by the guilt of pervasive racism. Because of this they remain very defensive. In effect they have no place to go intellectually. They cannot accept the human race as such and hence are not free to explore and understand the complexity of our species. The ascendency of the South in the Republican Party has made anti-intellectualism an unstated plank in the platform of that party. I should add that it is in the interests of the corporations that control the Republican Party to encourage rampant ignorance because people can more easily be seduced by advertising, both commercial and political, and by appeals to their emotions.
This process has resulted in one of the two major parties of this country promoting candidates who believe in creationism, deem global warming a conspiracy of the United Nations and a “Birthers” movement denying that President Obama was born in the United States This is more than folly, it is dangerous. A society with this number of people unhinged from reality becomes exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation. It confuses fact with belief and feels free to create “facts” that suit their motives. This is the kind of social mentality that permitted the rise of fascist regimes in Europe. I believe we can see this kind of ignorance in action in the current Republican-orchestrated ruckus at town hall meetings by Democratic Congressional representatives. This is the kind of bully boy tactic that the Nazis employed. In this respect it is also instructive to note that a prime mover of these attacks, Rush Limbaugh, has accused Obama of being a fascist. This kind of assertion by those who practice fascist techniques is done to preempt use of the term by applying it to their opposition first. Notice it is not the usual “commie” demonizing of the Republican past. The fact that these ludicrous, devious, misuses of language can be so effective is a measure of the degree the American public is removed from reality and thereby so profoundly gullible. That we are entering the throes of fascism is underscored in the article Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism? found at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141819
Culturally, this can, I believe, be traced in significant part to the ascendency of the role of advertising in our society. The pervasiveness and insidiousness of 24/7 saturation of advertising, the application of advanced psychological knowledge to its development and the vast amount of fiscal resources available to it, have produced a citizenry increasingly incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction and therefore prone to accept the emotionally satisfying rather than the noetically verified. That this society is the most powerful on the planet does not bode well for our species.
Robert Newhard
Postscript: Bill Maher has an interesting take on the abysmal level of American ignorance at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-smart-president_b_253996.html?view
Despite the fact that the founders of this country included a high incidence of intellectuals aware and engaged in the philosophy, science, economic and political thinking of the day, our country turned against intellectualism early in its history and it became fashionable to condemn intellectuals as “elitists.” Richard Hofstadter remarks this process in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Adlai Stevenson was so branded in my own time.
I suggest that the current form of politicized ignorance began with Richard Nixon's sending the Republican Party south to get the popular constituency it needed. This was done deliberately by a corporate America that had already moved the New England textile industry south to take advantage of cheap labor and anti-union state governments using a typically American contradictory euphemism, right to work laws. Hence we have the anomaly of the poor and middle class Southern whites in the service of the wealthy Northerners. Only in America!
The South, especially the Deep South, has been an intellectually backward part of this country since its founding, mainly because of racism. This continues today principally because Southerners are trapped by the guilt of pervasive racism. Because of this they remain very defensive. In effect they have no place to go intellectually. They cannot accept the human race as such and hence are not free to explore and understand the complexity of our species. The ascendency of the South in the Republican Party has made anti-intellectualism an unstated plank in the platform of that party. I should add that it is in the interests of the corporations that control the Republican Party to encourage rampant ignorance because people can more easily be seduced by advertising, both commercial and political, and by appeals to their emotions.
This process has resulted in one of the two major parties of this country promoting candidates who believe in creationism, deem global warming a conspiracy of the United Nations and a “Birthers” movement denying that President Obama was born in the United States This is more than folly, it is dangerous. A society with this number of people unhinged from reality becomes exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation. It confuses fact with belief and feels free to create “facts” that suit their motives. This is the kind of social mentality that permitted the rise of fascist regimes in Europe. I believe we can see this kind of ignorance in action in the current Republican-orchestrated ruckus at town hall meetings by Democratic Congressional representatives. This is the kind of bully boy tactic that the Nazis employed. In this respect it is also instructive to note that a prime mover of these attacks, Rush Limbaugh, has accused Obama of being a fascist. This kind of assertion by those who practice fascist techniques is done to preempt use of the term by applying it to their opposition first. Notice it is not the usual “commie” demonizing of the Republican past. The fact that these ludicrous, devious, misuses of language can be so effective is a measure of the degree the American public is removed from reality and thereby so profoundly gullible. That we are entering the throes of fascism is underscored in the article Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism? found at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141819
Culturally, this can, I believe, be traced in significant part to the ascendency of the role of advertising in our society. The pervasiveness and insidiousness of 24/7 saturation of advertising, the application of advanced psychological knowledge to its development and the vast amount of fiscal resources available to it, have produced a citizenry increasingly incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction and therefore prone to accept the emotionally satisfying rather than the noetically verified. That this society is the most powerful on the planet does not bode well for our species.
Robert Newhard
Postscript: Bill Maher has an interesting take on the abysmal level of American ignorance at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-smart-president_b_253996.html?view
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Wealth, Property and the Dire Need for Reform
In a world and time such as ours it is not unusual to be outraged by human conduct, but sometimes the outrageous event provides insight into just how bad things are and why they are that way. The so-called budget deal reached by California's governor and its legislature is one of these. 500,000 children will no longer have health insurance and thousands of infirm elderly people will no longer have home care. Meanwhile a proposed severance tax on oil to redress some of the budget shortfall was eliminated and the oil companies were allowed to resume offshore drilling after 40 years of protecting our environment against this practice. In the midst of the legislative struggle caused by a Republican minority the wealthy Republican governor provided the perfect paradigm for what has gone wrong with this society when he said that he would wait out the legislative battle by basking in his jacuzzi while smoking a favorite cigar. This is the modern equivalent of Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned.
The need to control wealth for societal benefit is a world-wide priority on a par with the need to reduce human population. Contemplate this. Let the enormity of the implications settle in: The 1996 U.N. Human Development Report report gave the mind-boggling statistic that the net worth of the 358 richest persons in the world was equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 percent of the world's population, that is, of 2.3 billion people. The aberrant distribution of wealth in the United States has resulted in an unresponsive government, a munitions-for-profit industry second to none and war without even a credible pretext. This kind of maldistribution of wealth is an ancient problem for humanity, but technology and a vastly overpopulated planet have made its elimination critical to human survival.
One of the greatest bastions of wealth is private property. The old myths of private property will have to be mitigated if not abandoned. Notably, private property, while taken note of in the Constitution, was never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. This would imply that private property is not essential to freedom, which is the burden of the Declaration of Independence. This planet is our species' only home. Nobody can own it. “It” will be here after we are long gone. Ownership is after all a social convention expressed in law. Some societies, including those of Indigenous Americans, did not have this notion. As a human convention it can be changed. Perhaps we will have to develop some system of “right to use” to replace ownership. This was a hot topic for philosophers of the 18th century when the United States was founded. I think this was so, in part, because Europeans were still finding their way out of centuries of feudalism. Initially transcontinental trade followed by the manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution created great wealth for non- aristocrats.. Private property was thus viewed as a hedge against the land-based dominance of the aristocracy and the crown. In brief, private property was a defacto banner of individual freedom. Is property a right as John Locke contended or is it a human convention as David Hume argued? Because property now has global significance and has become so powerful an influence on human well being it is, in my judgment, high time we began a reconsideration of the full implications of property ownership. Simply consider that Coca Cola can deprive Indian farmers of the aquifer they have used for centuries. Shell Oil can pollute African jungles with impunity. And Goldman-Sachs and the other money-manipulating corporations of Wall Street can cause a global economic collapse.
We can begin the kind of reform that is needed by defining property as a right of use conferred by society for purposes it deems useful. This, in effect, is what the corporation was intended to do. Incorporation is a grant by society to engage in a specified kind of business for specified purposes and, initially, for a specified period of time.
Enhancing this concept of the corporation so as to insure that the public good said to result from the approved incorporation is clearly defined would be a large step in the needed direction. Society should reserve the right to retract incorporation when the public good ceases to be served. This should be accompanied by the removal of corporate personhood illegitimately obtained by corporations in the 19th century. After all, if they are persons the repeal of their incorporation would be a form of homicide.
Bob Newhard
Postscript: As I was finishing this column David Sirota posted on Alternet an article on how the richest 1% of Americans are trying to subvert universal health care. It can be found at http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141520/how_the_ultra-rich_are_trying_to_kill_health_reform/ health care
The need to control wealth for societal benefit is a world-wide priority on a par with the need to reduce human population. Contemplate this. Let the enormity of the implications settle in: The 1996 U.N. Human Development Report report gave the mind-boggling statistic that the net worth of the 358 richest persons in the world was equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 percent of the world's population, that is, of 2.3 billion people. The aberrant distribution of wealth in the United States has resulted in an unresponsive government, a munitions-for-profit industry second to none and war without even a credible pretext. This kind of maldistribution of wealth is an ancient problem for humanity, but technology and a vastly overpopulated planet have made its elimination critical to human survival.
One of the greatest bastions of wealth is private property. The old myths of private property will have to be mitigated if not abandoned. Notably, private property, while taken note of in the Constitution, was never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. This would imply that private property is not essential to freedom, which is the burden of the Declaration of Independence. This planet is our species' only home. Nobody can own it. “It” will be here after we are long gone. Ownership is after all a social convention expressed in law. Some societies, including those of Indigenous Americans, did not have this notion. As a human convention it can be changed. Perhaps we will have to develop some system of “right to use” to replace ownership. This was a hot topic for philosophers of the 18th century when the United States was founded. I think this was so, in part, because Europeans were still finding their way out of centuries of feudalism. Initially transcontinental trade followed by the manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution created great wealth for non- aristocrats.. Private property was thus viewed as a hedge against the land-based dominance of the aristocracy and the crown. In brief, private property was a defacto banner of individual freedom. Is property a right as John Locke contended or is it a human convention as David Hume argued? Because property now has global significance and has become so powerful an influence on human well being it is, in my judgment, high time we began a reconsideration of the full implications of property ownership. Simply consider that Coca Cola can deprive Indian farmers of the aquifer they have used for centuries. Shell Oil can pollute African jungles with impunity. And Goldman-Sachs and the other money-manipulating corporations of Wall Street can cause a global economic collapse.
We can begin the kind of reform that is needed by defining property as a right of use conferred by society for purposes it deems useful. This, in effect, is what the corporation was intended to do. Incorporation is a grant by society to engage in a specified kind of business for specified purposes and, initially, for a specified period of time.
Enhancing this concept of the corporation so as to insure that the public good said to result from the approved incorporation is clearly defined would be a large step in the needed direction. Society should reserve the right to retract incorporation when the public good ceases to be served. This should be accompanied by the removal of corporate personhood illegitimately obtained by corporations in the 19th century. After all, if they are persons the repeal of their incorporation would be a form of homicide.
Bob Newhard
Postscript: As I was finishing this column David Sirota posted on Alternet an article on how the richest 1% of Americans are trying to subvert universal health care. It can be found at http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141520/how_the_ultra-rich_are_trying_to_kill_health_reform/ health care
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Perils of Boredom
I have often wondered what has allowed our affluent country, under no undue stress, to become so fundamentally polarized? There was no major depression, no unpopular war. Even the Cold War had settled down to an agreed-upon detente. I don't think it is sufficient to say Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich or Grover Norquist did it. I suggest people such as these were merely catalysts, who for their own purposes tapped into a pervasive social phenomenon: boredom.
When a society becomes sufficiently affluent the necessities that drive human beings are diminished. The greater the affluence and the wider its distribution the more profound is this loss of necessity, which people like Bill Bennett have glossed and misused as the loss of a “moral compass.” This cultural loss of focus is a byproduct of affluence and results in a heavy emphasis on amusement as an antidote to the boredom that ensues. It also makes a society more vulnerable to political manipulation.
Notice that Ronald Reagan's main message was not greater affluence. It was not even overcoming the Russians, although this was prominent. It was that Americans should “walk tall.” That they should move in the world independent of other nations and cultures. That they personally should be self-sufficient and forgo the securities of government support. Shortly before Reagan was elected, President Carter drew attention to America's cultural boredom in his “malaise” speech of 1979, which subsequently played a significant role in his defeat in the election. Americans did not want to hear the truth: they wanted to feel good about themselves. Reagan and/or his advisers were aware of the same phenomenon and used it to gain office and turn the country over to corporate rapine and religious bigotry. What Reagan did was persuade Americans that they were still the self-dependent pioneers that their forebears presumably had been. People did not ask how the criteria of the frontier might play out in a nation of hundreds of millions and a world facing nuclear weaponry. This was the reinstilled purpose, benighted though it was, for American political life. Americans, so devoid of historical awareness, did not see that we had been through what Reagan proposed before. The age of the Robber Barons had amply demonstrated what an economy dominated by the frontier dog-eat-dog encounters between economic goliaths who had no regard for the common good was like and what its consequences were, e.g. repeated recessions and depressions.
Robert Nisbet in his book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary
observes that “The range of cures or terminations of boredom is a wide one: migration, desertion, war, revolution, murder, calculated cruelty to others, suicide, pornography, alcohol, narcotics. Tiberius relishing those he tortured, or Sherlock Holmes taking to the needle, the pains and results of boredom are everywhere to be seen, and nowhere more epidemically than in Western society at the present time.”
Obviously the political process was one of moving the country from a common interest politics to a self interest politics. Once the pressure of the Great Depression was off and the prosperity following World War II had taken effect, people thought they no longer needed government except for military purposes. A public hubris set in, massively encouraged by the corporate financial sector eager to weaken the people's control of them. We are now living with the consequences.
The social hazards of affluence are many. Among the most subtle, yet dangerous, is the tendency to boredom. Barbara Tuchman, I believe in her book The Guns of August, notes that the Great Powers of Europe were armed to the teeth and had detailed plans for invading each other prior to World War I and that this was commonly known. She describes one episode in which German. French and English college students are congenially noting that they would probably be fighting each other soon. Such is the absolute idiocy of boredom. In a world bent on massive introduction of technology, with the resultant removal of necessity, this poses an ominous portent for future generations. What the antidote might be I am not sure. We know that social purpose can address boredom, whether for good or ill. However, purpose as a motivator is very risky in its reliance upon the emotions and difficult to maintain for the same reason. Perhaps we will wind up breeding boredom-resistant humans as Aldous Huxley suggests in Brave New World.
Bob Newhard
When a society becomes sufficiently affluent the necessities that drive human beings are diminished. The greater the affluence and the wider its distribution the more profound is this loss of necessity, which people like Bill Bennett have glossed and misused as the loss of a “moral compass.” This cultural loss of focus is a byproduct of affluence and results in a heavy emphasis on amusement as an antidote to the boredom that ensues. It also makes a society more vulnerable to political manipulation.
Notice that Ronald Reagan's main message was not greater affluence. It was not even overcoming the Russians, although this was prominent. It was that Americans should “walk tall.” That they should move in the world independent of other nations and cultures. That they personally should be self-sufficient and forgo the securities of government support. Shortly before Reagan was elected, President Carter drew attention to America's cultural boredom in his “malaise” speech of 1979, which subsequently played a significant role in his defeat in the election. Americans did not want to hear the truth: they wanted to feel good about themselves. Reagan and/or his advisers were aware of the same phenomenon and used it to gain office and turn the country over to corporate rapine and religious bigotry. What Reagan did was persuade Americans that they were still the self-dependent pioneers that their forebears presumably had been. People did not ask how the criteria of the frontier might play out in a nation of hundreds of millions and a world facing nuclear weaponry. This was the reinstilled purpose, benighted though it was, for American political life. Americans, so devoid of historical awareness, did not see that we had been through what Reagan proposed before. The age of the Robber Barons had amply demonstrated what an economy dominated by the frontier dog-eat-dog encounters between economic goliaths who had no regard for the common good was like and what its consequences were, e.g. repeated recessions and depressions.
Robert Nisbet in his book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary
observes that “The range of cures or terminations of boredom is a wide one: migration, desertion, war, revolution, murder, calculated cruelty to others, suicide, pornography, alcohol, narcotics. Tiberius relishing those he tortured, or Sherlock Holmes taking to the needle, the pains and results of boredom are everywhere to be seen, and nowhere more epidemically than in Western society at the present time.”
Obviously the political process was one of moving the country from a common interest politics to a self interest politics. Once the pressure of the Great Depression was off and the prosperity following World War II had taken effect, people thought they no longer needed government except for military purposes. A public hubris set in, massively encouraged by the corporate financial sector eager to weaken the people's control of them. We are now living with the consequences.
The social hazards of affluence are many. Among the most subtle, yet dangerous, is the tendency to boredom. Barbara Tuchman, I believe in her book The Guns of August, notes that the Great Powers of Europe were armed to the teeth and had detailed plans for invading each other prior to World War I and that this was commonly known. She describes one episode in which German. French and English college students are congenially noting that they would probably be fighting each other soon. Such is the absolute idiocy of boredom. In a world bent on massive introduction of technology, with the resultant removal of necessity, this poses an ominous portent for future generations. What the antidote might be I am not sure. We know that social purpose can address boredom, whether for good or ill. However, purpose as a motivator is very risky in its reliance upon the emotions and difficult to maintain for the same reason. Perhaps we will wind up breeding boredom-resistant humans as Aldous Huxley suggests in Brave New World.
Bob Newhard
Friday, June 26, 2009
On a Proper Frame of Reference
At our recent Citizens for Democracy meeting we had a discussion of plans for medical care in the United States. As the discussion progressed I was struck by the extent to which other issues became important in the discussion, especially cost.
Human beings, I believe, have a proclivity for thinking about the immediate and working their way to tangential issues as necessity seems to demand. This style of thinking, which I shall call “inside out” may be found less appropriate as the magnitude of human concerns becomes global. In what follows I want to explore a bit what happens when we think “outside in” global concerns first.
Suppose we approach the issue of health care from a global perspective. First there is the issue of health itself. Health means different things on a global, as distinct from a a national, point of view. The health of Americans, for example, may depend far more on global pandemics spawned in the massive slums of Africa, Asia and Latin America, than it does on single payer versus multiple payer health care schemes. Mike Davis discusses the dire consequences of a bird flu pandemic in his book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu which describes the potential, if not immanent, destructiveness of such a pandemic. This global perspective strongly suggests that we get clear about the social value of health care before we start talking about the cost of health care. This shift in priorities allows us to begin addressing the issue in terms of health rather than cost. It suggests that we in the United States need to address the social consequences of NOT having universal health care. This, in turn requires that we have a primary focus on the prevention of illness. One of the anomalies of U. S. health care is that the United States, despite its expenditure on medical services, ranks 50th out of 224 nations in life expectancy according to 2009 estimates from the CIA World Factbook.
From the point of view of the human species public sanitation, for example, has been responsible for saving more lives and extending the useful life span of more individuals than the introduction of life-extending devices, e.g. pace makers and stents, into the bodies of the elderly. A 2002 study of Medicare expenses for those 65 and older found costs averaged $37,581 during the last year of life versus $7,365 for non terminal years. If prevention were the primary target of health care large proportions of the population, including the poor, would be the focus of the heath care debate now going on, not who pays for what.
From a species point of view health is closely related to survival. This suggests that a major focus of health concern and investment should be on improving the health environment of the earth's multi-million resident slums. The world's largest slum is the 2.2 million Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. As the world's population continues to grow, these will be the breeding grounds of major health calamities.
The potential (inevitability?) of these slums to breed global catastrophe raises a second fundamental health issue: overpopulation. We know that the more interaction between animals, the more likely it is that the pathogens that infect them will be transmitted. This fact is compounded by the ability of these pathogens to mutate often and unpredictably. The closer that humans live to each other, e.g, the slums or the more often they come in contact, e.g. the global movement of people, the more likely a global pandemic will be created. Population growth has to be seen as a primary health issue and addressed as such. The health of the human species has to be a primary focus for reducing human population. I say this because our species has demonstrated a remarkable ability to abstract, symbolize, understand and apply our experience. There is a deeper meaning to René Descartes' “I think therefore I am.” To my mind it can be understood as I think therefor I am human.
While the above comments are by no means exhaustive, they do point, in my judgment, to something like the health care debate we should be having. We have not even established the value of health care. We have let the market do that, which is heavily biased toward those who have the money, not toward meeting health needs. We need to break out of this small box of health versus cost to health for human survival and optimization. We need to confront those institutions, whether religious or nationalist, that advocate population growth, as threatening human health. In brief, we need to keep our eyes on the fundamental meaning of health for our species, consider more specific issues in these human terms and, finally, not confuse the immediate with the real. Mankind must learn that it is its own worst enemy and its only salvation.
Bob Newhard
Human beings, I believe, have a proclivity for thinking about the immediate and working their way to tangential issues as necessity seems to demand. This style of thinking, which I shall call “inside out” may be found less appropriate as the magnitude of human concerns becomes global. In what follows I want to explore a bit what happens when we think “outside in” global concerns first.
Suppose we approach the issue of health care from a global perspective. First there is the issue of health itself. Health means different things on a global, as distinct from a a national, point of view. The health of Americans, for example, may depend far more on global pandemics spawned in the massive slums of Africa, Asia and Latin America, than it does on single payer versus multiple payer health care schemes. Mike Davis discusses the dire consequences of a bird flu pandemic in his book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu which describes the potential, if not immanent, destructiveness of such a pandemic. This global perspective strongly suggests that we get clear about the social value of health care before we start talking about the cost of health care. This shift in priorities allows us to begin addressing the issue in terms of health rather than cost. It suggests that we in the United States need to address the social consequences of NOT having universal health care. This, in turn requires that we have a primary focus on the prevention of illness. One of the anomalies of U. S. health care is that the United States, despite its expenditure on medical services, ranks 50th out of 224 nations in life expectancy according to 2009 estimates from the CIA World Factbook.
From the point of view of the human species public sanitation, for example, has been responsible for saving more lives and extending the useful life span of more individuals than the introduction of life-extending devices, e.g. pace makers and stents, into the bodies of the elderly. A 2002 study of Medicare expenses for those 65 and older found costs averaged $37,581 during the last year of life versus $7,365 for non terminal years. If prevention were the primary target of health care large proportions of the population, including the poor, would be the focus of the heath care debate now going on, not who pays for what.
From a species point of view health is closely related to survival. This suggests that a major focus of health concern and investment should be on improving the health environment of the earth's multi-million resident slums. The world's largest slum is the 2.2 million Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. As the world's population continues to grow, these will be the breeding grounds of major health calamities.
The potential (inevitability?) of these slums to breed global catastrophe raises a second fundamental health issue: overpopulation. We know that the more interaction between animals, the more likely it is that the pathogens that infect them will be transmitted. This fact is compounded by the ability of these pathogens to mutate often and unpredictably. The closer that humans live to each other, e.g, the slums or the more often they come in contact, e.g. the global movement of people, the more likely a global pandemic will be created. Population growth has to be seen as a primary health issue and addressed as such. The health of the human species has to be a primary focus for reducing human population. I say this because our species has demonstrated a remarkable ability to abstract, symbolize, understand and apply our experience. There is a deeper meaning to René Descartes' “I think therefore I am.” To my mind it can be understood as I think therefor I am human.
While the above comments are by no means exhaustive, they do point, in my judgment, to something like the health care debate we should be having. We have not even established the value of health care. We have let the market do that, which is heavily biased toward those who have the money, not toward meeting health needs. We need to break out of this small box of health versus cost to health for human survival and optimization. We need to confront those institutions, whether religious or nationalist, that advocate population growth, as threatening human health. In brief, we need to keep our eyes on the fundamental meaning of health for our species, consider more specific issues in these human terms and, finally, not confuse the immediate with the real. Mankind must learn that it is its own worst enemy and its only salvation.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Brave New World a la Corporate Capitalism and Corporate Deception
Aldous Huxley delivered his view of our future technologized world in his book Brave New World. In its May 25, 2009 issue Time Magazine delivers a Special Report detailing its view of the emerging world of work. I quote from its cover: “You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won't look much like your old one. There is no longer a ladder and you may never get to retire, but there is a world of opportunity if you can figure out a new path. Ten lessons for succeeding in the new American workplace.” This is a world of me-first, aggressive entrepreneurs in which everyone is responsible for themselves. Time tells the inhabitants of this inevitable and immediate future that they can forget the benefits that accompany employment such as social security, health, etc. As entrepreneurs they will buy their own “benefits.” The report is replete with statements from experts, reports from government agencies and statistics. There is no external goal to all this “creative” activity. It is Adam Smith's invisible hand writ large. Whatever the market, that monstrous creation of money, wants it will get. If people's needs cannot find a suitable place in the market, usually the needs of the poor, they will not be met.
Interestingly, the report envisions many opportunities for entrepreneurs to create franchising corporations, thereby betraying the implicit conflict between small business and small-business-destroying corporations. As has often been observed, the mark of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over and expect to get a different result.
By way of buttressing its argument, it says that the cost of startup companies is decreasing constantly, making this form of economic effort affordable to more people. It does not mention that startups fail at a rate as high as 90% after two years. While there are many critics of this figure, mostly from business sources, a constant failure rate of even 50% would create a very unstable economy. We Americans do not appreciate the value that long-term stable companies and especially, governmental entities,contribute to the stability of our society.
Underneath all of this however is the insidious societal fragmentation that modern capitalism has introduced into our society. This is a dog-eat-dog world of survival competition between individuals, which no society can long tolerate and remain a democracy. As always it will produce top dogs who will dominate the society. This kind of raw capitalism is inimical to democracy.
There is an effort to take the edge off this economic horizon by noting that, to a significant extent, the leaders of these enterprises are likely to be women because their softer feminine style of leadership is more productive in this economy of team effort – understanding the team may consist of members scattered around the world. While women are certainly capable of management, if their's is a softer form of leadership somebody should tell Meg Whitman ex CEO of Ebay and now a Republican candidate for California governor. Meg would cut 30,000 state jobs. For this billionaire woman this is obviously preferable to going after the excessively wealthy at a time when the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than it has been in the last hundred years. So much for the softer feminine management style. It is also rumored that Carly Fiorina, ex CEO of Hewlett-Packard will seek to replace Barbara Boxer.
Why, one may ask, is a mainstream national publication publishing such an article in view of the obvious current failure of just this kind of economics? This is Milton Friedman's capitalism with a vengeance dolled up as our inevitable future. I suspect this is part of the corporate media's attempt to divert public attention from the non-market solutions to the debacle that unregulated capitalism has wrought. It is an attempt to dazzle the public, especially the young, with the manifold opportunities for wealth through entrepreneurship. What is neglected, as it so often is, is the impact on the social fabric of our society. If we let the marketplace and the wealthy who dominate it prescribe the economic system of the future we thereby let them prescribe the social welfare of the people. We have had more than enough of this gross deception. It is high time we made a major issue of the danger unfettered capitalism poses to democracy and the welfare of its people.
This then is the consummate duplicity of the corporate media: to sell the populace on a future of an entrepreneur-dominated economy, which of course would leave no room for multinational multi-product corporations. They feel safe in doing this because they have the resources to buy up any untoward competition that might develop. The bottom line is that progressives must vigorously challenge this future. First, we need to clearly and energetically demonstrate how the market is being used to structure our society. Second, it is necessary to show people why the market is a lousy paradigm for organizing a humane society. Its goals are not to create a better, more just society, but to maximize profit, which alone creates its values. Third, we need to clearly articulate an alternative to the “free market.” This latter can be done by articulating a mixed economy of regulated capitalism for social benefit. Economies such as those of the Scandinavian countries are examples. However, some believe leaving even a remnant of capitalism in place would allow it cancer-like to gain control again as wealth becomes increasingly aggregated by the few. An economy of, for and by the people needs to keep capitalism at the periphery of society. The early citizens of this country were very distrustful of corporations. Some of the colonies were themselves corporations controlled by investors in England. Hence they strictly controlled corporations, which were authorized mainly for building infrastructure, e.g roads and canals. These corporations were sunsetted at the termination of the project. Are we still wise enough to make corporations subordinate to the accomplishment of social goals?
Bob Newhard
Interestingly, the report envisions many opportunities for entrepreneurs to create franchising corporations, thereby betraying the implicit conflict between small business and small-business-destroying corporations. As has often been observed, the mark of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over and expect to get a different result.
By way of buttressing its argument, it says that the cost of startup companies is decreasing constantly, making this form of economic effort affordable to more people. It does not mention that startups fail at a rate as high as 90% after two years. While there are many critics of this figure, mostly from business sources, a constant failure rate of even 50% would create a very unstable economy. We Americans do not appreciate the value that long-term stable companies and especially, governmental entities,contribute to the stability of our society.
Underneath all of this however is the insidious societal fragmentation that modern capitalism has introduced into our society. This is a dog-eat-dog world of survival competition between individuals, which no society can long tolerate and remain a democracy. As always it will produce top dogs who will dominate the society. This kind of raw capitalism is inimical to democracy.
There is an effort to take the edge off this economic horizon by noting that, to a significant extent, the leaders of these enterprises are likely to be women because their softer feminine style of leadership is more productive in this economy of team effort – understanding the team may consist of members scattered around the world. While women are certainly capable of management, if their's is a softer form of leadership somebody should tell Meg Whitman ex CEO of Ebay and now a Republican candidate for California governor. Meg would cut 30,000 state jobs. For this billionaire woman this is obviously preferable to going after the excessively wealthy at a time when the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than it has been in the last hundred years. So much for the softer feminine management style. It is also rumored that Carly Fiorina, ex CEO of Hewlett-Packard will seek to replace Barbara Boxer.
Why, one may ask, is a mainstream national publication publishing such an article in view of the obvious current failure of just this kind of economics? This is Milton Friedman's capitalism with a vengeance dolled up as our inevitable future. I suspect this is part of the corporate media's attempt to divert public attention from the non-market solutions to the debacle that unregulated capitalism has wrought. It is an attempt to dazzle the public, especially the young, with the manifold opportunities for wealth through entrepreneurship. What is neglected, as it so often is, is the impact on the social fabric of our society. If we let the marketplace and the wealthy who dominate it prescribe the economic system of the future we thereby let them prescribe the social welfare of the people. We have had more than enough of this gross deception. It is high time we made a major issue of the danger unfettered capitalism poses to democracy and the welfare of its people.
This then is the consummate duplicity of the corporate media: to sell the populace on a future of an entrepreneur-dominated economy, which of course would leave no room for multinational multi-product corporations. They feel safe in doing this because they have the resources to buy up any untoward competition that might develop. The bottom line is that progressives must vigorously challenge this future. First, we need to clearly and energetically demonstrate how the market is being used to structure our society. Second, it is necessary to show people why the market is a lousy paradigm for organizing a humane society. Its goals are not to create a better, more just society, but to maximize profit, which alone creates its values. Third, we need to clearly articulate an alternative to the “free market.” This latter can be done by articulating a mixed economy of regulated capitalism for social benefit. Economies such as those of the Scandinavian countries are examples. However, some believe leaving even a remnant of capitalism in place would allow it cancer-like to gain control again as wealth becomes increasingly aggregated by the few. An economy of, for and by the people needs to keep capitalism at the periphery of society. The early citizens of this country were very distrustful of corporations. Some of the colonies were themselves corporations controlled by investors in England. Hence they strictly controlled corporations, which were authorized mainly for building infrastructure, e.g roads and canals. These corporations were sunsetted at the termination of the project. Are we still wise enough to make corporations subordinate to the accomplishment of social goals?
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Leadership in an Age of Accommodation or When Humans Think More About Each Other Than They Do About the Real World
Politics, unlike science, has an inherent and intense focus on other human beings. It consists primarily of persuading other human beings by whatever means to act as the persuader wishes. This means, among other things, that politicians and much of the public believe that problems and their solutions are resolvable by persuading other people to one's own view.
There is, however, a third element in the problems and opportunities human beings face--the real world. Humans and their societies exist in a natural world that sets its own conditions for human welfare and survival. Yet this third element is often taken for granted and rises to the political surface only as a last and often too late resort.
A leitmotif of the Obama administration has been bridging the gap between the left and right in this polarized society. The method has been to accommodate the demands of both sides, although there has been, in my opinion, far more “reaching out” to the right than to the left. This effort at accommodation has thus been intensely focused on the human beings that comprise both sides. As a result the real world external to human concerns with other humans continues to take a back seat, although lip service to the inexorable demands of the real world continues to be heard. This process of trying to get both sides, each focused on its own beliefs and values, to in some sense become one can, given the fantasy and deviousness that inhabit the human mind, go on forever.
As an alternative, I suggest that the Obama administration needs to shift its focus to the real world which conditions human existence. In so doing it must enlarge its scope and begin developing policy from a global, species-survival, point of view rather than the narrowness of the “national interest.”
To do so it must aim for a knowledge-based society, which is the only basis we have for keeping the real world in focus. We have the disingenuous, knowledge-subverting corporate media and the faith-based (ignorance-based) powers to contend with. If this goal is pursued the government would actively promote knowledge. Obama has at his disposal the wherewithal to launch a massive campaign to get people to understand knowledge, the fascination it can hold for humans, the degree of reliability it provides compared to any other method for dealing with our fate as humans. People would understand that knowledge, while it it tentative as distinct from certain, offers the highest degree of reliability. It will no longer be enough to base global warming decisions on a lack of certainty as distinct from overwhelming probability as G. W. Bush and self interested corporations have.
As people learn to rely on knowledge they will see why it is necessary to apply this approach to human beings themselves. The American people were gulled into a war of aggression basically because they did not know how to assess the outrageous corporate interests at work in promoting that response. Had they effectively known that corporations have repeatedly used the American military for their own purposes (read marine general Smedly Butler's early 20th century account) they would have known where to look.
If the Obama administration were to begin using the resources of the federal government to massively promote knowledge as a primary value, by making the extent of human knowledge effectively known to people, if every challenge to knowledge, e.g. creationism, was challenged for its lack of evidence by the government, were people taught what constitutes evidence, how to evaluate claims of fact and the necessity to do so and supported in that effort,we might begin to develop a knowledge-based culture.
Such an undertaking would require the consummate statesmanship that Obama has the oratorical gifts to enunciate and motivate. One wonders however,whether he has the conceptual gifts to grasp the fundamental requirements of our time. Mankind's technological capability will overwhelm it unless humans understand the context in which it is to be employed. Notably, people who know what to do in an emergency do not pray or indulge other myths, they act on what they know. In global warming, global resource depletion, and overpopulation, humans face the greatest emergency they have ever faced. This, at root is why knowledge must be given priority, as Socrates observed so many millenniums ago.
Bob Newhard
There is, however, a third element in the problems and opportunities human beings face--the real world. Humans and their societies exist in a natural world that sets its own conditions for human welfare and survival. Yet this third element is often taken for granted and rises to the political surface only as a last and often too late resort.
A leitmotif of the Obama administration has been bridging the gap between the left and right in this polarized society. The method has been to accommodate the demands of both sides, although there has been, in my opinion, far more “reaching out” to the right than to the left. This effort at accommodation has thus been intensely focused on the human beings that comprise both sides. As a result the real world external to human concerns with other humans continues to take a back seat, although lip service to the inexorable demands of the real world continues to be heard. This process of trying to get both sides, each focused on its own beliefs and values, to in some sense become one can, given the fantasy and deviousness that inhabit the human mind, go on forever.
As an alternative, I suggest that the Obama administration needs to shift its focus to the real world which conditions human existence. In so doing it must enlarge its scope and begin developing policy from a global, species-survival, point of view rather than the narrowness of the “national interest.”
To do so it must aim for a knowledge-based society, which is the only basis we have for keeping the real world in focus. We have the disingenuous, knowledge-subverting corporate media and the faith-based (ignorance-based) powers to contend with. If this goal is pursued the government would actively promote knowledge. Obama has at his disposal the wherewithal to launch a massive campaign to get people to understand knowledge, the fascination it can hold for humans, the degree of reliability it provides compared to any other method for dealing with our fate as humans. People would understand that knowledge, while it it tentative as distinct from certain, offers the highest degree of reliability. It will no longer be enough to base global warming decisions on a lack of certainty as distinct from overwhelming probability as G. W. Bush and self interested corporations have.
As people learn to rely on knowledge they will see why it is necessary to apply this approach to human beings themselves. The American people were gulled into a war of aggression basically because they did not know how to assess the outrageous corporate interests at work in promoting that response. Had they effectively known that corporations have repeatedly used the American military for their own purposes (read marine general Smedly Butler's early 20th century account) they would have known where to look.
If the Obama administration were to begin using the resources of the federal government to massively promote knowledge as a primary value, by making the extent of human knowledge effectively known to people, if every challenge to knowledge, e.g. creationism, was challenged for its lack of evidence by the government, were people taught what constitutes evidence, how to evaluate claims of fact and the necessity to do so and supported in that effort,we might begin to develop a knowledge-based culture.
Such an undertaking would require the consummate statesmanship that Obama has the oratorical gifts to enunciate and motivate. One wonders however,whether he has the conceptual gifts to grasp the fundamental requirements of our time. Mankind's technological capability will overwhelm it unless humans understand the context in which it is to be employed. Notably, people who know what to do in an emergency do not pray or indulge other myths, they act on what they know. In global warming, global resource depletion, and overpopulation, humans face the greatest emergency they have ever faced. This, at root is why knowledge must be given priority, as Socrates observed so many millenniums ago.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Technology and the Puritan Ethic
One of the more fruitful ways to think about humans and their societies is in terms of what Karl Marx called "contradictions" and their consequences. While not formal logical contradictions, they referred to practices, tendencies or beliefs that were incompatible with each other. One of these, in my judgment, is the "contradiction" between technology and the puritan ethic, both of which hold sway in America.
The puritan ethic, sometimes called the protestant ethic, called for hard work to achieve monetary success as a sign of God's approval and, per Calvinism, election to salvation. This association of protestantism and capitalism created the work ethic that has so dominated our society. How this association developed is detailed in R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and in Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The fact that these books are both early 20th century publications indicates how long this association has been understood.
Technology is also a deeply rooted value in our society. It is a source of American pride and of a profound faith that it can save us from any unfortuitous events of the future.
However, technology produces to make life easier, so we don't have to work as hard. This obviously "contradicts" the puritan ethic of hard work. The interesting thing is what effect this contradiction has had on us.
The progressives of the 19th century saw technology as the root of progress because, among other things, it continued to reduce the labor of industry and daily life. Few asked themselves the question "what then?" Let us look at some of the consequences of this contradiction. What happens when technology requires less and less effort in a society devoted to the work ethic?
• Leisure: Progressives of the 19th century looked forward to the improvement of mankind as it was freed to develop its higher potential. Indeed, the Chautauqua series of lectures and cultural events that sprang up around the country evidenced that this was happening. However, as technology itself began to redefine leisure, this effort at self improvement gave way to motion pictures, then television, then the computer as an entertainment device. The profound impact of this transformation is captured in Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. We have substituted passive visceral and emotional titillation for the thought and learning of the Chautauqua.
• Work: While the drudgery of work has been greatly alleviated, its intensity has increased. There is a profound understanding of mankind's future to be found in what our society has done with its cultural value of work. As technology freed us from physical drudgery we began to work harder at the mind-deadening repetitiveness of factories under their maximal-profit-driven regimes in which time pressure replaced muscle exertion pressure. The continual speed-up of production lines, so pointedly illustrated in Charley Chaplin's movie Modern Times, became a dominating feature of the production world as the machine replaced human muscle. As this process of substituting the mind for muscle progressed we entered a world in which there were fewer and fewer limits to work. Unlike physical labor in which the body has obvious limits (we can only lift so much weight) there were no obvious limits to mental labor. People generally believe mental labor is much less demanding then physical labor. Also what constitutes mental labor is less determinable than what constitutes physical labor. It is rather easy for humans to distinguish between the recreational expenditure of physical energy and the work expenditure of that same energy. The difference between mental work and play is less determinable for society. The result of this amorphousness in the world of mental work, known as the knowledge industry, is that people are worked harder and harder. The idea is that you can't overwork the mind. It is one thing for labor unions to object to production line speed-up, and rightly so, it is another thing to make the same charge stick if a middle manager is overloaded with assignments and deadlines. These are some of the processes by which we have surrendered the increase in human improvement that so may saw in technology to the idiocy of making ourselves work even harder. Such is the insidiousness of the puritan work ethic.
• Abandonment and retribution: There are two sides, at least, to every ethic; the good and the bad. If in the puritan ethic, hard work and a rewarding wealth are evidences of God's approval and the achiever's salvation, then the absence of hard work and wealth is an evidence of sin and God's displeasure. This plays out in our time when we justify neglecting the needs of the unemployed by calling them "losers." We can imprison thousands of young men because their lack of jobs and our cultural proclivity to blame them for this state of affairs, which leaves them little alternative but crime if they are to have a life even remotely like those on the other side of town.
• Politics: American politics is where this dichotomy in American culture has probably found its greatest impact. Any cultural contradiction of this sort will always play a prominent role in a culture's political life. Political parties in their effort to control a society love nothing better than a fundamentally divisive element in the national culture. In the case of America the welfare of the society has been repeatedly hampered by the appeal to personal responsibility. This is derived from the Puritan ethic and is often used by the affluent to hold onto or expand their wealth at the expense of the poor. It is a not too subtle a way of saying the wealthy deserve their wealth as the (sinful) poor deserve the consequences of their implied indolence. I am reminded of those financiers of our current economic debacle, for which they are significantly responsible, decrying the demand that they give up their $1 million bonuses. As one of them said "he had worked his ass off for that bonus."
• Population: In no other area has technology had so dramatic an impact on the human species as it has had on their sheer numbers. Prior to the advent of science and its offspring technology humans had lived close to nature and nature's products. Their life span was considerably shorter than it is now. One source I read many years ago said the average life span in ancient Greece was 35 years due substantially to the high death rate in childbirth and the first few years of life. As science improved our understanding of human health and sanitary measures were introduced, e.g. Louis Pasteur's work on pasteurization, more humans survived their early years and they began to live longer. In 1850, twelve years before Pasteur invented milk and wine pasteurization, the world population was 1 billion 262 million. Today it is 6.9 billion and projected to reach 9 billion by 2050.
What are the consequences of the puritan ethic for a population of this density? Can we reasonably believe that an ethic of individual responsibility can prevent the catastrophes that the resource shortages, inflamed ethnic differences and the presence of nuclear weaponry present? So far the puritan ethic has been used to justify the rights of the wealthy to control humanity. The bottom line is that the puritan ethic has induced us to treat social problems as personal moral problems, usually of character.
• An ethic for our times: We badly need an ethic that will avoid the catastrophes the puritan ethic has and will continue to breed. This new ethic must be, I believe, an ethic of the common good. I would point out that any ethic, being at root a moral system with all the arbitrariness that implies, is not above its own form of abuse. Ayn Rand made much of this in her book Atlas Shrugged, a bible of sorts for libertarians. Obviously the majority, e.g. the common, can crush the individual. However, understanding how easily the cult of the individual has been manipulated for the benefit of the wealthy and their crushing of the poor and how irrelevant such an ethic is to the needs of billions of people, we do need an ethic that accepts the problems of the many as its focus, else our species perishes. An ethic of the common good focused, as Jefferson understood, on insuring that each individual realizes her or his potential, remains the best hope of humankind.
Bob Newhard
The puritan ethic, sometimes called the protestant ethic, called for hard work to achieve monetary success as a sign of God's approval and, per Calvinism, election to salvation. This association of protestantism and capitalism created the work ethic that has so dominated our society. How this association developed is detailed in R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and in Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The fact that these books are both early 20th century publications indicates how long this association has been understood.
Technology is also a deeply rooted value in our society. It is a source of American pride and of a profound faith that it can save us from any unfortuitous events of the future.
However, technology produces to make life easier, so we don't have to work as hard. This obviously "contradicts" the puritan ethic of hard work. The interesting thing is what effect this contradiction has had on us.
The progressives of the 19th century saw technology as the root of progress because, among other things, it continued to reduce the labor of industry and daily life. Few asked themselves the question "what then?" Let us look at some of the consequences of this contradiction. What happens when technology requires less and less effort in a society devoted to the work ethic?
• Leisure: Progressives of the 19th century looked forward to the improvement of mankind as it was freed to develop its higher potential. Indeed, the Chautauqua series of lectures and cultural events that sprang up around the country evidenced that this was happening. However, as technology itself began to redefine leisure, this effort at self improvement gave way to motion pictures, then television, then the computer as an entertainment device. The profound impact of this transformation is captured in Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. We have substituted passive visceral and emotional titillation for the thought and learning of the Chautauqua.
• Work: While the drudgery of work has been greatly alleviated, its intensity has increased. There is a profound understanding of mankind's future to be found in what our society has done with its cultural value of work. As technology freed us from physical drudgery we began to work harder at the mind-deadening repetitiveness of factories under their maximal-profit-driven regimes in which time pressure replaced muscle exertion pressure. The continual speed-up of production lines, so pointedly illustrated in Charley Chaplin's movie Modern Times, became a dominating feature of the production world as the machine replaced human muscle. As this process of substituting the mind for muscle progressed we entered a world in which there were fewer and fewer limits to work. Unlike physical labor in which the body has obvious limits (we can only lift so much weight) there were no obvious limits to mental labor. People generally believe mental labor is much less demanding then physical labor. Also what constitutes mental labor is less determinable than what constitutes physical labor. It is rather easy for humans to distinguish between the recreational expenditure of physical energy and the work expenditure of that same energy. The difference between mental work and play is less determinable for society. The result of this amorphousness in the world of mental work, known as the knowledge industry, is that people are worked harder and harder. The idea is that you can't overwork the mind. It is one thing for labor unions to object to production line speed-up, and rightly so, it is another thing to make the same charge stick if a middle manager is overloaded with assignments and deadlines. These are some of the processes by which we have surrendered the increase in human improvement that so may saw in technology to the idiocy of making ourselves work even harder. Such is the insidiousness of the puritan work ethic.
• Abandonment and retribution: There are two sides, at least, to every ethic; the good and the bad. If in the puritan ethic, hard work and a rewarding wealth are evidences of God's approval and the achiever's salvation, then the absence of hard work and wealth is an evidence of sin and God's displeasure. This plays out in our time when we justify neglecting the needs of the unemployed by calling them "losers." We can imprison thousands of young men because their lack of jobs and our cultural proclivity to blame them for this state of affairs, which leaves them little alternative but crime if they are to have a life even remotely like those on the other side of town.
• Politics: American politics is where this dichotomy in American culture has probably found its greatest impact. Any cultural contradiction of this sort will always play a prominent role in a culture's political life. Political parties in their effort to control a society love nothing better than a fundamentally divisive element in the national culture. In the case of America the welfare of the society has been repeatedly hampered by the appeal to personal responsibility. This is derived from the Puritan ethic and is often used by the affluent to hold onto or expand their wealth at the expense of the poor. It is a not too subtle a way of saying the wealthy deserve their wealth as the (sinful) poor deserve the consequences of their implied indolence. I am reminded of those financiers of our current economic debacle, for which they are significantly responsible, decrying the demand that they give up their $1 million bonuses. As one of them said "he had worked his ass off for that bonus."
• Population: In no other area has technology had so dramatic an impact on the human species as it has had on their sheer numbers. Prior to the advent of science and its offspring technology humans had lived close to nature and nature's products. Their life span was considerably shorter than it is now. One source I read many years ago said the average life span in ancient Greece was 35 years due substantially to the high death rate in childbirth and the first few years of life. As science improved our understanding of human health and sanitary measures were introduced, e.g. Louis Pasteur's work on pasteurization, more humans survived their early years and they began to live longer. In 1850, twelve years before Pasteur invented milk and wine pasteurization, the world population was 1 billion 262 million. Today it is 6.9 billion and projected to reach 9 billion by 2050.
What are the consequences of the puritan ethic for a population of this density? Can we reasonably believe that an ethic of individual responsibility can prevent the catastrophes that the resource shortages, inflamed ethnic differences and the presence of nuclear weaponry present? So far the puritan ethic has been used to justify the rights of the wealthy to control humanity. The bottom line is that the puritan ethic has induced us to treat social problems as personal moral problems, usually of character.
• An ethic for our times: We badly need an ethic that will avoid the catastrophes the puritan ethic has and will continue to breed. This new ethic must be, I believe, an ethic of the common good. I would point out that any ethic, being at root a moral system with all the arbitrariness that implies, is not above its own form of abuse. Ayn Rand made much of this in her book Atlas Shrugged, a bible of sorts for libertarians. Obviously the majority, e.g. the common, can crush the individual. However, understanding how easily the cult of the individual has been manipulated for the benefit of the wealthy and their crushing of the poor and how irrelevant such an ethic is to the needs of billions of people, we do need an ethic that accepts the problems of the many as its focus, else our species perishes. An ethic of the common good focused, as Jefferson understood, on insuring that each individual realizes her or his potential, remains the best hope of humankind.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Fear Doth Make Fools of Us All or the Courage to Be a Citizen
How is it that the citizens of the most powerful country the world had ever known are so given to fear that they permit the shredding of their Constitution, the launching of a war against innocents and the uncivilized use of torture that had no U. S. precedent? Have they lost confidence or purpose?
The New York Times (April 22, 2009) quotes a memo from Adm. Dennis C. Blair, Obama's National Intelligence Director, to his staff in which he states "high value information came from those (torture) interrogation measures." While this declaration was proved false by an actual interrogator, I asked myself at the time how this nation finds torture acceptable when in the midst of World War II with the devastating attack on Hawaii and the occasional shelling by Nazi submarines we did not find it either necessary or desirable? I have felt for some time that ordinary citizens of this democracy have lost the courage of earlier generations. When London was being bombed to smithereens, the British had 200 detainees, and Winston Churchill said, "We don’t torture." Today people in this country are prepared to destroy our Constitution out of fear. One measure of maturity is an ability to accept risk and persist in a human manner. Our citizens accept far greater risk when they drive down the street than they do from terrorists, yet they enter the danger of the "driving zone" casually every day. That we need to take precautions is clear, and that we do. That we need to shred our Constitution in response to terrorism betrays a citizen weakness fatal to democracy. Those who still approve of G. W. Bush most often argue that he kept us safe, which betrays the weakness we suffer from.
This defense of Bush administration torture has been made before. Unfortunately the argument has been couched in terms of whether valuable information was obtained rather than what are the full consequences of torture. Suppose we grant that "high value information" was obtained. Without knowing the value of that information and without bringing in all the other consequences of torture the phrase "high value" is meaningless. Was the information of such value that using the rack or singeing the victim at the stake would be warranted?
The defense of this torture has been based solely on American national interest. What if, in pursuing our national interest in this fashion, other countries felt either justified or compelled to torture also? Would a world addicted to torture be an advance for humanity? That is what the Geneva Convention is all about.
If I am correct in finding a difference in citizen courage between earlier generations and now, what could be the cause? Among the causes for this change I think the Cold War has had a lot to do with it. The baby boomers as children had to "duck and cover" and regular civil defense sirens built into them at a very young age. We lived for decades with immanent Soviet attack kept as a background for our daily lives. Many people built bomb shelters. Our movies were often based on what would the world be like after the nuclear exchange had taken place. Our leaders often talked of using the nuclear option. We had the face-off of the Cuban missile crisis. This partial litany should indicate how thoroughly fear was instilled in the American mind during these years. We have become a society of incipient panic. We need to understand what has happened to us and begin the process of readjustment before we do ourselves and the world irreparable damage. (Some interesting thoughts along this line may be found in the article Farewell to the American Century by Andrew Bacevich at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/04/30/bacevich/print.html.)
If Americans could ever get it through their heads that they are not masters of this planet; that what we do others will also do; that we must always weigh our decisions in terms of the kind of world we are likely to generate; then perhaps we could contribute to a world that humanity, ourselves included, would find much more conducive to our happiness than it has been.
After I had finished this post I discovered an excellent article by Gary Kamiya titled America's Necessary Dark Night of the Soul. It is his view of what we must do to overcome what fear has wrought. It can be found at Salon.com at http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/05/01/torture_investigations/print.html.
Bob Newhard
The New York Times (April 22, 2009) quotes a memo from Adm. Dennis C. Blair, Obama's National Intelligence Director, to his staff in which he states "high value information came from those (torture) interrogation measures." While this declaration was proved false by an actual interrogator, I asked myself at the time how this nation finds torture acceptable when in the midst of World War II with the devastating attack on Hawaii and the occasional shelling by Nazi submarines we did not find it either necessary or desirable? I have felt for some time that ordinary citizens of this democracy have lost the courage of earlier generations. When London was being bombed to smithereens, the British had 200 detainees, and Winston Churchill said, "We don’t torture." Today people in this country are prepared to destroy our Constitution out of fear. One measure of maturity is an ability to accept risk and persist in a human manner. Our citizens accept far greater risk when they drive down the street than they do from terrorists, yet they enter the danger of the "driving zone" casually every day. That we need to take precautions is clear, and that we do. That we need to shred our Constitution in response to terrorism betrays a citizen weakness fatal to democracy. Those who still approve of G. W. Bush most often argue that he kept us safe, which betrays the weakness we suffer from.
This defense of Bush administration torture has been made before. Unfortunately the argument has been couched in terms of whether valuable information was obtained rather than what are the full consequences of torture. Suppose we grant that "high value information" was obtained. Without knowing the value of that information and without bringing in all the other consequences of torture the phrase "high value" is meaningless. Was the information of such value that using the rack or singeing the victim at the stake would be warranted?
The defense of this torture has been based solely on American national interest. What if, in pursuing our national interest in this fashion, other countries felt either justified or compelled to torture also? Would a world addicted to torture be an advance for humanity? That is what the Geneva Convention is all about.
If I am correct in finding a difference in citizen courage between earlier generations and now, what could be the cause? Among the causes for this change I think the Cold War has had a lot to do with it. The baby boomers as children had to "duck and cover" and regular civil defense sirens built into them at a very young age. We lived for decades with immanent Soviet attack kept as a background for our daily lives. Many people built bomb shelters. Our movies were often based on what would the world be like after the nuclear exchange had taken place. Our leaders often talked of using the nuclear option. We had the face-off of the Cuban missile crisis. This partial litany should indicate how thoroughly fear was instilled in the American mind during these years. We have become a society of incipient panic. We need to understand what has happened to us and begin the process of readjustment before we do ourselves and the world irreparable damage. (Some interesting thoughts along this line may be found in the article Farewell to the American Century by Andrew Bacevich at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/04/30/bacevich/print.html.)
If Americans could ever get it through their heads that they are not masters of this planet; that what we do others will also do; that we must always weigh our decisions in terms of the kind of world we are likely to generate; then perhaps we could contribute to a world that humanity, ourselves included, would find much more conducive to our happiness than it has been.
After I had finished this post I discovered an excellent article by Gary Kamiya titled America's Necessary Dark Night of the Soul. It is his view of what we must do to overcome what fear has wrought. It can be found at Salon.com at http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/05/01/torture_investigations/print.html.
Bob Newhard
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