The recent "tea party" demonstrations by the Republican Party raise once again what I believe will become, and in fact now is, one of the most insidious threats to democracy, namely excessive wealth.
The so called tea party was funded by Dick Armey's corporate-funded FreedomWorks and vigorously promoted nationwide by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. The event was premised on distortion, i.e. the Boston Tea Parry was not a protest against taxes, it was a protest against taxes without representation. The need for the tax increases in this state and nation is to address the fiscal debacle caused primarily by Republican destruction of financial regulatory oversight imposed after the Great Depression. All this anti-tax blather is in the context of massive tax breaks for the wealthy and the largest gap between the rich and the poor in a hundred years.
We have very serious problems in our world and society of which our current economic situation, bad as it is, is not the worst. Yet the wealthy and their minions will exercise their power and pervasively deceptive influence on the citizenry to distort and obfuscate the truth no matter what the cost to humanity.
We are often urged to speak truth to power, indeed to find solace in so speaking. However, in the cacophony of lies, distortions and distractions that technology provides the wealthy the assumption that the voice of truth will be heard is tenuous at best.
The truth is that excessive wealth and democracy are incompatible. Progressives need to come to grips with this truth and raise the wealth issue to prominence. We must become very clear on how the wealthy employ their resources to preserve their control and subvert the democracy. This will require their subordination to the needs of society. In a time of overpopulation, rapidly decreasing resources and drastic climate change it is extremely dangerous to let wealth continue to play a dominant role, especially in one of the world's wealthiest nations. Kevin Phillips in his book Wealth and Democracy provides a history of the insidious role wealth has played in our society. I would add that the mechanics and consequences of wealth accumulation for a democracy must be clearly articulated in order to reverse our traditional worship of wealth. The fundamental axiom of wealth is that wealth attracts wealth. The wealthy are more likely to attract more wealth than are the non-wealthy. This is how family fortunes such as those of the Rockefellers, Kochs and Coors have been permitted to so thoroughly distort our democracy that the majority of us have far less influence on our legislatures than do the wealthy.
Until progressives make the concentration of wealth a preeminent focus of reform they will not be, in the fundamental sense necessary, truth speakers and the obfuscating and half measures of the Obama administration will continue to the point of a social crisis that could well leave us with a fascist regime. We must point out that Bill Gate's billions are a threat to democracy, despite giving millions to fight aids. We must realize that H. W. Bush's "thousand points of light" solution to social problems is a ploy of the rich to deprive citizens of both the resources and public choice that the taxes avoided would have produced for society. We must see charity, especially in an affluent society, as a failure for a democratic society to provide adequately for its citizens. Bill Gates' father, an affluent physician, argued against the repeal of the estate tax successfully pushed by the Bush administration. His son did not. Perhaps Gates senior understood the malevolent effects that the accumulation of great family fortunes has had on democracy.
I should point out that I am also opposed to MoveOn's acceptance of money from billionaire George Soros who made his fortune in one of the most pernicious forms of enterprise, e.g. speculating in changing monetary values. One only needs to think of the democratically-determined social needs that could have been realized with Soros' self-enrichment.
The daunting part of this is that a sustained focus on the adverse effects of wealth, demanding as it is, is but a part of bringing reality into citizen focus in a culture of distraction.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Private morality, public morality, global morality and Prudence
Gordon Brown, the British Prime minister, has been making the rounds of the world's major capitols pushing for what he calls "global morality." He is doing this in advance of the G20 meeting opening in London April 1, 2009. He appears to be very concerned that the conventional way of viewing the world economy, e.g. currency, productivity and wealth, is not sufficiently focused oh human well being, especially as revealed by the current global economic crisis. He apparently believes that the only remedy is to incorporate a "global morality" into the global economy.
This got me thinking about whether morality is scalable. Going back at least to the 18th century Enlightenment two kinds or levels of morality have been distinguished, private morality and public morality. Private morality is generally regarded as dealing with those things that are done in private and do not affect others, examples frequently used are adultery and marijuana consumption. Public morality is concerned with the well being of groups of individuals, e.g. racial discrimination, environmental pollution. Interestingly, Thom Hartman sees this distinction as distinguishing conservatives focused on private morality from liberals focused on public morality. His article on this is titled Rush Limbaugh May Teach Conservatives A Lesson can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1003-01.htm.
But what about global morality? At first such a concept sounds ridiculous. The plethora of racial, religious, and ethnic differences that have and still create so much havoc within our species would seem to doom any global morality to failure. It should be noted that moral systems, unlike noetic systems which are based on fact and subject to testing as to facticity, are based substantially on our emotions, which fact generated the 18th century notion of the moral sentiment. The intellectual challenge that moral systems face is how to build a moral system on something as slippery as our emotions. It has yet to be done with anywhere near the success of noetic systems such as those of science.
Additionally, this search for a global moral basis is not as recent as we might suppose. It was Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice who uttered, "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?" This is an appeal to human commonality, albeit to justify revenge.
One of the first tasks is to find what it is in the global conglomeration of humans to which moral sentiment is or can be attached. This sentiment has to be specific enough to be recognized by all humans as a human feature, yet capable of generating that sentiment in a population of billions. I believe that the necessary ingredient is there because all armies have to depersonalize the enemy into an object before the killing can begin. Indeed, in World War 1 on Christmas eve of 1914 German and English soldiers, on their own declared a truce, visited each other in no man's land, exchanged gifts and shared whiskey. Obviously a shared culture allowed common thoughts of home to burst through despite everything including their officer command structure. Can we find a similar kind of basis, complete with such a powerful sentiment, upon which to build a global morality? Notice that this event occurred in the context of shared suffering. While dramatic events such as these indicate the possibility, however tenuous, that humans may find a common moral framework it appears to be more in the nature of a project than a solution at this time.
However, if a common moral sentiment cannot be found and generalized into a global morality then I suggest that we should forget morality as a basis for solving this global problem and turn to prudence instead, which I suspect is the root of morality anyway.
Prudence can be based on the need for survival of the human species, upon which presumably all humans could not only agree, but actively pursue. This can be much more easily promoted than global morality. My suspicion is that we will have to expend a good deal of energy and ingenuity before we realize that much of what was taken for granted in the past must now be regarded as a focus of prudence not ownership. G. W. Bush and his coterie of neocons sought to control a natural resource, i.e. oil, instead of regarding it as a human resource to be prudently used for the benefit of all. In this case oil should be regarded as a materials resource, e.g. plastic, rather than as an energy resource, which increases global warming. If we practice the discipline of prudence on a broad enough scale for a long enough time we may, as a species, create an environment for a shared morality.
Bob Newhard
This got me thinking about whether morality is scalable. Going back at least to the 18th century Enlightenment two kinds or levels of morality have been distinguished, private morality and public morality. Private morality is generally regarded as dealing with those things that are done in private and do not affect others, examples frequently used are adultery and marijuana consumption. Public morality is concerned with the well being of groups of individuals, e.g. racial discrimination, environmental pollution. Interestingly, Thom Hartman sees this distinction as distinguishing conservatives focused on private morality from liberals focused on public morality. His article on this is titled Rush Limbaugh May Teach Conservatives A Lesson can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1003-01.htm.
But what about global morality? At first such a concept sounds ridiculous. The plethora of racial, religious, and ethnic differences that have and still create so much havoc within our species would seem to doom any global morality to failure. It should be noted that moral systems, unlike noetic systems which are based on fact and subject to testing as to facticity, are based substantially on our emotions, which fact generated the 18th century notion of the moral sentiment. The intellectual challenge that moral systems face is how to build a moral system on something as slippery as our emotions. It has yet to be done with anywhere near the success of noetic systems such as those of science.
Additionally, this search for a global moral basis is not as recent as we might suppose. It was Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice who uttered, "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?" This is an appeal to human commonality, albeit to justify revenge.
One of the first tasks is to find what it is in the global conglomeration of humans to which moral sentiment is or can be attached. This sentiment has to be specific enough to be recognized by all humans as a human feature, yet capable of generating that sentiment in a population of billions. I believe that the necessary ingredient is there because all armies have to depersonalize the enemy into an object before the killing can begin. Indeed, in World War 1 on Christmas eve of 1914 German and English soldiers, on their own declared a truce, visited each other in no man's land, exchanged gifts and shared whiskey. Obviously a shared culture allowed common thoughts of home to burst through despite everything including their officer command structure. Can we find a similar kind of basis, complete with such a powerful sentiment, upon which to build a global morality? Notice that this event occurred in the context of shared suffering. While dramatic events such as these indicate the possibility, however tenuous, that humans may find a common moral framework it appears to be more in the nature of a project than a solution at this time.
However, if a common moral sentiment cannot be found and generalized into a global morality then I suggest that we should forget morality as a basis for solving this global problem and turn to prudence instead, which I suspect is the root of morality anyway.
Prudence can be based on the need for survival of the human species, upon which presumably all humans could not only agree, but actively pursue. This can be much more easily promoted than global morality. My suspicion is that we will have to expend a good deal of energy and ingenuity before we realize that much of what was taken for granted in the past must now be regarded as a focus of prudence not ownership. G. W. Bush and his coterie of neocons sought to control a natural resource, i.e. oil, instead of regarding it as a human resource to be prudently used for the benefit of all. In this case oil should be regarded as a materials resource, e.g. plastic, rather than as an energy resource, which increases global warming. If we practice the discipline of prudence on a broad enough scale for a long enough time we may, as a species, create an environment for a shared morality.
Bob Newhard
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