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
Sunday, May 31, 2009
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)