I first noticed this phenomenon many decades ago when studying Plato's Republic. Plato holds that knowledge is the highest virtue. It followed therefore that society should reflect this fundamental truth. It followed from this that what was needed to assure that knowledge would remain society's defining virtue was a philosopher king. Hence a fundamental individual virtue, when applied to society, resulted in a dictatorship, albeit a dictatorship of wisdom. This is a case in which a private virtue, one properly ascribed to an individual, was made into a public virtue with, I suggest, the expected result. Indeed I. F. (Izzy) Stone the renowned investigative reporter, in his book, The Trial of Socrates, argues that Plato was part of a movement to overthrow the Athenian democracy.
For much of human history private virtues dominated the public arena. Government was viewed by the mass of people as good or bad on a personal scale, e.g. a good or bad monarch. The notion of the family was expanded to government as the monarch was viewed as the father of the country and the population as his children. Theoretically the state was his private domain. All others held their land in fief to him. Again this resulted in arbitrary rule as the father was viewed as the arbitrary ruler of this family.
Public virtues such as justice and equality came to the fore with the rise of democracy. Emanuel Kant saw this dichotomy and sought to reconcile these two kinds of virtue when he proposed that the private virtue of not lying was actually a public virtue because if everyone lied society could not function. While this effort to derive the private virtue of not lying from public necessity merits significant thought, it is interesting to note that not even the highest oath of office in our country, that of the President, makes no mention of not lying.
The problem is that private virtues are absolute for the individual who subscribes to them and thus become tyrannical when applied to public affairs. If honesty is a virtue for an individual then "more or less honest" will not do.
In our time this confusion of private and public virtue has become critical for the survival of our democracy. Conservatives, by passionately trumpeting individual virtues as replacements for public virtues such as equality and justice, have argued that charity should replace some major social services. You may remember President George H. W. Bush's call for a thousand points of light to solve glaring discrepancies in wealth. Thus the wealthy would decide when and if the poor were to receive the help they badly needed. This is not democracy! Again the current "debate" on health care pushes the conservative's private virtue of individual responsibility into the public arena where citizen rights and welfare should predominate and it does this with disastrous results for 46 million Americans, including 9 million children who have no health insurance.
One result of this relentless and deliberate insertion of private virtues into the public arena is that Americans have lost the sense of society and its importance. Democracy must accommodate a wide variety of private values of citizens; therefore its values, must in a sense, transcend those values in the interest of the society as a whole. This is not to say, for example, that we do not want personal honesty in government. It is to say that we do not require it as a condition of public office holding except in positions where it is critical, e.g. the town treasurer in the conduct of affairs related to that office. If honesty were rigorously required of politicians neither they nor this society could function for the simple reason politicians must say different things to different constituents if they are to be elected. We the citizens require this as we so frequently vote our private values rather than the public values of justice and equality.
There was a time when public virtues played a much stronger role in our public affairs. During Franklin Roosevelt's administration we actively sought and voted for the public good. We believed in the public good of public education as a right for children not a privilege of the wealthy. Public education was full of experimentation as we tried to understand what stimulated young people to learn. John Dewey fought to make the student the focus of education, not the institution. He understood Jefferson's view that education was the primary job of society and should focus on helping people realize their potential. Properly understood, society's goal was to produce an increasingly competent and curious citizenry. Conservatives have turned this on its head by declaring that they know the best things for students and education should be directed at instilling those values. Contemporary conservatism is at its heart dead. It is analogous to a hurricane or tornado; next to nothing at its center, but enormously destructive to everything around it. It does not want to inquire and base knowledge on the results of honest inquiry. Neither do corporations, and this is one of the roots of agreement between conservatives and the corporate world. It should never be forgotten that ignorance is deeply rooted in Christian culture. Knowledge of good and evil was a penalty God bestowed on Adam and Eve for their misbehavior. The Christian phrase " a little child shall lead them" implies that the ignorance of innocence is a virtue. These are the kinds of homilies out of which dictatorships are fashioned. Hitler's vision for the Nazi youth movement was purity of spirit. The image of Nietzsche's young eubemensch striding the Bavarian mountaintops captured the German imagination as "family values" and sexual purity threaten to distort our own public perceptions.
In short, be wary, very wary, of translating personal virtues into public virtues.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Limits
The other day the L. A. Times carried an article on the increasingly evident limits to Olympic athletic performance, unassisted by drugs or technology. To quote;
"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."
That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."
This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"
This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.
What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.
In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.
Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.
He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4
While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.
To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"
Bob Newhard
"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."
That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."
This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"
This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.
What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.
In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.
Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.
He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4
While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.
To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"
Bob Newhard
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