Recently my wife Eleanor and I attended the high school graduation celebration for one of our young relatives. This young lady graduated with honors. She wants to be a psychologist or a nurse and to my surprise, admires the young people of the 1960's, especially their protests against the Vietnam war and for civil rights. Dare one hope that hers is the generation that may bail this country out of its long nightmare of shallowness and militarism? But the most impressive thing about this youngster is that several years ago she lost her sister in an ATV crash with a train. She and her sister were very close. When offered rooms of their own they chose to continue sharing a room. For teenagers focused on establishing their individual identity this would seem to be a rarity. She came out of this traumatic loss with a concern not only to help others, but the understanding that society's welfare is central to this concern. To me this was a startling level of maturity in one so young. It would have been so easy, I am tempted to say natural, for her to have been embittered by a perceived unfairness in the traumatic loss she had experienced. I asked myself, in light of this display of maturity, how societies managed with their great traumas of which war is the preeminent one.
Until World War II the United States demonstrated a good deal of maturity in its response to war. While we were as guilty as most of using war, or threat of war, to get our way, nonetheless, after every war we demobilized and demilitarized. This demonstrated a degree of maturity as we repeatedly returned to a focus on civilian society at the end of each war.
Immediately after World War II we again demonstrated maturity when we established the Marshall Plan to help our erstwhile enemies recover after the war. Being as we had the only viable economy after the war this "generosity" also created jobs for returning soldiers, which helped avoid the bonus-march unrest following World War I. The Marshall Plan not only demonstrated maturity, but also that we were able to become a learning society as we recognized one of the sources of World War II in the depression-exacerbating reparations following World War I. However, all of this was lost as we failed to find some life-saving détente with the Russians. Both sides had humanity as a stated concern, for America it was liberty, for Russia the welfare of the proletariat. Had we fought as manfully for peace as we did for war we may have avoided the loss of millions of lives and massive human displacement and suffering that the so-called Cold War brought upon mankind. The bellicose Winston Churchill put an end to all hopes with his Iron Curtain speech.
Now we are again faced with a test of national maturity. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were uncalled for. After 9-11 we were not faced with a "war" as G. W. Bush and his ruling neocons declared. We had the opportunity to use the overwhelming sympathy and willingness to cooperate of most of the world. We could have created a cooperative police action to track down the perpetrators and subject them to a world tribunal as was done with other criminals such as Milosevic. This, however, did not suit the plans of the neocons to create a defacto empire out of the "sole remaining superpower." The smallness of mind, the gross failure to understand human resistance to occupation by foreigners, especially as it developed after World War II, completely escaped them as they converted foreign policy into military policy.
What would national maturity now require of us? Many urged, and many thought, Obama would pursue getting us out of the aggressive wars initiated by G. W. Bush. This time the maturity required some of the courage displayed by Roosevelt in opposing Wall Street (the financiers tried to organize a coup) or by Truman, who fired General MacArthur at the height of his poularity for insubordination. In Barak Obama it was not forthcoming and hence we have not displayed the maturity to remove our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.
This time it is up to we the people to create a movement for national maturity. We have no Roosevelt or Truman or Marshall. Maybe we shall find one in a Congressman Grayson or Congressman Sestak. For now it is totally up to us. Nine years after a hubris-driven and murderous mistake was made, it is time for an exercise of the national maturity we have demonstrated before.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
The Politics of Values
Since the advent of Reaganism we have been subjected to the politics of values. But what are values and how do they play out in politics?
Let us consider values as distinct from facts. Facts require evidence, values do not. Facts have a greater or lesser amount of evidence to support them. The more evidence the greater the facticity. Values are human creations, they are not found in nature. They have a substantial degree of emotional content. Being a human creation, having no necessary connection to the natural world, and being emotionally charged makes them an ideal vehicle for controlling society.
This being the case values should always be examined, especially when being employed to persuade people. Questions that need to be honestly explored are: Who is pushing the particular values? Do they have any non-value interest in the effort being made? If so what are those interests and who else will benefit by society's pursuit of them?
Another downside of values is, that being detached from the real world, they can be treated as absolutes because there can be no fact contradicting them. This makes values immune to any imperative derived from the natural world, e.g. global warming or overpopulation. This detachment from reality also means that belief in values can lead to a kind of insanity. Human beings can invest any amount of passion, good or bad, they choose in support of them. This is compounded by their apparently absolute nature, another "benefit" of being detached form the real, testable, world of fact. As a result, there is nothing to cast doubt on a value and the human passion for certainty finds a safe home. Thus people are free to believe any fantasy by calling it a value, which, being absolute, cannot be challenged. As a result "belief" is elevated to the highest levels of certainty and is so psychologically powerful that many people cannot distinguish between belief and fact.
Some examples may clarify the relevance of this argument against the innocence of values. We have, for example, placed a high value on human life. Left unexamined, this value has been and is being used to thwart human birth reduction. Millions of people, e.g. Christian, Muslim, believe preventing the birth of human beings and aborting the human fetus is morally wrong. Yet the evidence is that this planet cannot handle unlimited human births. This obviously insane behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged because values that once had relevance when humans were few and weak, have gone unexamined, and are even frequently reinvigorated despite the obvious consequences. Obviously we are at a stage where the quality of human life, not, the quantity, is of primary importance. It is also obvious that the facts have trumped values in importance.
Finally, as alluded to above, values are used by the powerful to control those less powerful. An interesting study would be to delineate the primary values of a society and then analyze the use made of those values by the controlling elite to control the rest of the society. In my last column I attempted to do that with the American value of freedom. As I tried to show, this value, left unexamined, has permitted corporations to defend their constant immersive propaganda as their right to exercise free speech. They, of course, have a huge megaphone, that will easily drown out the free speech of others. Because of the high value we place on free speech, we, including the Supreme Court, have allowed the free speech of some to kill the free speech of others. Obviously the facts surrounding this issue would call for a greater opportunity to be heard for those with a weaker voice, but the value of free speech cloaked in its robe of absoluteness, is not allowed to be challenged by the facts,
Socrates declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. One might add that the unexamined value can be a source of great harm to the living.
Bob Newhard
Let us consider values as distinct from facts. Facts require evidence, values do not. Facts have a greater or lesser amount of evidence to support them. The more evidence the greater the facticity. Values are human creations, they are not found in nature. They have a substantial degree of emotional content. Being a human creation, having no necessary connection to the natural world, and being emotionally charged makes them an ideal vehicle for controlling society.
This being the case values should always be examined, especially when being employed to persuade people. Questions that need to be honestly explored are: Who is pushing the particular values? Do they have any non-value interest in the effort being made? If so what are those interests and who else will benefit by society's pursuit of them?
Another downside of values is, that being detached from the real world, they can be treated as absolutes because there can be no fact contradicting them. This makes values immune to any imperative derived from the natural world, e.g. global warming or overpopulation. This detachment from reality also means that belief in values can lead to a kind of insanity. Human beings can invest any amount of passion, good or bad, they choose in support of them. This is compounded by their apparently absolute nature, another "benefit" of being detached form the real, testable, world of fact. As a result, there is nothing to cast doubt on a value and the human passion for certainty finds a safe home. Thus people are free to believe any fantasy by calling it a value, which, being absolute, cannot be challenged. As a result "belief" is elevated to the highest levels of certainty and is so psychologically powerful that many people cannot distinguish between belief and fact.
Some examples may clarify the relevance of this argument against the innocence of values. We have, for example, placed a high value on human life. Left unexamined, this value has been and is being used to thwart human birth reduction. Millions of people, e.g. Christian, Muslim, believe preventing the birth of human beings and aborting the human fetus is morally wrong. Yet the evidence is that this planet cannot handle unlimited human births. This obviously insane behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged because values that once had relevance when humans were few and weak, have gone unexamined, and are even frequently reinvigorated despite the obvious consequences. Obviously we are at a stage where the quality of human life, not, the quantity, is of primary importance. It is also obvious that the facts have trumped values in importance.
Finally, as alluded to above, values are used by the powerful to control those less powerful. An interesting study would be to delineate the primary values of a society and then analyze the use made of those values by the controlling elite to control the rest of the society. In my last column I attempted to do that with the American value of freedom. As I tried to show, this value, left unexamined, has permitted corporations to defend their constant immersive propaganda as their right to exercise free speech. They, of course, have a huge megaphone, that will easily drown out the free speech of others. Because of the high value we place on free speech, we, including the Supreme Court, have allowed the free speech of some to kill the free speech of others. Obviously the facts surrounding this issue would call for a greater opportunity to be heard for those with a weaker voice, but the value of free speech cloaked in its robe of absoluteness, is not allowed to be challenged by the facts,
Socrates declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. One might add that the unexamined value can be a source of great harm to the living.
Bob Newhard
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