Power and its Alternative

To my mind, one of the great cultural cleavages in humankind is that between power and understanding. Basically, power seeks to change things, at root, by brute force. Understanding, in and of itself, seeks to perceive the way things are, and hence sees the exercise of power, per se, as a threat by the very fact that it disrupts what needs to be understood. Power, per se, takes no notice of understanding whatsoever. Both of these proclivities are essential to human survival and, as is so frequently the case with human values, can be fundamentally at odds with each other.

I suspect power is earlier in the course of human evolution than understanding. As a species, humans were as much prey as predator, if not more so. Thus, living in constant fear, they were both impressed with the power of the animals that preyed on them and, perhaps, longed for the power they witnessed. It is instructive that the animals that received so much honor in human religions were the powerful ones, especially the lion, in India the elephant, and in Mayan culture the leopard. It is not surprising that power being so long and deeply ingrained in human nature should be more suasive in human affairs than understanding. In daily discourse we often hear people say what do I have to do?; not what do I have to know when confronted with a problem.

Understanding, being of more recent evolutionary development, is less firmly ingrained in our nature. It is, however, what finally allowed humans to redress their power imbalance with their predators. Using the two together the human species became the dominant species, for good and bad.

One of the continuing imbalances in our human and social affairs is that between these two influences. We so easily take the fruits of our understanding and wantonly place them at the service of our power proclivities. Through understanding, our brains continually create new technologies, new ways of dong things, which we, almost gleefully, pursue to their, often bitter ends. We created extremely useful computers, cameras, sensors of all kinds and produced the Predator and Reaper drones used to hunt and kill human beings as if in a video game.

Of late, there has been a movement to adhere to a "precautionary principle" which would require an assessment of all technology for its potential impacts before it is released for use. Genetically modified grains are a case in point. On a much larger scale, notably weaponry, this way of thinking needs to be implemented and rooted deeply in the human response to the inventions of its brain. For example, malaria, until the 19^th century, was thought to be caused by bad air. With the discovery that it was transmitted by mosquitoes their breeding grounds were drained, netting used over beds at night, etc. People hailed the conquering of this disease that had been a primary source of childhood mortality, and made building the Panama Canal feasible. As a result many more humans survived to child bearing age and populations increased globally. This along with many other beneficial sanitary developments based on increased understanding greatly increased the human life span as well. Both contributed to increased population growth, which if not stopped, will destroy our species. We can ask, should we have required a reduction in birthrate as these consequences of disease mitigation took place? This is an old problem going back to Thomas Malthus who saw in the 19^th century that mankind could out grow the resources necessary for its survival and therefore must control its growth. Seeing no other way to control that growth, he assumed it was one of the functions of famine, disease and constant war. This is the kind of problem that has become critical for human survival, largely because of our technological capabilities. It is also, obviously, a fundamental human problem to be resolved by humans if they are to continue to survive. By obvious implication, if technology is the primary source of this kind of dilemma, then the science that is technology's birthplace must be taken into account.

Science, in and of itself, is the fundamental cultural expression of the human proclivity to understand. We often undertake scientific efforts that have no practical use and thus no potential for our power impulse: the astronomy of intergalactic space is a case in point. Along the way we may find some uses for the knowledge we thus acquire, but that is not the reason for the undertaking. The more narrow minded among us, especially those politicians seeking the vote of the uninformed, often decry the uselessness of such, often expensive, knowledge quests, e.g. NASA, as a waste of money. The word "use," so employed, is an expression of power.

An interesting feature of understanding and one that I suspect may become fundamental to human survival is that understanding is much less culturally restricted than power. If you notice, understanding can break the bonds of cultural parochialism that cause so much conflict and human destruction. Physics, chemistry and mathematics remain the same whether in America or China or Timbuktu. This bodes well for the basis of a global human society. We have the basis for a common understanding. We have a way to get beyond the cultural divisions that plague us. This implies that the current attempt to deal with the dysfunctions of cultural diversity, i.e. to celebrate diversity, is in the long run inadequate. While I understand the intentions behind this approach of cultural identity awareness, I think it is clear that mankind needs a human identity if it is to survive on a planet of increasingly known limitation.

With respect to science, a world of fact and evidence, generating a moral system, you may find the book "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, significant. I am finding it so.

A Case in Point:

The history of Japan and the United States over the last 50 years offers an instructive example of these two proclivities in action. During that period the United States spent its energies on power, specifically the power to dominate the world. Japan, a small nation with few natural resources, substantially by a major emphasis on education, developed an economy that was the second largest in the world, after that of the United Sates. I am aware of some of the usual arguments made for this glaring difference, e.g. Japan did it under the military protection of the United States and hence did not have to invest so immensely in armaments. Protect them from what, the fantasies that led to General MacArthur's deliberate provocation of China and its entry into the Korean conflict? In any event, all that says is that peace, per se, can be more productive than war. In matters of such large scale as mankind's future, all the caveats usually lodged against Japan's achievement still leave this difference between it and the United States highly instructive.

The Learning Society

The Learning Society is an ongoing effort by UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to base economic development on life-long education. Far too often, indeed I suspect in the majority of cases, nations have built their economies on conquest, i.e. power, as did the United States as it pushed indigenous people from one ocean to another. The hegemony-declaring Monroe Doctrine asserted our power over the western hemisphere. Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet, a flotilla of warships, around the globe to emphasize our power and our willingness to use it. I submit this whole posture crushed the potential for an understanding-based society that could have sprung from the passion to understand found in some of our nation's most prominent founders, e.g. Jefferson and Franklin, had we heeded Washington's advice against entangling foreign alliances.

The point of these kinds of large-scale and admittedly very complex examples is that our species cannot continue to exist if we rely on power as the driving mechanism of our future as we so thoroughly have in our past. We have developed the capacity to destroy ourselves and yet behave like children with a new toy at each technological advance in the exercise of power. We, as a species, have demonstrated the capacity to develop through understanding. Our problem has been that we then insist on wantonly turning that understanding into power. We must learn to be satisfied with understanding, tread lightly on this earth and each other and be far more careful about turning understanding into power.

The Precautionary Principle

By way of developing a method to inhibit our largely uncontrolled practice of turning understanding into power there is an effort to define and implement deterring practices known as the Precautionary Principle. There are various definitions of this principle due to the complexity of the many issues and the vested interests of various segments of the world's population. Basically the principle would prohibit the introduction of new technology and the accompanying processes unless it was proven to be safe with respect to mankind and the environment. A Google search will turn up a plethora of information, and complexity, for those who may be interested.

As The Learning Society initiative evidences, there are people and groups concerned to deal with the problems our species faces by the use of mankind's unique capacity to understand. We need to bring this need and this approach to general public awareness accompanied by the urgency it deserves. We must think our way out of our massive dilemmas lest we destroy ourselves in the emotional responses we customarily make.

Bob Newhard

Are Humans Becoming Redundant?

There is a latent, but pervasive, sense among Americans that the rich need the rest of us as a market. As Henry Ford is said to have believed, he had to pay his workers decently if he expected them to buy his automobiles. However, this serf-like view of humanity is true only if wealth is being generated by mass production for mass consumption and that production cannot be moved from one region to another. The truth is, however, that markets are not people, they are money. If money is concentrated in relatively few hands, the market cannot be "mass:" to wit nobody markets to poor people because they have no money--except in a scam such as subprime mortgages.

The message here is that an unregulated, market-driven economy cannot meet the needs of humanity at large, which in substantial measure, is why we are seeing the global turmoil being generated by the fallout from the Great Recession.

It follows that as the market-driven economy continues to concentrate increasing amounts of wealth in fewer individuals that the demographic size of the market shrinks and increasing numbers of humans cease to be effective members of the economy.

Sam Pizzigatti, editor of the online publication Too Much, which is concerned with economic inequality, has published an article detailing one major indicator of this phenomenon-- advertising. Sam reviews a report in Ad Age, the major trade journal of the advertising industry, which tells advertisers to forget marketing to individuals who make less then $100,000 a year. Useful amounts of money are not to be made there. Additionally the report advises that long term marketing strategy should focus on 20-30 year olds who make at least $100,000 a year because the probabilities are that they will be the wealthy cohort from which future profits are to be made. Here we have one of the most wealth sensitive segments of our economy, advertising, laying out their assessment of our economic future, which envisions increasing concentration of wealth and the power that accompanies it as well as increasing numbers of economically deprived human beings. We shall address some of the social consequences of this below. Sam's article titled, Madison Ave. Declares 'Mass Affluence' Over, may be found at http://toomuchonline.org/madison-ave-declares-mass-affluence-over/.

In another article titled, Are the American People Obsolete? Michael Lind, political policy director at the New America Foundation, examines the fate of the American worker if wealth continues to concentrate. Here I would observe that the reason that the wealthy oppose public employment is, at root, because the public sector is the only place that people cashiered by the private sector have to go to get employment. It is difficult to think of a more economically vicious catch 22. But as Grover Norquist, a patron saint of the wealthy anti-taxers, said of government "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

The wealthy, in so many words, see government as the enemy standing between them and total domination of society.

Michael begins his article by asking "Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes." He then goes on to unfold a scenario in which increasing joblessness forces Americans, like the citizens of so many poorer countries, to migrate elsewhere in search of employment. Americans have not seen this possibility before, but it is common to the rest of the world, indeed, it was migrating poor Europeans who created this country.

Perhaps a couple of quotes from Michael's article will encourage you to read the complete article, which I highly recommend.

This is a message that must be made as clear to the American people as that greed is a primary Wall Street motivator.

" The point is that, just as much of America’s elite is willing to shut down every factory in the country if it is possible to open cheaper factories in countries like China, so much of the American ruling class would prefer not to hire their fellow Americans, even for jobs done on American soil, if less expensive and more deferential foreign nationals with fewer legal rights can be imported."

You want to know how to stop incessant war?

"The American people also could put a stop to any thought of an American Foreign Legion and declare, through their representatives, that a nation of citizen-workers will be protected by citizen-soldiers, whether professionals or, in emergencies, conscripts. The American people, in other words, could insist that the United States will be a democratic republican nation-state, not a post-national rentier oligarchy." Michael's article can be found at http://news.salon.com/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete/.

Again, the message is if the rich have no need for you, you become redundant. Obviously this cannot be a continuing process. Obviously it must be stopped either within the capitalist system or through a replacement system.

Let us now look at some of the social fallout from this attack by the wealthy on government and, hence, on us. Support for public universities and colleges has diminished to the point of canceling some courses and outrageously increasing enrollment fees, reducing or eliminating monetary aid to students from poor families and reducing teaching staff. At the same time the wealthy continue to get tax deductions for their extensive gifts to their private colleges and universities. As I say, vicious! The concentration of wealth in the few has left public schools strapped for resources. Teachers have been let go thereby increasing class sizes, when everyone knows class size is one of the most significant determinants of effective education. This also increases the numbers of unemployed. Deliberate and vicious! There could be a direct transference of money, by way of a transaction tax on pure speculative investing, to public schools both to correct this awful imbalance and demonstrate to the American people the direct connection between the speculation-ridden life of the wealthy and the working life of most Americans. Of course, however, the wealthy would then claim their enormously wasteful and economically distorting practices support public education. Similar transfers of wealth by this kind of tax should be made to the victims of mortgage fraud and to the millions homeless with parents and children frightened of the future and desperate for some sort of security. And the Republican party of wealth and privilege would have us believe they care? Liars of the thousand lights of charity! These are but a few of the known, deliberate, consequences of increased wealth concentration and those who benefit from it. As we have said before wealth, especially concentrated wealth, is an enemy of the people and of democracy. It should be an object of social scorn instead of the focus of envy and icon of achieving that it now is.

So, is the bulk of humanity headed for economic irrelevance? If you look at the major trends as Michael did the answer would be "yes." None of the forces in play naturally encourage societal development. Labor requires less and less human endeavor. This is called efficiency, but efficiency presupposes a goal which one process is more efficient than another at accomplishing. What is the goal of this kind of efficiency? Simply more money called profit. Notably not human well being. Being as neither technology nor the power of the wealthy is directed at creating a viable, rewarding society for the majority of mankind, the only mechanism for changing human destiny is the informed will of the vast majority of mankind. Our operating principal is that we still outnumber them. Many people understand this. One union speaker at the Occupy Wall Street rally on the occasion of union support showing up, said to these predominantly young protesters "Well, we finally got together." Unions have been pitting manpower against wealth for years. This is a place to begin learning. Unions, like other organized efforts, whether corporations or religions, are subject to corruption, which requires a vigilant membership, but at least they are focused on human beings not merely money. As Benjamin Franklin said "We must all hang together or, assuredly, we will all hang separately." To do this we must develop a new understanding of what it means to be human at our best and to build a value system based on this reality. This is a tall order, but we are faced with a tragic reality. I still remember Denis Kucinich crying into the microphone during a candidates forum in the 2008 election "Wake up America, wake up!" This was by far the most powerful utterance in that whole devious, manipulative charade.

Corrective action.

For starters corrective action must begin with the realization that excessive concentrated wealth is a threat to mankind and must be eliminated at its first appearance. The methods of its accumulation must be as continuously monitored as we monitor the rise of an epidemic-causing virus. Instead of encouraging our young to "go forth and make their fortune," we need to encourage them create a better world, to live modestly and help make this planet the livable place it should be. We need to create a global value system that will take precedence over any existing cultural system. Because of overpopulation, over consumption, maldistribution of wealth, and the increasing efficiency of weapons technology, we have got to the point that humanity is its own worst enemy.

Bob Newhard

The Individual and the Collective

Evolution itself first articulated this distinction. Some forms of life are loners from the moment of birth, e.g. the sea turtle. Others are largely functions of the group, e.g. schooling fish. We humans having evolved a larger brain that has led to a greater awareness of self have lived in a largely bifurcated world of self and society. Unfortunately that larger brain has been much less successful in developing the capacity to bridge this gap than it has in exacerbating it and in developing destructive technologies that make this failure ever deadlier to its continued existence.

In addition to the problems generated by our bifurcated nature we also have a pronounced tendency to over emphasize the discoveries of our brain. In current literature this is often described as "overshoot." When Darwin presented his Origin of Species and the mechanism of survival of the fittest, this notion was almost immediately converted into a societal, especially business, motif. The wealthy not only did in fact dominate the poor, it was only natural that they did so. Being wealthy, and hence powerful, they were the ones "fit" to dominate the rest of mankind. What these titans of greed did not understand was that evolution had produced a social species with a sense of justice based on a moral sense of equality. This social sense was as necessary for human survival as being "fit." To this day the notion of the survival of the fittest permeates the ethos of libertarianism and its free market economics. Their version of freedom is nothing more than Darwin's survival of the fittest. Indeed, if you listen to the utterances of today's business tycoons their use of the word "war" to describe competition is often heard. The Art of War, an ancient Chinese work authored by Sun Tzu, is a best seller in business circles. Yet in times of financial crisis many of these business bravados flee to the relative safety of public coffers in the form of government bonds to protect them from the ugly world they have created. Individualism of the form espoused by libertarians and free marketers is a child's game of "king of the mountain," although a very dangerous one, in which the collective must bail the individuals out. When will we learn that the seductive siren call of uncontrolled economic freedom is a chimera that will inevitably destroy the ship of state and its cargo of fools. Productivity should be aimed at human well being not human wealth.

Neoliberalism, little more than a play on words

Neoliberalism is a current example of conservative radical individualism. It is also a very irksome term for anybody who takes liberalism seriously. Let us look at how the libertarians and free market economists converted liberalism into conservatism.

Liberalism arose in the 17th century from thinkers such as John Locke for whom property was almost a synonym for freedom because the Crown, aristocracy and Church owned almost all of it, John Stuart Mill whose essay "The Subjection of Women" early demonstrated liberalisms concern for improving social conditions and Jeremy Bentham whose "greatest good for the greatest number" utilitarianism was intended to replace religion as the foundation of morality. This was a time when freedom was increasingly in the air, at least among philosophers. The predominant enemies

of freedom were the king for whom other humans were subjects, not citizens and the landed aristocracy and the Church. It was against this background that people such as Jefferson believed the less government the better. Keep in mind that the British Crown controlled everything. The colonies were created to serve the crown either directly or indirectly through its grantees. The American Revolution was largely a merchant's revolution aimed at freeing merchants to trade with whomsoever they pleased and freeing them from increasingly onerous taxes by an absentee monarch.

Now let us step forward to 1933. The major oppressors were the Wall Street financiers and industrial tycoons. They were the ones oppressing workers in the coal mines, think the Ludlow massacre; in the meat packing houses, think Upton Sinclair's, the Jungle; in the auto plants, think Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times; in rapacious railroad freight charges, think the farmer's Grange movement. Freedom of the individual at this time meant freedom from economic domination. The government under FDR became the instrument for restoring freedom. Why? Because this country had become a democracy not a monarchy and the people were able to use government for their own purposes. It, obviously, was not easy, but equally obviously, it did not require a French Revolution.

In both 18^th and 2o^th centuries liberals sought the freedom of the individual within the context of society. Neoliberalism is an effort by conservatives to recreate the economic oppression of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries by leading people to think the economic world of the 18^th century, before corporations dominated the economy, is germane to the world of the 21^st century. That it has resulted in little more than economic colonialism should be evident to all. In a world of increasing overpopulation and decreasing resources it is clear that an ethos that sacrifices the group to the individual is a breeding ground for escalating conflict and violence, and this in the context of an expanding capacity to kill and maim.

The following is an excerpt from Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s essay titled Liberalism in America: A Note to Europeans in which he makes clear the consistency of liberalism and by implication the stealing of the word liberal by conservatives to engender confusion in America's political process.

"Enough should have been said by now to indicate that liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain. Liberalism in America has been a party of social progress rather than of intellectual doctrine, committed to ends rather than to methods. When a laissez-faire policy seemed best calculated to achieve the liberal objective of equality of opportunity for all -- as it did in the time of Jefferson -- liberals believed, in the Jeffersonian phrase, that that government is best which governs least. But, when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state."

Corporate power and the poverty it has spread are today's fundamental enemies of freedom.

Franklin Roosevelt clearly understood the meaning of "liberal" in the context of a corporation, rather than a monarch, dominated society when he included a freedom from want in his four freedoms speech. We must realize and articulate the fact that poverty is as much the enemy of freedom as dictatorship and that we have a Republican Party prepared to impose poverty on millions of Americans, indeed to move as many middle class citizens into poverty as possible. To some this claim may seem a drastic overstatement, but I think the extensive and vicious attacks on government services and economic support of the citizen combined with a radical decrease in taxes on the wealthy leave no other explanation. This is the fundamental purpose and result of their attacks on government. Ordinary people have no other defender than government and they need to take it back.

We must ask ourselves whether, in the face of overpopulaton, human-replacing technology and extremely high concentration of wealth, whether humanity is becoming redundant and is this situation being manipulated by the multibillionaires of this planet for their own purposes. In a democracy they need us as long as we have the vote, hence the Koch brothers and the Tea Party. However, it is more than possible that they can subvert this democracy into an authoritarian state, perhaps via the Religious Right's stated desire for a theocracy and the political machinations behind the "unitary presidency" floated by G. W. Bush, especially in the chaotic times this country will experience.

Democracy has no defense other than the will and energy of its citizens. The real question is whether the American citizenry is up to it.

Bob Newhard