Newtown and Cultural Insanity

The Los Angeles Times carried an article in which the reporter queried people in and about Newtown regarding the mass killing of school children and adults at the Newtown public school. He found a community long given to guns with a plethora of gun shops, gun repair shops and shooting ranges. Indeed, the small state of Connecticut is the birthplace of the iconic Colt and Winchester guns, the Colt being established in 1830 and still manufactured in Hartford. Newtown citizenry is split between multigenerational families and, beginning about 15 years ago, wealthy newcomers from New York who found a quiet haven 70 miles from New York City from which they commute for work. Last fall Newtown’s police commission put an item on the ballot proposing limited hours for firing ranges and police permission to fire guns on private property. This was done primarily in response to complaints of noise from firing ranges. The proposed ordinance was defeated by local gun shops and their trade association supporters.

The mother of the 20 year old shooter was a wealthy divorcee living in a colonial style home. She liked guns, beer and volunteering at the local public school. She had an arsenal of five weapons, including an assault semi-automatic rifle, which the Times reporter found not to be all that unusual in Newtown and environs. The shooter’s mother had said she needed this arsenal for protection, a reason others gave for their own arsenal.

With funeral services still being held for those killed in the shooting, the Times reporter queried gun retailers and members of gun clubs and failed to get any rethinking of guns and mass slaughter, other than that schools needed to hire police personnel or arm teachers and principals. The remedy was more guns. The good people had to arm themselves against the bad people. This is the position the National Rifle Association has taken. Their leader publicly declared that the only remedy for a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. This profoundly simple-minded response to the mass killing of young children with a high capacity automatic weapon betrays either a high level of cultural callousness or a society that has lost its connection to reality. In either case this response from a multibillion dollar organization that expects it to fly raises so many questions as to the state of American society and American culture that the depth and complexity of our social sickness and its causes await an urgent analysis and the beginning of an era of remaking America as a society focused on human well-being.

I am personally of the opinion that there are many contributing causes to tragedies such as Newtown.  Among them are gross overpopulation, which cheapens human life; massive movement of wealth to a very few and the consequent decrease in the wealth distributed among the rest of American society; a narrow-minded moral meanness that has spread in our society with the political rise of the South; the loss of a sense of reality occasioned in no small part by 24/7 advertising, which replaces truth and fact with emotional fantasy; the effects of a communications and an entertainment technology that increasingly isolates Americans from the human presence of each other. So called social networking is often little more than self-advertisement by the millions seeking to be somebody in a very homogenized society. This litany of contributing causes is neither complete nor may not even mention those most important, but it does provide a sense of the complexity of the problems we face as our world begins to unravel around us. We are at the point where Americans will reject the path of self- indulgence, cultural arrogance and global imperialism and begin to seek remedies for our many shortcomings, including seeking them from other developed societies or we will continue down the path of self-delusion, decline and demise. I am not that hopeful, given what history tells me about human behavior, but if we have the capacity to put exploratory hardware on Mars and understand our evolutionary roots, we may find a way to avoid the extinction that most certainly awaits us if we do not. It would be a startling and valuable precedent to see a society as large and complex as ours recover its sanity.

Bob Newhard

The Rich Are Always With Us or How Wealth Distorts Society

I believe it is time that we stop moralizing about the unfairness of wealth and the opportunities it affords that are not available to those lacking wealth. Wealth has social consequences inimical to society and the stability it requires.

In his book The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future Joe Stiglitz remarks the role of inequality in the major social revolutions of 1848 and 1958 and speculates that 2011 may turn out to be another such seminal period because of the pervasive inequality.

But how does wealth distort society? Let me count the ways.

Wealth is power and as it is much more likely to attract additional wealth than is non-wealth (the poor are a notoriously lousy investment for the money-focused wealthy), it increasingly concentrates wealth and the power it generates into fewer and fewer hands. To paraphrase Lord Acton Power corrupts and increasing power increasingly corrupts. This power has distorted our political process so thoroughly that our democracy is now a hollow version of its former self. This power now permeates every aspect of our society including economics, law, media, war, education both general and academic, etc.

Wealth as a goal badly distorts our ability to deal with the major threats our species faces. It replaces a concern for our planet and our species with a concern for money and profit. Neither of these meets any fundamental human need.

Wealth replaces human value with monetary value and makes of human beings factotums in the market place with money equivalents not unlike the machines used to produce our goods. Indeed, we are often more concerned for the machine than the human. We allow businesses to amortize the value of a machine over time thereby reducing taxes on it, but do not allow the worker to amortize her/his body as it wears out. They are just fired.

Even if wealth did not result in excessive power it would still be distorting to society. If it could only be used to denote status as Thorstein Veblen describes in his Theory of the Leisure Class or as in Samuel Butler’s Erewon in which the Musical Bank issued non-negotiable money that represented prestige only, wealth would still have the pernicious influence of dividing society along artificial lines that would take its focus off valuing human wellbeing.

All of this criticism is based on the social evil of creating distinctions that generate asocial grouping based on the assumption of some groups that they are superior to other groups and that superiority per se is of fundamental importance.

Aldous Huxley was sensitive to the human proclivity to place undue value on difference in his novel Brave New World in which human beings were bred from the embryo on up to do certain jobs so that there would be no social crises due to unrealized expectations or sense of inferiority or superiority. In the rare event this discontent did arise a soma pill would alleviate any undue stress.

We must begin to view wealth as at least a threat, if not an enemy of, a stable democratic society and mitigate its accumulation out of that concern. Children should not be encouraged to go forth and seek their fortune as has been a centuries-long mantra in American society, now commonly called “success.”

But, it is said by the wealth-instilled conventional wisdom that without great wealth as a stimulant we will not get the innovation that a vibrant economy requires. In this regard a recently read article comes to mind.

The federal government has a new program to make the country a leader in battery technology. The plan calls for the  Argonne National Laboratory, which has considerable experience developing the lithium-ion battery that now powers everything from cell phones to the Tesla all-electric very fast luxury automobile, to lead this project. A number of university laboratories will work in cooperation with Argonne and the results of their development will be turned over to corporations to develop and market  products. The major innovation here is to be found in the government and other non-profit institutions. The private sector contributes a secondary level of innovation in developing products for the market and in the process these for-profit companies create excessive wealth that plays havoc with everything from financial stability to environmental destruction to social stability. Obviously highly qualified people work for the Argonne Laboratory, as they do in university research laboratories. They are well paid, but rather than being motivated by aspirations to become billionaires they find satisfaction in the knowledge they create. Another example is the Internet developed totally at government expense to mitigate damage to the nation’s communications system in the event of a nuclear attack. The private sector was allowed to use this system thereby generating behemoths of the Google and Amazon size, which avoided paying sales taxes for years until states began forcing them to do so. Again, this was billions in revenues that could have been used for society’s betterment.  My point here is that contrary to the constantly-pushed claptrap from the business community, we do not need free market capitalism to generate innovation. Additionally, we can no longer afford the liabilities free market capitalism introduces into a democratic society.

So, what should replace it? If you talk to people in the professions and sciences you will find that interest in the subject was and continues to be a prime motivator. Of course they want a reasonable income, but dreams of great wealth are seldom what inspire them.

What if the corrupting wealth that now flows to the ever fewer was taxed at 90% as it was under Franklin Roosevelt and what if those moneys were invested in creating clean energy solutions, massive rebuilding and improving of the nation’s infrastructure and to help people through adequate funding of public education and affordable academic education? These societal needs and desires are, after all, the price we pay for tolerating excessive wealth.

Finally, as technology continues to erode the role of the job as a means of distributing society’s wealth-generating productivity, it will be necessary to create a job-sharing labor market if we are to continue to use the job as the means of maintaining a fair distribution of wealth.  

 The standard argument from the likes of the National Chamber of Commerce that increasing the cost of products by using more people to produce them would price American products out of the market, would be dealt the death blow it so richly deserves because the excess wealth now going to those who have no need for it would be used to keep the price of American products reasonable. It is high time we added up the cost of excessive wealth and used the power of taxation to mitigate its adverse impacts and redirect the flow of wealth to society as a whole. We have done it before. It is high time we did it again.

Bob Newhard

On Dryland farming, Free Market Capitalism and the Threat of the Short-term Thinking they Exemplify

I was watching Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl about the extended Midwestern drought of the 1930s. At the time, these were dryland farms meaning no irrigation and absolute dependence upon the weather. In 1938, at age 15, I spent the summer on my grandparents farm is central Iowa. This was a dryland farm and the risks a farmer took every year would have a Wall Street financier shaking in his Guccis. The corn crop could be wiped out by a hailstorm, which often accompanied thunderstorms. So every time the summer air got thick and the flies gathered in layers on the screen door we knew a thunderstorm was on the way and a possible deluge of crop-destroying hail. Additionally if the rains did not come at the right time and the crop could be damaged by too little or too much rain for a given stage of crop growth. These were small farmers who, unlike today’s Wall Street capitalists did not have hedge investments in other assets that could offset much of the damage of a failed investment. These farmers were capitalists par excellence.

These farmer capitalists knew their business and had little use for government, especially government “interference” in their business of farming. Initially they rejected the advice of government agricultural experts who said the dust bowl was largely a creation of their straight line plowing method, indeed plowing straight furrows was regarded as a hallmark of farming competence. It was suggested that they adopt contour plowing which followed the undulations of the land and which would retain much more of what rain fell. It took a year or more of demonstration to convince farmers to change. Other measures such as leaving stubble in the field until the next planting season and planting rows of wind-breaking trees and letting land lay fallow for a year came from the government and were eventually adopted by farmers. The process of restoring the land had begun and when another drought set in and dust began to blow the farmers themselves went after the miscreants who had not maintained their soil.

The lesson here is that free market farmer capitalists thought they knew it all and distrusted a government that told them they were the primary cause of the event that overtook them. The deeper lesson, omitted from the segment of the documentary I watched, is that short term thinking, i.e. the annual crop production can lead to long term disaster i.e. the dust bowl.

All of this struck me as almost exact paradigm for Wall Street free market capitalism.

Here we have the experts who want the government kept out of “their” business as well as out of affairs  they want to control for profit. Their practices have caused global recession instead of regional disaster. They too disregarded, indeed saw to the overthrow of government regulations created to avoid disasters such as the Great Depression and the Great Recession. However, unlike the farmers, they never learned to accept the regulations their business requires. Under the leadership of Milton Friedman they even developed an economic theory that said it was wrong for the government to be involved in its practices and made that absurd claim public policy in the oft-repeated sole remaining super power.

However, decision making practices of those running this largest casino on the planet leave a bit to be desired.

As with the short-term thinking of farmers that resulted in the Dust Bowl, the short- term thinking elicited by free market capitalism also generates disastrous consequences.

In an article titled The Blindness of Short-Term Thinking ‘Quarterly Capitalism’ Desperately Needs Tempering With Long-Term Guidance, that can be found by goggling the title, the short-term thinking of financial executives is explored.

A group of top asset managers attending a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley (MS) were asked about their investment time horizon. Fifty-five percent said a quarter or less; only 20% said more than a year. Another survey revealed that 78% of managers would reject a net-present-value-positive project if it would lower quarterly earnings below consensus expectations, and 80% would focus on this short-term metric at the expense of building long-term shareholder value.

This should send shivers down the spine of every investor looking for long-term value creation, because climate risks alone could cost investment funds $8 trillion by 2030, according to Mercer.

The point here is that capitalism has, as perhaps its worst trait, short-term thinking built into it. Despite hopes to lengthen corporate reporting cycles this will remain true because one of capitalism’s primary money making strategies is rapid reinvestment turnover in order to optimize profit. In some types of currency differential investing in the Foreign Exchange Market the profit per transaction is often a fraction of 1%. However, because these transactions take place at computer-driven speed 24/7, worldwide, an average of 1.9 trillion dollars a day is invested. Rapid turnover has become a leitmotif of capital investment. The long-term perspective upon which the future of our species depends is absent in the major arenas of global resource allocation under the sway of capitalism.

Heidi Cullen, in her book The Weather of the Future, deals at length with the failure of the mass of mankind to grasp the gravity of what our species faces. Cullen, a climatologist, consulted psychologists who described two systems inherent in human beings for dealing with risk. One is analytic, carefully considering all aspects of risk. She offers stock market investing as an example of this. The other risk-evaluating system is emotional and stems from very early human evolution. The fight or flight syndrome of threatened animals is an early version of the system in human beings. Cullen’s psychologists told her that this type of decision making has regard only for the immediate, prioritizes in terms of the individual’s experience and assumes that every problem has one cause and, hence, does very poorly in cases where many factors function to cause a threat. Her psychologists told her that, in case of conflict between these two systems, the emotion-driven system will trump the analytic system every time.

Cullen suggests bridging this gap between the analytic and emotional risk assessment systems by including climate forecasts with the regular weather forecast. This, presumably, would give climate forecasts credibility in the public mind. Whether this would work or not, it may not be necessary. Hurricane Sandy’s massive destruction could go a significant way in associating the process of climate change with the immediacy of weather.

Whether or not the intensity of that hurricane was associated with climate change, its track almost certainly was. The normal track for hurricanes going up the Atlantic coast of the United States is to head out into the ocean somewhere between Virginia and Rhode Island. My surmise is that it is following the warmer water of the Gulf Stream. Instead of turning east however, Sandy turned west and tore into some of the most populous areas of the United States. My hypothesis is that the heavy Arctic ice melt this summer poured an immense amount of cold water into the Northern Atlantic, which disrupted the flow of the Gulf Stream, which is also responsible for mild winters in England and other parts of Western Europe. This is a scenario climate scientists have feared for some time. It is known that a high pressure area over Greenland probably blocked what would have been Sandy’s normal path East. Whether that high pressure ridge was caused by exceptionally cold water in the Northern Atlantic I do not know. Scientists are working intensively to understand the dynamics surrounding hurricane Sandy. And as the evidence accumulates the relationship between global warming and this kind of extreme weather will become clearer.

Hurricane Sandy may be a significant event in creating an effective link between climate change and weather. Even more importantly it advances the process of establishing science in the popular mind as the institution of trust when dealing with the real world. The turning from the emotion-driven to the analytic account may get a significant boost in the popular mind if we can get past the corporate control of the mass media with its vested interest in pursuing fossil fuel as the primary energy source. Science may need the public protest of knowledgeable citizens to get past the corporate control of our mass media.

If we are to preserve a democratic society we must, when considering such unprecedented threats as climate change, global food and water shortages and overpopulation, change the mode of risk decision making from short term emotional to long term analytical quickly and pretty thoroughly. If we don’t the decisions will be made by arbitrary authority and probably be made too late. It is time to let that which made us unique as a species rise to the top of the decision making process as we have done in science. It is time to understand that believing something does not make it a fact. In short, it is time for mankind to grow up.

Bob Newhard

Facing Up to Our Times

In a lecture that may be found on YouTube under the title Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges details the massive corruption and social dysfunction that corporations have introduced into human society at the end of which he expresses no hope that mankind will avoid the abyss that it has created for itself.

There is, in Chris' judgment, a possible way to deal with our situation and that is to incorporate the poor of the planet into the wealth of the planet. This would avoid a class of millions of desperately poor people whose implacable resentment is the seed bed for the totalitarianism that will overtake us otherwise. Lest it be thought that Hedges is placing too much importance on the significance of the poor I suggest reading Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth which can provide some insight into the dimensions of massive poverty in a world of ostentatious wealth. Also, as Mike Davis in his Planet of the Slums notes, the U.S. Military is refocusing its combat training on the slums, the environment from which it expects the major conflicts of the future to emerge.

However, Chris says, this necessary redistribution of wealth will never happen in a world dominated by coporate capitalism. In consequence of this corporate power and intransigence Chris, being the tenaciously honest person he is, faces up to the despair his conclusion leaves him with. His recourse is to individual acts of resistance, justice and compassion that, while not changing the course of the vicious folly we face, will confirm the best that is in us. He closed the lecture with the last lines of W. H. Auden's poem September 1, 1939, written as Auden saw with despair the horrible implications of the German invasion of Poland, which touched off World War II.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Obviously Chris has asked himself and us, how will we live our lives in these times of crushing irrelevance and denial. It is a question that, in my judgment, every morally engaged person must ask themselves. 

Nevil Shute ends his novel On the Beach, which depicts the end of humanity as the radioactive fallout from a massive nuclear exchange in Europe circles the world by the prevailing winds, by portraying the mass of mankind either turning to religion or to a final great party as they anticipate their end.

In contrast, Chris Hedges writes for those relatively few who face the moral consequences of the demise of our species.

I dealt with this issue some time ago when I could see no way out for our species that has given me everything I value. Unfortunately,­ mankind's intelligence has been dominated by its primordial emotions throughout evolution. What is most unique to our species has been held hostage to its much earlier biological self. When faced with despair as to the fate of our species I find that “affirming flame” in mankind's unique ability to think and thereby understand. In that quest to understand, and perhaps help avoid the pitfalls of fear-driven passion, may there be those found in that pursuit should our species fail.

Bob Newhard

Financialization

I was reading a Common Dreams report on the corporation-sponsored financialization of biodiversity concerns. Their effort is being made at the United Nations 11th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Biodiversity. Both Friends of the Earth International and Food and Water Watch have warned the assembled delegates from 170 nations against this practice as being disastrous for biological diversity and the future of our species, which is dependent upon that diversity.

You may be familiar with the concept of financialization as expressed in the cap and trade “control” of greenhouse gas emissions. The practice puts a polluting value (the cap) on a unit of emissions and companies can purchase the right to pollute from other companies who do not use their alloted pollution rights. This creates a speculative market for the right to pollute analogous to any other commodity market such as pork bellies.

Obviously this process favors the wealthy, including the wealthy nations. In creating one more market, including the inherent speculation, it is also a source for generating more profit from the basic needs of the planet and mankind.

As I read the article, titled 'Recipe for Disaster': Group Says No Financialization of Nature! found at http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/13 , it occurred to me just how much financialization is a disease of our time, but also what other common denominator can we find that will allow us to exchange our values and avoid engendering value conflicts, the most unresolvable of all conflicts.

Financialization is a relatively new financial concept. Some have traced it to Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics. Financialization is not quantification, which had a somewhat similar effect during the Industrial Revolution and was heavily criticized by those who resisted the quantifying of qualities. This concern is illustrated in John Galsworthy's narrative essay titled Quality about a bootmaker who was known for the high quality of his boots, but who was losing customers who bought cheaper factory made boots. The work revolves around the bootmaker's loss of self-worth.

Quantification leaves whatever was quantified untouched. The quantified object, whether boots or bricks remains itself and is simply counted. Financialization transmutes the object into a financial instrument that can be sold and purchased like any other real commodity. As a security it can enter markets it had never seen before and therefore establish values it had never seen before. This, in effect, is what happened in the recent subprime mortgage fiasco. Mortgages are very old, established, instruments of debt and enjoyed a greater repayment likelihood than many other forms of debt. Mortgages were financialized by breaking them up via computerization and repackaging these parts into securities to be sold in the financial markets. It was argued that this process minimized risk because a single mortgage default would affect only part of the security's value that contained it. The common mortgage was turned into a financial instrument no longer thoroughly attached to the property that generated it. Eventually this disconnect sank into the heads of investors generating a massive sell-off and the resulting recession. As securities very loosely attached to anything real the mortgage was subject to the uncontrolled speculation the market is capable of. This financialization led to the practice of subprime loans because the value of a mortgage became what it could generate in the speculative financial market rather than the value of the asset it was based on.

Another liability of financializaton mentioned by Friends of the Earth is the lack of accountability it generates and the games corporations tend to play. For example, Enron set up numerous corporations and then declared as profits the moneys they moved among these entities. Corporations can so dilute relationships that accountability is extremely difficult and expensive to prove, if indeed it can be done.

In my judgment financialization is also an instrument by which power is transferred from government to corporations. Up until the introduction of financialization government determined any exchanges that were to take place in the achievement of public purpose. Indeed, when the matter became serious enough, as in World War 2, government simply rationed materials such as gasoline. The market was not used because the market always favors the rich. During World War 2 everybody had to get to work, not just the wealthy. If you had an emergency or other extremely important job your ration would be commensurately higher. There was, of course, the usual attempts to misuse ration cards, but the system itself responded directly to the need. The profit motive exploited by the market approach of financialization exposes critical decisions and processes to the whims of speculation.

Financialization is a form of abstraction, about which I have expressed my concerns before. Abstraction has been a, if not the, fundamental instrument of human development. It has taken humans from the concern with the immediate and mundane world of the hunter-gatherer to the world of planetary exploration. But it is a two edged sward that can destroy with equal ease and efficiency. The reflective precautionary principle should apply to the use of abstractions, especially in areas critical to human well-being. In short, Alan Greenspan should never have been “shocked” by the collapse of the mortgage market as he testified before Congress. That he was, betrays how much his economic understanding was little more than the doctrine of Milton Friedman that the market will always correct itself and, therefore, government should have no role in regulating it. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said of science Seek simplicity, but distrust it, so we should say seek abstraction, but distrust it.

Bob Newhard

Will Prudence Replace Morality in Humanity's Effort to Survive?

In the past I have argued that mankind needs to transition its social values from nation, tribe, religion etc. to humanity itself, and this lonely planet itself, if it is to survive. But what if this cannot be done, as is so evident in the Middle East, where people of the same religion, but different sects, are willing to kill each other in large numbers rather than compromise? Is there another path to survival open to mankind?

Have you ever noticed that the larger the group, the less the role of moral values in major decision making? Foreign policy of a major country is not conducted on the level of whether a country, its leader, or its people are morally reprehensible or not. At levels such as these prudence takes the place of morality in making judgments.

A general truth of large numbers of things, whether natural resources or human beings, is that as the numbers increase the value of each constituent decreases. Put another way, scarcity breeds value. If human beings are to be valued, you do not overproduce them.

I suggest that at some point mankind may find that it has to replace assessments of what is the right thing with assessments of what is the wise thing. This is because prudential assessments are related to facts, especially those of the natural world. Moral assessments are all too easily divorced from the facts of human existence and can create havoc with human well being. There is no fantasy that cannot be endowed with moral value. Consider that the fantasy of a human soul contributed to human overpopulation by denying contraception to women, not to mention what it has also contributed to the limits placed on women ranging from denial of education to denial of employment.

The problem with prudence is that it tends to neglect minority or individual needs. Our Constitution sought to deal with this tyranny of the majority in its Bill Of Rights.

However, remember we are talking about the survival of the human species. I was reading to day of the outrage of some African women at being sterilized without their consent. However, what if the survival of our species required such action, except it would apply to humanity in general, both men and women? Such is possible, indeed given China's mandatory “one child” family, likely. Perhaps, considerations such as these can begin to convey to the world's populace the urgency of the need to reduce our human population. As in China, people will lose the right to have as many children as they desire. This is but one example of the revaluation, if not transvaluation, of values that the unique and overwhelming consequences of impending global catastrophe will impose on humanity.

The answer to those who pose the moral argument that the majority does not have the right to dictate to the minority, which is held sacred in our Bill of Rights, is that these rights cannot survive in a world threatened with human extinction. If we want our rights we must protect their existential foundation. Dealing with our moral values is but one consequence of the world humanity has made for itself. There are many other, neglected as this one is, that need to be articulated until the full dimension of what we are faced with begins to take shape. We cannot assume that we or people like us or societies like ours will be dealing with these unprecedented global forces as we have dealt with large issues of the past. I remember in the 1950s the evacuation plan for the Los Angeles basin announced by the authorities in the event of a nuclear attack. It made, for example, assumptions about the freeway capacities which anyone familiar with normal rush hour traffic found ludicrous. Katrina is another example of our refusal to take the future seriously. We can expect more of the same on a much larger scale if we do not come to grips with the world we have created. Prudence requires that we do everything we can to reduce our population, our consumption and our wanton destruction of our planet's ecosystems.

Bob Newhard

On Reading Chris Hedges

I have been reading Chris Hedges' book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. In a long introduction Hedges delivers an impassioned (I am tempted to say “agonized”) attack on the current journalistic delusion of “balanced” or “objective” reporting and the destruction it has wrought on the institution deemed so valuable it received special protection in our Constitution. In this denunciation it becomes quite clear why he left the New York Times. He candidly admits that journalism is a moral undertaking for him. This situation of a moral person trying to function effectively in a large and very complex world, increasingly run on the only common currency it has been able to find, i.e. money, is a paradigm for the current state of mankind.

This raises the question of whether social morality is limited by the size of the society and hence can we expect to create a global society accepting a common moral system.

One way that humans have coped with the dilemma of moral sentiments in a complex and large society is to make a virtue of cosmopolitanism, which allows a society to continue a kind of cultural identity by downgrading what it considers moral parochialism. The cosmopolitanism of large cities succeeds by either disregarding the moral sentiments of smaller groups or by a courteous bow of recognition without any hint of belief.

However, cosmopolitanism requires a degree of cultural sophistication not commonly available. It is also vulnerable to the passions aroused by that kind of morality commonly found in small groups usually raising some aspect of cultural tradition to a high level of immediate moral intensity. You may recall how the Equal Rights Amendment had all but passed both houses of Congress until Phyllis Schlafly and a small group of right wing anti-feminists mounted an impassioned attack on it. All that is needed is to remind a society of some ancient relevance and harp on it until the old sentiments are revived.

One of the things most obvious about Hedges' moral sentiments is that they are concerned with social injustice in many of its ramifications. But social injustice arises as an issue between human beings. What about perilous issues that confront mankind as a whole such as global warming? My reading of Hedges, which is not encyclopedic, is that he is less morally outraged with these issues, catastrophic though they may be. He has an excellent article in this book on human overpopulation,which has the potential to be lethal to our species sooner rather than later. However, the outrage that would call for mass protests, etc. is not there. My point is not that Hedges is falling short in any unique fashion, but, like the rest of us, finds it difficult to make these large issues affecting human survival a source of moral outrage commensurate to what we bring to, say, the gross inequality of resource access taking place on our planet. In this, even though he has a more developed moral sensibility than most, he is like most of mankind. Why, for instance, has not global warming and its increasingly adverse impact on human food and water supply not been made a moral focus? Where are the massive protests elicited by unemployment or issues of war and peace? Chris has an excellent article on overpopulation in this book, but makes no call for street protests even though he sees the end of the human species if this issue is not dealt with promptly. A UNICEF report that can be found at http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm?tql-iframe says that “Every year 15 million children die of hunger. Where is the moral outrage at food-reducing global warming or religion-motivated overpopulation? Our moral sentiments born in tribal societies remain egregiously inadequate in the world mankind now inhabits. A moral reach born in small groups has apparently reached its limits and a revaluation of moral values is called for which should be focused on humanity itself and its survival. A major effort at consciousness-raising is required. Once again, progressives are not devoid of opportunity to be of substantial service to human well being and Chris Heges can convert some of his justified moral outrage to making these issues of human survival the moral concerns they should be.

Bob Newhard

The South Has Risen

Did you notice that both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions were held in the South? This is but the latest evidence of the success of the Republican Southern Strategy initiated by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. This strategy was a flagrant exercise in racism and tapped the most heinous socio-political sentiments that have beset this country.

It was specifically the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the anger they generated in the South that the Republicans took advantage of to turn the Democratic “Solid South”, although a thorn in the side of progressives such as Franklin Roosevelt, into a Republican Right Wing bastion.

However, due to the shallowness of American political thinking, the South, once inside the Republican Party, took it over. We have lived with the consequences ever since. The Republican Party became the vehicle for the spread of a long regionalized ethos of virulent racism, gun toting pickups, “right to work” suppression of labor that brought the New England textile mills to the South, the rebel railing against government, the introduction of religious zealotry into politics and a blind patriotism that made the South the preferred military recruiting area for the all volunteer army. While all of these proclivities can be found scattered among the American populace in general, it is the South where they have been nurtured and acculturated.

Is this too strong an indictment? I don't think so. As a young soldier in World War 2 I was stationed for awhile in 1943 near Tampa, Florida. I saw the public drinking fountains and public restrooms for whites only and blacks only. As a California boy, I was appalled that this could be going on in the same country I was raised in. On a bus I got up from my seat near the front to give it to a black woman struggling under a load of purchases, a common courtesy in my home state. I was sharply reprimanded by the bus driver and told to return to my seat. Here it was, almost 80 years after the end of the Civil War, yet American citizens, born free, were being made subservient to others by law.

All this is to point up the fact that the South, with an economy dependent upon slavery, has returned to the distinction it made between master and slave, that is between a superior and an inferior class of human beings, at every opportunity. It is to this kind of societal fault line that the worst in human bigotry and cruelty gravitate. Though the original arrangement was defeated by the Civil War, it found a way through Jim Crow laws and share cropping to achieve much the same end. When that was brought to a halt, wage slavery in the form of right to work laws was used to attract industry to the South. I am aware that New Englanders with their slave ships were deeply involved in this despicable practice, but unlike the South the general populace did not live with the immediacy of the South's intense practice. I am also aware that it has been American corporations who have taken advantage of Southern bigotry to profit from the deprivations of low wage laws. Having set the standard in the South, these corporations have gone on to exploit cheap labor world wide.

A basic irony in all of this is that the political party that had so many of the abolitionists that fought slavery has become the party of the ideological descendants of the slave-owning South. Witness the current efforts of the Republican Party to purge voter rolls of those without prescribed identification, striking heavily against poor black people and that party's vigorous anti-immigrant efforts. Ari Berman's Nation Magazine article How the GOP Is Resegregating the South is especially informative on this matter. It can be found at http://www.thenation.com/article/165976/new-southern-strategy

The recent book by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West titled The New Jim Crow details how Jim Crow segregation is being reintroduced through unjust criminal codes including the war on drugs, deprivation of eduction, etc. They have one chapter titled Thinking Is for Mechanics, Not Racial-Justice Advocates (the title of which I thoroughly disagree with) which articulates problems requiring the most profound thought if massive unrest and violence is to be avoided.

The fundamental social characteristic of slavery and one that continues to characterize its residue in the Republican Party is the pervasive distinction made between classes of people. When these rigid distinctions are made, especially along lines such as skin color and ethnicity which cannot be changed, they become the areas of exacerbated conflict to which many other issues gravitate. These kinds of distinctions between people are so obvious that the ignorant, the traditionalist, and the simple minded can be easily convinced that they have some miscreant meaning. These distinctions are the favorite tools of dictators such as Hitler's use of the Jews to gain support for his Nazi regime. There are reasons why white supremacists are to be found in the Tea Party.

Of course the above condemnation of “the South” refers to an ethos, not particular people; that would be the bigotry condemned herein. Evidence of this can be found in progressives like Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the progressive Texas Observer, all of Austin Texas, a city regarded by the majority of the Texas legislature as another planet, as described by Molly. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Birmingham Alabama is another brave testament to progressive tenacity.

The steady march of this Southern bigotry, albeit in a more sublimated form, must be candidly and objectively evaluated, the full dimension of its horrors laid bare, its current forms and future impacts identified, those primarily responsible for the reintroduction of American apartheid identified and a program of countervailing legislation developed. A big order? Obviously yes. A necessity for the preservation of American democracy? Equally obviously yes.

Bob Newhard

On Honoring the Troops

In my last post I offered some comments on the problem of honoring soldiers who voluntarily fight in a bad war such as the invasion of Iraq. I want now to consider honor itself, which leads to such delusions as honoring the troops.

Honor, like patriotism can be the refuge of scoundrels, which indicates that honor is not self justifying. In the name of honor people kill others in duels. In the name of family honor some Muslims kill their daughters who have been raped. Nations have gone to war over slighted honor.

The notion of honor is a human creation and applies only to humans. It is therefore independent of the issue of human survival itself, although survival can be made a matter of honor if humans so choose as in the gallantry displayed on the sinking Titanic. Notice, however, honor is here reserved for specific acts. When honor is applied to a class of humans, unless they each have demonstrated the kind of self sacrifice mentioned above, the term becomes vacuous and misused, which is what is happening in the phrase “Honor the Troops.”

This is what we do when we institutionalize personal virtues and in so doing we mislead and deceive as is so common in the advertising that so permeates the American mind that it can no longer distinguish between hero and celebrity.

Let us take as an example of how egregiously we can be led astray by the notion of honoring the troops, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Vietnam War was instituted by a patent and known fallacy, namely, the Domino Theory of Communist Expansion in Southeast Asia. China had become communist and it was argued that Vietnam would in due course become Communist. This theory, supported by President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, completely disregarded the long-standing enmity between Vietnam and China. What was a colonial war between France and the Vietnamese became our Vietnam War in which the might of the most powerful nation on the planet was unleashed against a small, mainly agrarian, country in Asia. We poisoned the land with Agent Orange and to this day people step on land mines in their fields and their children die playing with cluster bombs we dropped. What honor can be found in an unprovoked war with these kinds of results? Obviously humanity requires a new kind of national monument, a testament to a nation's remorse. In my judgment one of the healthiest commemorations would be a global day of remorse, in which nations would acknowledge, as the Germans have, that they have caused grievous death and suffering and in so doing restore lost value to truth and provide a sobering reminder to counter the jingoism that so easily influences people. The United States would acknowledge that there was no need for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This destruction was undertaken to impress Russia. Japan would express its remorse for the invasion of China and the murderous rape of Nanking. Britain, France and Belgium for the horrors they unleashed on their colonies. Such a Day of Remorse would point up the dire need for a global ethic in which the well-being of our species, and by extension the planet we inhabit, is the foundation of our moral system. With the technology of destruction we have and continue to develop and the increasing sources of conflict as we exhaust the world's resources, such a global moral system is an imperative for the survival of humanity. All efforts to create peace should be founded on this need.

Instead of the monument to shame that should have been erected we built the Vietnam Memorial Wall to honor the soldiers who died carrying out this heinous war. That monument has become a grieving place for many Americans who lost loved ones in that disastrous military exploit. Where is the memorial to the millions we slaughtered or to the little girl fleeing her napalmed village with her body on fire from the onslaught? Howard Zinn had the courage and humanity to go back to the German town he had been ordered to bomb at the very end of World War 2, after he found out there was no need for the mission. Where is the country that will do likewise and thereby begin one of the processes necessary to stimulate a social consciousness of one people on this lonely planet?

The only country, at least in recent times, that has faced up to its crimes is Germany, which has accepted responsibility for its actions under the NAZI regime. Unlike its response to the defeat of its aggression in World War 1, which was to blame and slaughter Jews, the German nation and people accepted responsibility, expressed regret, maintained the concentration camps as testament to the barbarity they permitted and recompensed those who survived.

It will be said that expecting nations and their people to acknowledge their barbarities is expecting too much of human beings. In reply I say that if we are to create the global society our survival as a species requires, we must undertake new paradigms of self and group identity; nation, religion, ethnic group will no longer suffice. The honest dealing with honor by making it responsive to the crimes it is used to cover and to those crimes it would cover in the future is imperative for a just society.

Bob Newhard

Creating Perpetual War

You may be aware of the current outrage over NBC's new “reality” show Stars Earn Stripes in which so-called celebrities are paired with combat veterans, mostly from special forces like the Army's Green Berets and the Navy's SEALS, to undertake simulated military attacks. General Wesley Clark has been hired to host the series, presumably to give it additional credibility. On its web site devoted to promoting this series, NBC would have you believe that this series is devoted to honoring all those who have served in the military. They are called heroes. No mention is made of that emotional kickback from combat called PTSD and the high rate of suicides resulting from it. No mention is made of the thousands of civilian casualties in these operations dehumanized to the level of “collateral damage.”

Nine Nobel Peace Laureates have sent an open letter to NBC and Clark condemning the series as glorifying war, creating entertainment out of war, and sanitizing the profound horrors of war and the aftermath of suffering it leaves.

To the charge of glorifying war leveled by the Nobel Peace Laureates NBC responded “This show is not a glorification of war, but a glorification of service.” This is an old ploy used by war mongers to emotionally trap people into war, namely, the self-sacrifice of the soldiers is among the honorable acts a human can perform, therefore the war that produces these acts of self sacrifice must be good. Emotionally, you cannot honor the soldier without honoring the war. Among the services progressives can provide to a people in the process of losing their democracy to militarism is to carefully and thoroughly lay bare the deviousness of this deception. If, for example, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were undertaken to control Middle East oil, as is patently evident, especially in Iraq, then those prosecuting these wars cannot be doing a good and honorable thing. The soldiers fighting this war are all volunteers and whatever their motives they are willing to kill others in the prosecution of such wars. They are responsible for their actions just as a Mafia hit man, loyal to his “family,” is nonetheless regarded as a criminal because the Mafia is engaged in a vicious, self-serving enterprise. Personally, I believe this confusion of means and ends contributes to the high rate of suicides among veterans of these wars as they realize the horror of the acts they have committed in a callous war of conquest. I believe progressives can provide a real service, especially to the young who are lured into these wars by the most reprehensible of deceptions that bad wars can produce honorable soldiers that we all too easily call heroes.

Beneath the calloused inhumanity and perpetual-war mongering of this TV series, provided by a subsidiary of a major arms manufacturer (General Electric is a 49% owner of NBC) lies the continuing and largely successful effort to militarize the American nation. Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex pales in comparison to what has actually happened and continues to happen.

I think this latest effort to make militarism palatable to the American people by presenting it as normal entertainment, promoted during the Olympics by NBC ads, is ample evidence of what is behind this continuing effort to miltarize the American mind and the American society.

Consider the following:

• Americans have been subject to a war mentality since the beginning of World War 2. Over 70 years of relentless concern with enemies. This makes them prime candidates for war propaganda.

• Projections are that America will no longer dominate the world economy and thus secure what it wants through economic means. It will increasingly have to share economic power with China and other rising economic powers.

• Lacking the economic dominance it has enjoyed for so long it must rely on military dominance to maintain as much of its power as possible. This, I believe, is the corporate agenda for America in a global economy. I believe the major decisions have been made and we are seeing in such morally and intellectually repulsive propaganda as the Stars Earn Stripes “reality” program the unfolding of this agenda.

The final result of this agenda will be a garrison state now being prepared for by the Homeland Security Department as it deploys its drones and increasingly incorporates combat-equipped local police into its operations. Notice protesters at political and corporate events are now put behind fences. The police are trained to treat the citizen as the enemy. Their mission is no longer to serve and protect, but to dominate and subdue.

This garrison state—think ancient Sparta—is the vehicle for insuring continued American global dominance as it loses its economic clout. It is totally antithetical to democracy, but Americans seem to be having little trouble giving that up. Do we progressives thoroughly understand what we are losing? I don't think so, otherwise there would be mass protests in the streets. “Freedom” is a mantra of the far right as they pursue an agenda that is destroying it. We must make it very clear that war is so dangerous to freedom that until Would War 2 this country had rapidly demobilized after every war.

We live in a time of cruel, highly destructive deceptions of which Stars Earn Stripes is but the latest, and more than usually blatant, instance.

We must vigorously unmask these deceptions and castigate those who practice them for the moral degenerates they are.

Bob Newhard

The Public Intellectual

Gore Vidal died Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at age 86. The passing of this great novelist, playwright, essayist and cultural and political commentator reminded me of the importance of the public intellectual to society, especially a democratic society.

The public intellectual is not a formal career. Universities do not offer curricula for it nor can it be found on any job listing. It is a function taken on by thinkers voluntarily out of a concern for society and a deep passion to understand. The breadth of Vidal's interests is astounding, running from issues like the America First movement to the Byzantine emperor Julian who attempted to restore the Roman gods that had been replaced by Christianity.

Other public intellectuals such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre have been key figures in helping people understand their cultures, both the good and the bad. This species of humanity is as ancient as Socrates walking the Agora debating the nature of goodness. That the public intellectual as a recognized undertaking is still suspect is evidenced by Wikipedia's expressed reservations on the legitimacy of the “topic” even though it is merely reporting the 100 most significant contemporary public intellectuals as determined by polls conducted by two reputable magazines, the Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US).

A significant number of these people have been novelists, which indicates the role the novel can play in understanding and evaluating a culture. My own sense is that the complexity and immediacy of human life hides the more general characteristics, trends and forces of a culture and it is these that the public intellectual brings to the surface in a way consonant with the lives of those who read them. Public intellectuals are not social scientists concerned with demographic percentiles or specific tendencies quantified for use by others in decision making. Nor are they journalists, as important as these can be, who report immediate conditions and events.

This country began with a plethora of public intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine and it shows in our founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. With this range of intelligence and concern it has seemed a tragedy to me that this country has so firmly rejected the role of the intellectual in influencing the decisions it makes and the courses it takes. Evidence that intellectualism has become a political liability was blatantly displayed when Adlai Stevenson ran for President and was attacked for being an “egghead.” Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in America details the depth of this sentiment in the American psyche. My own judgment is that intellectualism got lost in the immediacy of survival needs as the population in increasing numbers continuously dealt with the demands of the western frontier. The longer view or the search for underlying influences seemed to have little value in this environment, indeed intellectualism came to be seen as a kind of pretension. A very interesting and challenging question to ask oneself is “What would Jefferson or Madison say or do once they saw that their cherished individualism had spawned a corporation-dominated society deaf to the needs of all except the wealthy?” Would they, for example, be found on Wall Street with the rest of their rich brethren? Would they feather their economic bed like Bill Clinton has done or would they make the transition to the concerns of ordinary people in a mass society? Would they be Libertarians with their freedom uber alles view and the law of the jungle it entails or would they see freedom as dependent upon human well-being as did Franklin Roosevelt?

As Peter Scheer wrote in TruthDig's Vidal obituary “A student of history, he struggled to tolerate America’s strange regression in the new millennium.” Vidal was caught between America's promise and America's rejection of that promise.

Bob Newhard

Reason, Sentiment and Human Survival

July 14^th was Woody Guthrie's posthumous 100^th birthday. Listening to his songs of social injustice, especially Deportee and its lament at the careless anonymity with which we regard migrant workers, recalls an earlier age of American humanity. It elicits the pathos of so much of the world's poor and anger at the rank contrast between them and the waste and greed of excessive wealth. The fundamental human compassion of Guthrie's songs strongly suggests the missing element in so much of our efforts to deal with humanity's major and increasing problems ranging from famine to war for the world's remaining resources.

But compassion is not the only missing element and it often cuts short our attention to the realities, often overlooked, that underlie the situations that move us to compassion. Guthrie's song Deportee, lamenting the callous indifference of a report on a plane crash, which killed the deported immigrants, has behind it the fact of gross human overpopulation. Where is the lament over that gross tragedy? Why can we not bring our compassion to bear on the fate of children born into an overpopulated world that makes their lives even more desperate than that of their parents? Why can we not bring our anger to bear on the Catholic Church and the Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian fundamentalist Quiverfull movement which promote increased birth rates knowing full well the fate that awaits those born to a world having little use for them?

There is an old gospel song titled This World is Not My Home. The fact is this world is our only home. Yet the former elicits a feeling of longing for a non-existent place and the latter elicits little emotion at best.

The central concern in all this is to begin a process of engaging human emotions, especially those surrounding the concept of home. Carl Sagan in his brief Pale Blue Dot homage to Earth as the birthplace and only home mankind has ever had, made a poignant effort in this direction. It should be as ongoing a theme in human discourse as any religion. I have appended it at the end of this article.

Until humanity can or will devote its compassion to these fundamental causes of human suffering, remote though they may seem, we will make little progress in ameliorating that suffering.

Additionally, it is imperative that we divorce morality from religion. We need to return to that good old 18^th century notion of a moral sentiment inherent in all people. As our world continues its global integration it is equally imperative that that sentiment is guided by reason applied to the facts of human existence. Morality can be taught. Compassion is an imperative element in that education. We must do this before the bigotries now extant in society destroy us all. An example of the moral sentiment is the refrain from Pete Seeger's My Rainbow Race. This song was sung by 40,000 Norwegians, standing in pouring rain, in, as they said, Love and Defiance. This was a unifying protest against those who would pit Christians against Muslims and to that end murdered 77 members of Norway's socialist Labor Party, which promotes multiculturalism. The majority of those killed were teenagers at a summer camp. The singing event can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q7CPNNWfME. For the meaning of moral sentiment I strongly suggest viewing this event and letting it fully sink in. You may want to view it several times to let its full dimensions sink in.

The refrain:

One blue sky above us, one ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round, who could ask for more?
And because I love you I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race, it's too soon to die

Bob Newhard

aken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, lion miles in the dista

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Go Small. Go Big. Go to Hell?

That mankind has a future, tenuous though it may be, is a given. What that future should (must?) be is currently being contested primarily by those who insist we must go small, such as Bill McKibben on the one hand and those who insist we must go big, albeit with greater concern for humanity than current globalization has afforded, such as Joseph Stiglitz. Both are good people concerned for what is best for humanity, which allows us to focus on the evidence offered rather than the motivations behind both positions.

Those who would have us go small propose economic and political localism. Goods should be produced as close to the areas of consumption and use as possible to minimize the energy and environmental costs of transportation. Currently the average distance food travels to the United States consumer is 1,500 miles. The economy as a whole should also be localized to minimize the excessive accumulations of capital that underlie the ruinous speculation that occurs when capital is increasingly detached from production. Localism in politics brings the political process closer to the citizen and makes participation in the political process more relevant to citizen concerns.

Among the downsides of localism is provincialism with its attendant narrow mindedness that can lead to violence when the differences between local groups are unmitigated by a cultural consciousness of our commonality. One of the virtues of large cities is the cosmopolitanism they can produce. McKibben sees the Internet, with its plethora of cultural and informational content as a major offset to localism’s potential for provincialism. Localism also fails to take into account that the earth’s resources are not equally distributed. Those humans living in the Sahel aridity of northern Africa, subject to frequent drought, have far less in natural resources than those living in temperate zones in Europe and the United States. Interestingly, South Korea seems to understand this. They are currently developing prefabricated, enclosed farms growing produce hydroponically. These immense enclosures could be placed anywhere and powered by locally-generated electricity. As population continues to grow, humans will have to live on less productive land. Even in the so-called developed world agricultural resources are being depleted. In some parts of the American Midwest top soil that was initially 2 feet thick is now down to 6 inches and has to be intensively fertilized with fossil fuel-produced fertilizers to maintain its productivity.

Proponents of globalism point out that humans are one species. That the planet is our only home and that we have to manage ourselves and our resources in global terms to even begin to effectively address the problems we have created. If we do not do this we risk perishing as a species as we quibble and kill over our differences. It can be argued that globalization has not been the problem. Globalization in the hands of immense profit-driven financial institutions has been the problem.

But let us look at a third alternative. Not what we ought to do, but what are we likely to do. The global economy and hence global power is in the hands of those who are focused on immediate financial and/or political objectives. As an example, the recent meeting of the G20 on global warming took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first such meeting took place 20 years ago. Currently about 25% of the Amazon rainforest, sometimes referred to as the lungs of the planet, has been lost. Yet this enclave of global power meeting in the very country that contains most of that forest could come to no firm plan of action. Brazil, one of the larger economies of the world, pleaded that it did not have the resources to stop the steady encroachment on the forest. There was no attempt by these world leaders to bring together the world’s resources to stop the destruction and begin restoring this essential feature of global geography. We can globalize financial speculation to a 24/7 world-wide operation, but we cannot find the resources to protect life on this planet. That is but one of many instances that illustrate mankind’s inability to deal effectively with problems of this magnitude. It is, in my judgment, more likely that this incapacity to take seriously problems that will take more than one human generation to eventuate, compounded by the inability to overcome the relatively petty issues that have always divided us, that will spell the end of our species or at least spell the end of civilization and send us back to the tribal cultures of our forebears. We know how to obliterate our species. The idiocy of scientists' creating a much more virulent version of the pandemically deadly avian flu virus is testament to that.

Evolution produced an animal with a brain that has done absolutely amazing things, but encased it in the usual emotion-driven, narrow focus of the rest of the animal kingdom. This brain, that with its discovery of the Higgs boson is now in a position to understand the universe it inhabits, that sees inadequacies in its thinking as opportunities for further understanding and because of that does not war and kill over major differences such as Newtonian or Einsteinian cosmology as religion does over its differences, was unfortunately encapsulated in the same emotion-driven body as the rest of the animal kingdom. Our curse is knowing more than we can ever be and the inability to control that small portion we can be.

Bob Newhard