Will Norwegians give us another Lesson in Democracy?

Anders Breivik killed 77 people, mostly teenagers. All but eight of the victims were members of the Workers Youth League, an affiliate of the Norwegian Labor Party, at a summer camp. He was dressed in a police officers uniform and shot children as they came to him for protection and as they froze in fear before him. Why this slaughter, which at his trial he declared to be "necessary?" Because the Labor Party supported multiculturalism, which Breivik calls cultural Marxism and which he believes fostered Muslim dominance of Norway. He accuses the multiculturalists of being ideologues, when he was actually an ideologue in its final stages, i.e. that point at which human beings become merely objects.

Ideology this extreme has become a plague on this planet. In politics we get Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik. In religion it plants bombs in market places they know will kill people no matter what their beliefs because they have become objects. In the American military, soldiers murder civilians, including children, because they have been reduced to objects. The military is known for training that reduces human beings, called the enemy, to objects. They are "ragheads" etc. This makes killing easier for young people brought up to be civilized. Unfortunately this reducing those we oppose to objects is an all too frequent human response to conflict. It permeates society. It has become so bad in this country that people say they have found "closure" when the killer of their child is executed. They find peace in yet another death. We have sublimated revenge, for that is all the execution of killers amounts to, to the peace of closure.

Amid all the antagonism, killing and maiming that has gone on in the name of national interest, in a continuing cultural compression, the Norwegian people and their government have shone as a beacon for humanity. They rejected a cultural antagonism that killed their children, and responded not with vengeance, but by focusing on humanity and its needs.

As an instructive contrast, faced with the 9-11 terrorist attack the  American government immediately declared war, which the imperialists Cheney and Rumsfeld had long planned for. The American people, long accustomed to a military response to any kind of attack, ebulliently waved flags and sent their young people off to war. As a result hundreds of thousands have been killed and more than that maimed and the coffers of the United States drained and the lands of the Middle East trashed. So much for the eye-for-an-eye response that is this ten-year long "piece of cake."

As of this writing we do not know what the Breivik verdict will be. Hopefully, it will teach us another lesson in humanity. The people objected to an initial psychologist's finding that Breivik suffered from schizophrenia. A second psychologist found that Breivik was not schizoid at the time of his murders and is not so at the time of his trial. However, in the midst of Breivik'a barbarous testimony, including his desire to behead the Prime Minister,  40,000 Norwegians gathered in drenching rain to celibate multiculturalism and defy the Breivik and his followers in their attempt to insinuate vengeance into their society. As a beautiful testament to their appreciation for humanity and their determination to defeat Breivik and his ilk they sang Pete Seeger's Rainbow Race (See some of lyrics below.) It was a heartrending testimony to the best in human nature. A video of the event can be found on the Common Dreams web site. Norway has no death penalty and the maximum sentence is 24 years in prison. Will they give us yet another lesson in the sentencing of Anders Breivik?

To my mind, the Norwegian people and their government should be awarded the next Nobel Peace Prize. May we all learn from them.

Bob Newhard

Refrain from Pete Seeger's song Rainbow Race:

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.

Some folks want to be like an ostrich,
Bury their heads in the sand.
Some hope that plastic dreams
Can unclench all those greedy hands.
Some hope to take the easy way:
Poisons, bombs. They think we need 'em.
Don't you know you can't kill all the unbelievers?
There's no shortcut to freedom.

Go tell, go tell all the little children.
Tell all the mothers and fathers too.
Now's our last chance to learn to share
What's been given to me and you

Technology, Humanity, Destiny (Part 2)

In part one, we dealt primarily with Western civilization's suspicion of knowledge and its offspring technology, and the challenges technology poses to human beings both as individuals and as cultural participants. In this part 2, I want to focus on a less obvious impact of technology on humankind in its aggregates.

These are just as much a response to the impact of technology as are air pollution and global warming. The slums may be viewed as the flotsam and jetsam of technology washed up on the shores of the large cities of the world by the waves of technology-based innovation and the storms of economic and social dislocation they generate. It is technology that has permitted our species to witlessly and grossly outpace the planet's ability to support us. It has, in my judgment, made the slum the harbinger of mankind's future.

If you examine the economy of the slum, it becomes apparent that it is Adam Smith's version of capitalism writ large. This economy consists, in the main, of thousands of individual or very small entrepreneurs, each looking to extract survival from a small niche of demand from the poverty of the slum. These small enterprises range from selling a few quarts of soup made at home to providing a taxi service with your motorcycle. There is no economic infrastructure; no public education, mo healthcare, no old age pension. Insecurity runs very high. There is little organized, structured means of production; no factories or department stores, no supermarket grocery stores. Not only are there no government services, in many cities such as Rio de Janeiro the government is actively trying to destroy them.

An example of slum survival entrepreneurship is a woman in the slum of Lagos Nigeria who daily makes a pot of soup, puts it in about a 3 or 4 gallon wide-mouth thermos and carts it along with plastic bowls and plastic spoons to the median strip of the roadway and sells it to motorists who stop for a quick bowl of soup. Her current problem is that she can only sell in the afternoon because the police, who come only in the morning, will arrest her for impeding traffic. She has found her survival niche of demand, but it is threatened by society. Another example is a young man who came to the city from the radically impoverished rural area. He provides a motorcycle taxi service which is valued by customers as much faster than an automobile in the densely congested traffic. He began by working for another individual who had several motorcycles and split whatever revenue the young man generated. At the point of the interview he had saved enough money to buy his own motorcycle and retain all of the profit. He looks forward to a future of entrepreneurship in motorcycle taxis. That, however, is likely a chimera. The economy of a slum is a closed economy limited to the resources of the slum and reaching little beyond the GDP of the poor that comprise it. The only asset the slum has to offer the world outside of it is cheap labor. That demand, however, does not exist and is increasingly exacerbated world wide by robotization, computerized self-service in stores and other developing blessings of technology. The slum economy is an informal economy of on-the-spot bargaining between buyers and sellers of services and products.

This closed slum economy of the poor without resources can, and may well be, the economic future of much of humanity. At root, we have only one economy on this planet and we all live in it. It is based on limited and continually shrinking resources. It continues to move wealth from the many to the few. This trend, I suspect, portends a world primarily of major cities centered on the needs and desires of the few who have the wealth and surrounded by the slums of those who do not. Last year, for the first time in human history, more of the world's population lived in urban areas than in rural areas. This process is also denoted by the recurring phrase "disappearance of the middle class."

The city surrounded by its slums is the very picture of the feudal economy that resulted from the fall of the Roman Empire and that civilization. This was a world of castles of the wealthy surrounded by those who sought safety from the castle lord to whom they paid a portion of the crops they raised. They became serfs of the lord tied to his land. The basic difference between the feudal arrangement and the slums is that the slum dweller will probably remain physically free because he/she is not needed by the wealthy nor will protection be provided by the city.

A world in which the mass of mankind lives in slums surrounding major cites is a future in stark contrast to the return to the village proposed by some environmentalists. Given the overwhelming dominance of the capitalist system, I suspect the slum scenario is more likely. Indeed, the continuing effort to convince the American citizens that the small entrepreneur is the salvation of our economy, especially in creating jobs, is evidence that the powers that be may already be preparing the American psyche for a future not unlike that adumbrated here.

The slum-economy of limited resources is indicative of the future humanity faces as its excessive demands on the limited resources of the planet constrict economic activity. It is little understood by most humans that capitalism is based on a surplus. Capital is what is left over after immediate need is met. As this surplus diminishes, so does the viability of capitalism. Increasingly humans will be living in societies of reduced economic activity faced with all the problems and violence that accompanies such a social environment. The resources will not be available to provide for social security, health care, education, etc. unless humans learn to greatly reduce their population and their consumption and learn to control themselves. As it is, the rich continue to accumulate the wealth that should have been distributed to others. The necessities of the mass of humans are made hostage to the excesses of the few. Viewed from the perspective of our species' future, the behavior of the very wealthy is criminal. Ironically the small-time capitalism the slums have developed as a survival economy will be increasingly debilitated as the small surplus extant in the slum diminishes further.

For other views and more information on the significance of slums may I suggest:

Mike Davis' book Planet of the Slums. This is an excellent presentation of the significance of the slums in mankind's future. Davis even draws attention to the central role the slums have assumed in American military planning.

Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. Neuwirth lived in a large number of the world's slums and describes them and their culture in a very perceptive manner.

Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, has an interesting article titled How Slums Can Save the Planet. It can be found at file:///C:/Downlosd%20as%20of%203-4-06/Slums/How%20slums%20can%20save%20the%20planet%20by%20Steewart%20Brand.htm

Bob Newhard

Technology, Humanity, Destiny (Part 1)

There has always been a latent suspicion of knowledge, at least in Western culture. As early as the Genesis story the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil was the source of all human ills on earth. It was not how they lived up to the point of that acquisition, for God obviously approved of what it had created. It was the knowledge that the way they were living was immoral, hence the fig leaf. But worse than their lifestyle, was the fact that they had partaken of their creator's knowledge. In this foundation story for Christian civilization knowledge is therefore evil.

Again, Faust has to sell his soul to the Devil in order to acquire knowledge, which human beings are not supposed to have.

When knowledge began to be applied to the physical world technology, which consists of that application, made real that erstwhile vague suspicion. The Luddites set about destroying the machines of technology as they saw them robbing them of jobs and the sustenance of life.

The threat of technology to not only human welfare, but to human self esteem took root early in the 19^th century. The story of John Henry the steel driving railroad hero competing with the new steam-driven machine portrayed a human who would not let a machine deprive him of his sense of self-worth based on his strength. In this age of mechanical technology the machine was competing with the human body.

Then came the bitter acceptance of defeat by the machine as Charlie Chaplin could not keep up with his relentless assembly line in Modern Times and was last seen enmeshed in the gears of the monster he serviced. In somewhat the same vein Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis portrayed a dystopia ruled by an intellectual elite high in their towering skyscrapers controlling a regimented laboring class doomed to service the blast furnaces and factories of immense heartless machines.

In all of this rebellion against technology the underlying theme was the machine's competing with the human body and winning.

With the advent of the computer in the 20^th century the machine began to compete with the human brain. In the 1957 movie Desk Set the John Henry competition between human and machine breaks out in a corporate reference library. Spencer Tracy is demonstrating his new computer system designed to quickly answer reference questions. This corporate function has been traditionally performed by a small crew of highly skilled reference librarians. It is interesting to note that when it comes to brain-machine competition females replace male. In this early example of human-computer competition, humans win. By the early 1990's HAL, the computer antagonist of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, starts killing his masters, but is eliminated by the last surviving human on the spaceship who progressively disconnects HAL from the power and information it needs--a close call for the humans.

In an earlier column I mentioned Ray Kurzweil's book Singularity and its argument that artificial intelligence superior to human intelligence is on the near horizon of technological development and that the U. S. military is already wrestling with how much self control to give a combat robot.

In all the above comment on technology I do not mean to imply that it has provided no benefits. It obviously has. The inherent and generally disregarded fact is , however, that the very benefits, say the immensely extended life span, have generated our equally massive problems, e.g. overpopulation. We humans have not learned to control ourselves in our own interests. We have not learned the lesson of the Golden Mean or All Things in Moderation--maxims recommended as a primary virtue more than 2500 years ago by the philosophers of Greece and Rome. As Dennis Kucinich pled with Americans in the 2008 presidential election "Wake up America, Wake up!" so I would urge "Grow up World, Grow up!

In this part 1 my concern has been to trace human reaction to its cognitive brain from suspicion to backlash. In part 2, my next post, I will deal with some of the more subtle, but perhaps more fateful consequences of technology, especially the economic and social significance of continually diminishing resources.

Bob Newhard