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