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