On dealing with a future of impending chaos

As people search for ways that humanity can deal with the many impending ecological and social threats it faces, they try to discern human capacities that, if enhanced, might see humanity through the future it faces.

 Some, the transhumanists, argue that humans will have to transform themselves into beings that can survive the future we have created. They propose essentially a technological solution. We may, for example, incorporate increasing amounts of computerized capabilities into our organism, much as we are now developing artificial hearts. Others of this persuasion focus on DNA manipulation to create humans that are more suitable to the ecological and social  conditions of the future.

Both of these approaches are intellectual in that they rely on our ability to think our way out of our dilemmas. There is however another use of our intelligence that seeks solutions without artificially modifying the human being. One of these is to examine human nature for widely shared characteristics. Those that are promising for the purpose of human species survival would be heavily emphasized in educating the young and featured prominently in societal communications in general. Campaigns of persuasion launched against tobacco smoking and now obesity are examples of emphasizing inherent human survival characteristics.

There is a substantial movement that recognized the human capacity for empathy as a candidate for this kind of social enhancement. Studies by primatologists and psychologists indicate that our simian ancestors have this capacity to a limited extent. Primates can “spontaneously” share goodies, even when paired with strangers. There was an experiment with macaques in which the monkeys were subject to a mild electrical shock in their cages. Their reactions elicited agitation in macaques which were in cages some distance away, but visually and audibly able to witness what was happening. Whether empathy can be generalized to the extent future calamities will require is highly debatable although there is a substantial movement to encourage the practice of empathy. David Brooks, in an article in the New York Times, expresses his doubts by noting an incident in World War II in which Germans soldiers were ordered to machine gun Jewish men, women and children. They did so, but some of them wept while doing so. Brooks argues that this kind of behavior demonstrates that empathy cannot replace morality. What Brooks fails to mention is that morality cannot withstand military training. Military training is specifically designed to break down the common human morality, which can and has interfered with the soldiers’ ability to kill on command. Having broken the civilian  notion of morality down, those emotions are either replaced by loyalty to military and one’s service unit, or, as in the case of the American military, it was made more personal by encouraging the “buddy system” in which soldiers were paired in training and in combat. This had the added advantage of increasing rage against the enemy if one’s buddy was killed or injured by the enemy. Even in matters of life and death humans are still being manipulated by the organizations to which they belong.

My own view remains that humans will have to rely on their ability to think if they are to survive the future they have created. However, rather than seeking to transform humans into more survivable forms, I think we need to seek survivability in the context of the natural world in which we evolved. To do this, we must acquire the knowledge of how large masses of people behave when confronted with the kinds of pressures that we can expect from the natural and social world of the future.

When science sets out to understand an amorphous collection of entities analogous to the masses of humans envisioned here, it does so by modeling behavior and then progressively refining that model as experience dictates, until the model becomes more and more accurate in predicting outcomes form specific kinds of events. Weather forecasting, for example, has been developed in this manner.

A model that has suggested itself to me is that of fault lines in the earth’s surface and the kind of analysis seismologists have adopted. Suppose we regard the major differences in the human population today as fault lines in global society. Some of these are race, ethnicity, gender, wealth, and ancient enmity. Let us take race as an example.

First we should examine existing and recent areas in society where race has been the source of conflict. As a first step we have to find a means of distinguishing racism from other motives that may accompany it. Currently in this country purging of voter lists is taking place under the rubric of confirming voter qualification. That a substantial portion of those being purged are black evidences racism. How do we know this? As with any other natural phenomenon we examine the data and look for correlations or the lack thereof. In this case the purging is predominantly or totally in the South with its ongoing racism identified in other areas of human behavior in that area of the country. Using this evidence we look for a similar pattern of camouflaged racism in other areas such as employment and housing.

Having identified some of the eruption points on this fault we examine the conditions which cause this fault to erupt violently. Gradually we build a social map of the various fault lines, their frequency and violence of eruptions, intersections with other fault lines and lesser or tangential fault lines. As the characteristics of a fault line begin to take shape we get an increasingly clearer picture of the relations that obtain in the fault line. We look for the kinds of things that have triggered eruptions. We determine the various costs to society that these eruptions have caused.

Having made these determinations to the point of functional clarity we set out to find and develop remedies. Can, for example, an adequate jobs program quell racial tensions that may be heightened to a dangerous degree by unemployment? Every city and community should know itself in these objective terms.

As seismology is less than an exact science, so will be a thinking approach to social unrest. But as weather prediction is more accurate than seismology in its predictions so we could continue to make our understanding of social unrest increasingly accurate as we improve it with additional evidence from its use.

The point of this hypothesis, whether it has merit or not, is that we must begin to rationalize our understanding of society and incorporate that understanding into our political and social decisions. The only way humans have managed to improve their existence is through thought and understanding and the application of that understanding in our decision making. If our species is to survive, such understanding will be essential to that survival. In an essay titled Future Peace: Breaking Cycles of Violence

Through Futures Thinking, Tessa Finlev of The Institute for the Future argues that thinking about the future can itself have a calming effect on conflicting groups. This article can be found at http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/16-3/A03.pdf. This effort to think out and plan for a future highly prone to violence, is the kind of response that I am proposing in this post. Let us employ our reason before we are so engaged in the immanent resource-based conflicts we are already seeing as oil reserves diminish that we cannot do the required planning.

It takes time and great effort to create the understandings and their best application in a complex and large society. It is, in my judgment, high time this effort be taken seriously to avoid or mitigate the violence that will befall us if the trends that threaten our future continue to coalesce in increasingly perfect storms.

Bob Newhard 

On ‘Something Is Better Than Nothing’

I recently expressed my disappointment at her vote on Senate filibusters to Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren ran for the Senate and I supported her as a self-declared progressive. She voted for the anemic Reid proposal. In her response to my letter Warren expressed her deep disappointment with the result of the effort to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule, but she voted for Reid’s bill “because it is better to get something than nothing.”

This is, in effect, the mantra we have been getting from Democrats from Bill Clinton on. It reflects, in my judgment, a very narrow view of “something,” namely, what goes on in the legislature, not what goes on in the country.

Bernie Sanders, alone as usual, voted against Reid’s bill. That is because Bernie has a far larger view of progressive politics than most of the Progressives in Congress. Bernie understands the responsibility of progressive legislators to educate the public about the importance of issues facing the country’s legislature. His way of doing politics is to make his decisions in terms of the people, not his fellow legislators. He knows that Progressives will never effectively make their case unless they are known for their integrity and thoughtfulness. A pallid vote for Reid’s bill did little, if not nothing, to let the people know the extent of Progressive opposition to it and the reasons for that opposition.

Warren, along with some other of today’s Progressives, needs to take a serious look at what “Progressive” meant in the 1930’s. It might be helpful if these people read the article Eleanor: the Radical Roosevelt, which can be found on the Yes magazine web site at

http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/eleanor-the-radical-roosevelt.

The Progressive agenda of FDR’s Work Projects Administration (WPA) did not merely set out to put people to work, but also to put them to work for which they could make the greatest contribution. Thus the WPA not only had administrations for building dams, schools, roads and libraries, it also had the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writer’s Project. The latter produced a series of superb state histories that were noted for their thoroughness and readability. These became staples in public libraries. Dorothea Lange’s photographs for the Resettlement Administration became American icons and are still some of the best vehicles for understanding human despair and grief. The point is that government relief programs were aimed at keeping the society whole in its many dimensions. These survival programs made room for laborers and engineers, but also for artists and intellectuals. All this and much more was accomplished by government responsive to people’s needs.

This was progressivism in action. This is what was lost with the arrival of Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council and “Dynamic Middle” concept through which he continued Ronald Reagan’s practice of privatizing everything in sight. Today’s problems are different from those of the 1930s in that we have allowed the manufacturing base of that economy to be exported to other countries. Because of the continued replacement of human labor, mental as well as physical, by computers, jobs in the conventional sense can be expected to diminish and those that remain will become fewer and fewer. The threat from witless technological development to social development can have effects as disastrous as those of the Great Depression. Today’s Progressives should be devising and promoting the social programs to meet the needs of this anticipated future in order to mitigate adverse impacts, provide opportunities for human development and bring human population, consumption and industry into harmony with the capacities of our planet. To do this we must begin by reintroducing the fundamental role of government in achieving those goals. This cannot be left to the caprice of the profit-chasing private sector.

To do the above we also need to shift our primary focus from getting progressives elected, as exemplified by the Progressive Democrats of America and Democracy for America, to developing a progressive response to the issues of our future as well as the issues of our time.

I have looked rather assiduously for organizations or web sites that are focused on articulating a progressive futurism. I have not had much luck. In the course of this search I went to the Congressional Progressive Caucus web site at http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/. I found a lot of thinking and work going on, especially a 2012 ‘People’s Budget and the 2013 ‘Budget For All’ progressive budgets as rivals of Paul Ryan’s Republican budgets and President Obama’s Democratic Party budgets. These budgets evidence a high level of critical and comprehensive thinking. However, nowhere on the CPC site nor elsewhere, have I been able to find Progressives articulating a comprehensive and coherent progressive perspective to offer people and to compete with other perspectives for humanity’s future.

For instance, in these well-regarded Progressive budgets there is a massive effort to create jobs, but nowhere on this site or elsewhere have I found progressives trying to think out the consequences of a continuing job loss due to technology and increasing population. We will need an alternative to the job as we know it or we will have to create pointless surrogates though their only role is to distribute income, e.g. store greeters are common in Japan and becoming increasingly so in this country. As society’s productivity is increasingly turned over to machines, the results of that productivity will have to be turned over to human beings, either the wealthier few as in this country or the average many, as the preservation of democracy will require. Again, if our planet’s resources demand a sustainable future, where is the progressive planning for such a future? I ask myself why a society that had converted the working class into the middle class through an improved level of economic equality would buy Ronald Reagan’s  ‘Morning in America.’ Granted there had been a continuing period of “stagflation.” But if we could pull ourselves out of the worst depression we had ever seen, could we not deal with a period of little or no growth? What does this episode, with all of the continuing economic and social adversity it has created tell us about a society based on a sustainable economy? Where are progressives wrestling with this aspect of our future?

We must THINK deeply and hard in order to articulate the solutions to the complex problems that face us and the rest of mankind if we are to survive in any civilized fashion. That this call to thought is not too precipitous is indicated by observing that the progressive budgets would balance the budget by 2021 and a few decades after that humans will be living with the compound consequences of global warming. Let us work hard to bring reality into focus in the politics, economics and social consciousness of this country.

Bob Newhard