Overcoming Our Values

“Humanity today is like a walking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.”

“We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

E O. Wilson – The Social Conquest of Earth

History has seen science destroy the mythic cosmology of the Catholic Church. Science still finds heavy resistance as its biological evidence destroys a mythic story of divine creation of humanity. Currently there is increasing evidence that the free will that we base our legal and moral systems on is also an illusion. Neuroscientists are pursuing the likelihood that all values are illusory in that they cannot be found in nor reliably represent the world of fact.

Neuroscientists investigating the “living brain” with new technology have discovered that the brain executes a decision and then informs the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of consciousness. Our consciousness labors under the illusion that it is making the decision. We literally do not know we have made a decision until after it has been made. While the time gap between the two events is miniscule, this fact raises fundamental issues for morality and law, both based on the assumption that people know what they are doing.

One of the consequences of values gradually submitting to the rule of fact is that values, which have been a major source of human mayhem (think the Middle East), can be measured against human well-being as it is defined by the real world. A major problem with values is that they can be completely arbitrary and attached to anything, including human fantasies, and for any purpose. Values are beyond any testing or evidence, yet they are capable of marshaling immense force from the people who believe them. They are controlled by nothing and applied to everything. As neuroscience and other sciences reveal more about how they function in the human brain, values will be brought to the bar of fact, hopefully before they destroy us all in some conflagration of ideologues.

But, it may be asked, how would society function without moral values? One suggestion was made by Samuel Butler in his satire of values-ridden Victorian society titled Erewhon published in 1872. Human behaviors in Erewhon  are not morally good or bad, they are healthy or sick. Thus when there was a transgression of Erewhon’s laws the malefactor was sent to the “Straightener” to be healed. It is relevant to note that the law now accepts the condition of the accused’s body and brain as relevant to determining moral responsibility. It was not that many centuries ago that  moral values were so detached from reality that courts were trying animals for transgressing the law, frequently as possessors of evil spirits.

An important thing to notice about Butler’s Erewhon is that it is concerned with reforming society, not the individual. It uses a fictional society to criticize Victorian society and describes what happens to individuals when that change is made. Conservatives generally argue that the individual has to be reformed as a condition for societal reformation. I think this is frequently a cop-out because they know full well that such a prescription will lead to continuing inaction as individuals face the daunting task before them. In a world of 8 billion people social change is the only vehicle for accomplishing the needed changes in mankind if humanity is to survive.

In this connection, E.O. Wilson in his above cited book, points out that social animals and insects have a far greater record of survivability as a species than nonsocial species. In a world where socialization, especially when expressed as a pronounced division of labor, is the best guarantee of species survival, we have a culture focused on the individual, especially, the pronounced individualism of Ayn Rand and the Libertarians.  Legislators in Oklahoma have rejected federal tornado disaster aid on the basis that Oklahoma is a go-it-alone state. We thus have major political movements rejecting, and denying others, the very basis for long-term species survival. Talk about detached values!

In any event, the real world must become the bedrock of our values. We have had enough of competing value systems detached from reality. Free floating fantasies sparking mass slaughter and indifference to the real plight of humanity compounded by the rapidly increasing lethality of our weaponry and the increasing competition for resources insure the end of civilization if not our species. 

This is not to rule out the possibility of converting values to the facts of the real world as distinct from merely basing our values on facts. The feasibility of this can be seen in Carl Sagan’s use of the  “billions and billions” of galaxies in the universe, so immense that human imagination cannot grasp it; we must have mathematical formulae to deal with its immensity. It has many of the properties attributed to god and can by its sheer immensity and complexity engender the awe many people reserve for their deity. It supplies an inexhaustible resource for the human search for meaning and, most importantly, it is rationally addressable.

Humanity’s survival presents a task of unprecedented, multidimensional complexity, fraught with murderously fanciful beliefs and traditions. Our species has much to learn about itself and its environment and very little time to do so. We progressives must be a vehicle for bringing science, its methods and its demand for convincing evidence to the arenas of societal decision making.

Bob Newhard

Quo Vadis Progressivism

Recently the Common Dreams website hosted a conversation with some of their more prominent writers titled A Conversation with Common Dreams: 'Given the Status Quo, What's Needed?' Many of the writers were adamant that what was needed to break the current impasse was a movement. Neither the existing political parties nor the current batch of politicians is up to the task. We could not rely on politicians to lead this society forward until they could be assured that it was politically safe to do so. Regarding the necessity for a movement, John Nichols, a progressive writer for whom I have great respect, pointed out that from Jefferson’s time, through the progressive movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to FDR’s New Deal, we have seen progressive movements rise and make a difference for human well-being. He was of the opinion that we were on the verge of another such an event.

 

As I listened to John I asked myself why these periods of great benefit to the ordinary citizen did not last, being as (supposedly) politics in a democracy express the will of the people?

 

 

Take the end of the New Deal under Ronald Reagan. Granted there was an existing stagflation. Why would people, many of them Democrats,, support Reagan who had made it clear that it was his intention to break the unions and take the American economy back to the unregulated capitalism of the 19^th century. Was an “aw shucks” friendly persona enough to do this? Was a cheery “New morning in America” enough to do it? Was a temporary stall in the capitalist economy enough to do it? The social safety net was in place. There was no depression. Why were masses of people willing to transfer their well-supported trust in government for the self-centeredness and human disregard of a corporatist America?

 

This, I believe, is the kind of question progressives have to answer if they are to create the permanent economic equality that must prevail if this country and this world are to be able to deal effectively with the massive changes society increasingly faces as humans seek to survive the ecological conditions and the untoward social structures they have created.

 

Does this fact mean that progressivism cannot go beyond periods of power and that, like capitalism, it has cycles? Our last progressive era was that of the New Deal. It was brought to an end during a period of economic stagflation by Ronald Reagan who persuaded Americans that the stagflation could be brought to an end only by turning the economy and people’s well-being over to the private sector, aka the corporations.  To show the way he broke the airline controller’s strike by bringing in military air traffic controllers. What we and the world have gone through in the Great Recession is a direct consequence of the American citizenry’s willingness to give up all that had been achieved by the New Deal in order to solve a much more transitory problem.

 

In contrast to much of what was said during the Common Dreams “conversation,” I believe progressives must find a way to make progressivism much less transitory, especially with the need for economic sustainability so imperative. It is wise to remember that, with the rapidly increasing ubiquity and lethality of modern weaponry, economic stability is becoming an imperative for human survival.

 

Progressives need to develop, offer, and push a program for sustained progressivism.

 

For example, when I think of how the catastrophe that was Ronald Reagan’s election and deleterious regime could have been avoided, I think of the preemptive measures that should have been in place when stagflation hits a capitalist economy. As we have reserve funds and pre-developed plans for dealing with natural disasters, so we should have for economic disasters. These should be triggered by stipulated situations and conditions. If society is to retain its multiplicity of interests and energy, this kind of support for economic downturns should be broad and continuously in place.

 

This kind of solution requires planning, as does any complex situation, but we have been fed the myth that planning is anti-democratic; that it does not permit the freedom that innovation requires. The political Right puts planning down as dictatorial control ala Russia’s planned economy. The pejorative distinction used to be their command economy versus our demand economy.

 

The capitalist countries never did acknowledge the accomplishments of the Soviet Union. In less than 70 years they moved from a largely feudal society to putting the first satellite into orbit. Along the way they moved their entire manufacturing establishment east of the Ural Mountains to avoid losing it to the Nazis in World War II and then defeated the Germans. The Soviet Union’s passage from feudalism to an industrial economy can be compared with the nearly 200 years it took the capitalist countries of Europe and America. Of course, it can be said that they had the accomplishments of capitalist industrialization to point the way. While there is obvious truth to that, it should be remembered that the capitalist countries did everything they could to impede Russia’s economic development, including military invasion.

 

The lesson to be learned here is that both Russia and now China have demonstrated effectiveness at dictatorial economic development. Unless the democracies of this planet demonstrate far more responsiveness to marshaling the effort to meet the massive challenges of global warming, impending food and water shortages, and excessive population, mankind may turn to the demonstrated ability of dictatorships to secure its continued survival. Certainly planned economies will become increasingly necessary as the above-noted impending catastrophes unfold.

 

 

But planning requires a perspective; some idea of what the goal is. The political Right has a fairly simple task in this matter, as traditionalists usually do. Pick a traditional belief, make it the goal and do what you have always done. Progressives have a much more difficult task because, in aiming to improve society, we have to be sensitive to the implications of the conditions that confront humanity and figure out ways in which humanity can endure and perhaps flourish in the changed conditions and then figure out how best to bring those changes about. An example of this difference can be found in Hoover’s approach to the Great Depression, namely, let capitalism take its course and Roosevelt’s approach of creating new public programs to deal with the effects of the Depression at all its various levels. These ranged from the Civilian Conservation Corps for unskilled  young men, to reforming agricultural practices, to writer’s projects, to major infrastructure construction. This difference in the complexity of the tasks of the political Right and Left has always pervaded American politics and may account, in part, for more frequent Republican than Democratic governance.

 

As to the nature of a Progressive, some Progressives, people like Cornel West, believe it is necessary to articulate a Progressive value system analogous to the Right’s use of “values” as a political tool. While at some point this may be desirable, I think we should begin elsewhere. Any value system, if we are to avoid the horrific consequence of value systems based on human fantasy and the religious conflict they so frequently spawn, must be based on reality. I suggest this process should begin with the necessity that humans must live in harmony with the planet they inhabit. This is the only home we have ever had and long before we seek habitat elsewhere in the universe we shall have perished if we continue to devastate our home. This planet is the root of whatever commonality we have as a species, a commonality that is essential to our survival. We must keep constantly in mind that we humans are our own worst enemy, accounting for more death and destruction than nature has ever imposed on us. The solutions to the massive problems that confront us are to be found within us, if they are found at all.

 

As an example of developing a Progressive perspective, we might use the work of Lester Brown dealing with the impact of humanity’s suicidal use of the earth. We humans now know enough to undertake this project of environmental harmony. We also know enough about the demands such an adjustment would make on long-standing human beliefs regarding such matters as the right to have as many children as one wants, the right to possess whatever one can legally acquire and the right to enjoy whatever possessions we manage to garner. Our species living in harmony with earth will demand material and psychological adjustments bigger and deeper than mankind has ever experienced, and this in the context of the deadliest weaponry we have ever developed. Deep and persistent thinking will be required for such a foundational effort of Progressivism. Matters such as global warming must be made the concerns of daily living and social planning and inform the founding documents of our changed public institutions.

 

There is an old gospel song containing the line “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” This is the mentality that must be vigorously challenged along with the commandment to go forth and multiply. Such cultural sentiments must not be seen as innocent sentiments, but as dangerous misconceptions. That this world is our only home should be one of the major mantras of Progressivism.

 

It seems to me our task, while overwhelming, is clear and only humans can carry it out.

 

Bob Newhard