On Abstraction

The human ability to abstract is a two edged sword. It has been the source of major human accomplishments and major human deception and unnecessary misery.

What do the Mars Rover and the murderous U. S. soldiers in Hidatha have in common? They are both the results of the human ability to abstract. Somewhere in our evolutionary history we humans developed the ability to abstract from our observations. An abstraction may begin with generalizations about the common elements in the phenomena we observe, but in rather short order they take on a life of their own as an abstraction. Humans became so fascinated with their abstractions that we began drawing relationships among them, using these to build abstract structures, which they endowed with meaning superior to that found in our ordinary experiences. An example of this process is found in plane geometry. The Egyptians had learned to triangulate the Nile flood plain using knotted ropes so that after the annual flooring they could reallocate the land to the owners. Eventually the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras derived the properties of the right triangle independent of any application. Pythagoras and his followers were so impressed with the symmetry and power of their geometry that they built a religion around it. Plato held that everything we witnessed was a pale reflection of its perfect form, called a universal. These universals were where reality resided.

I think one lesson to be learned from our power to abstract is that it is very productive when applied to the natural world, but problematic and even deadly when we apply it to human beings. When applied to human beings abstractions can easily result in bigotry, violence and mass slaughter. In bigotry we usually abstract one or a few characteristic of the members of a group and disregard all individuality within the group and any other group characteristics. Thus derogatory terms such as japs, gooks and now ragheads are used to describe opponents in combat.

The military is notorious for its efforts to “objectify”, that is making objects out of the enemy by abstracting some presumed characteristic and applying it to all members of the defined enemy class. This allows soldiers to be more efficient in killing enemy humans because they do not have to treat them as humans. Currently we are seeing the results of this form of abstraction play out in the “prosecutions” of the soldiers that slaughtered a family, including children, in Hidatha Iraq. Although many participated in this slaughter, only one has been convicted and he will serve several years in prison whereas if he had done this to an American family he would have been sentenced to die. Even in the administration of “justice” these Iraqis remain objectified.

Lt. Col. David Grossman has written a book titled On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Grossman describes how the U. S. Army, in comparing the combat kill rate for American troops to the ammunition they fired in the Civil War and World Wars 1 and 2, determined that the kill rate was far below what they expected. Upon further investigation they found that the majority of troops in combat were avoiding killing the enemy soldiers by firing over their heads. These citizen soldiers could not bring themselves to kill another human being even when being fired upon. As a result the U. S. Army began a vigorous desensitization effort in training its soldiers. In my judgment, this may be a reason why the military is trying to place increasing amounts of technology between its soldiers and the enemy. When one fires a missile from a destroyer at sea one does not have to see the consequences in an Iraqi village over the horizon and hence one performs more reliably. The only casualty is our humanity, which happens to bind our species together, and hence is fundamental to civilized society. One additional question is, of course, what happens when these desensitized people return to civilian life?

One more example of abstraction gone grievously awry can be found in economics. The problem began with an abstraction we call money. Prior to money as a medium of exchange, economic transactions were basically barter. In my own lifetime my maternal grandmother would take the eggs and garden produce of their Iowa farm to town and trade them for salt and other necessities. When money was introduced as a medium of exchange, goods could be much more broadly distributed. All sorts of erstwhile local human products and services could find their monetary equivalencies and be interchangeably sold and purchased. However, money soon created a world of its own in which people began to make money off of money itself. Even Jesus saw there was something wrong with this (competing abstractions?) when he threw the money changers out of the temple. Thus began a world of business detached from human need. An enormous space was created for speculative deviousness, fraud and manipulation of a society’s economy. Of late, the inequalities and environmental disasters caused by money-based abstraction has led to an economic reaction called “true cost accounting” which aims at restoring the environmental and social damage caused by our money-based capitalism. It requires that all effects, e.g. pollution, social degradation, environmental destruction, waste etc. be built into the cost of products and services so that our economic activities do not lead to disastrous consequences for the human species.

Finally, there is that most dangerous threat to our species the abstraction called religion. As a recent article in the Providence Journal (April 28, 2008) asks, why in the repeated crises mankind is now experiencing, for example the current global food crisis, do we call in such experts as the economists, the agronomists and the political scientists to analyze the problem and offer possible solutions, but we never call in the demographers who analyze population explosions. Why indeed! Could it be the fear of backlash from the religions that promote higher birth rates? After all, the Vatican tried to kill the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt in 1999.

We know as certainly as we know the contribution made by fossil fuels to climate change, indeed more so, that the human population explosion is the fundamental cause of the damage we are doing to our planet and to ourselves. Yet we have major religions such as Catholicism and Islam promoting maximum population growth. If, in ordinary life, we saw a person pouring gasoline on a house fire we would act immediately to stop the crime. In the case of a similar threat to our species we give tax breaks to the criminals.

One aspect of abstraction-based structures is that, because they can be independent of all constraint either of fact or reason, they are ideal hosts to the play of human emotions. This often gives those abstractions applied to humans their power to affect humans.

Given our mass societies and their complex interrelationships, social abstractions in the form of law are necessary. However that necessity may reflect the problems of massive groupings of human beings more than anything intrinsic to human nature. In brief the lesson to be learned here is that our ability to abstract has very powerful consequences and that we should examine any abstraction-based proposal or practice for all its consequences before allowing its implementation. However, to require this kind of precaution, in the face of massive religious, cultural and advertising hype focused only on the so-called benefits of their abstractions saturated with emotionalism, will take a much higher level of sophistication and self control than now exists in our society. This change can either be accomplished through education, hopefully undertaken by progressives, or the realities of environmental and social collapse will induce humanity to learn the hard way – if it survives the learning process.

Bob Newhard

Taxation and Democracy -- the Deviousness of George Skelton

George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times political columnist in Sacramento, has raised the question of whether, especially in these hard times, public employees get too much in the way of salary and benefits. (June3,2008 issue.) In so doing he subtly suggests they do. Skelton also wrote a column (May 5, 2008) on taxes as a solution to the State budget crisis in which he says “Least stable is an income tax system that depends too heavily on the wealthy. Their incomes rise and fall steeply with the economy -- and therefore so do state budget deficits. In 2005, million-dollar earners comprised only one-third of 1% of all taxpayers but paid 36.5% of the income tax.” Putting these two statements together we get the hackneyed pit-classes-of-working-people-against-each-other conservative approach to fiscal problems. This time it goes to the ludicrous extreme of saying the rich should not be fairly taxed because their radically varying income is not a stable base for taxation. Presumably the middle and poorer classes of citizens whose income consists mainly of regularly taxed and reported salaries should bear the brunt of taxation. Furthermore, he offers the typically deceptive statement that “…million-dollar earners comprised only one-third of 1% of all taxpayers but paid 36.5% of the income tax.” without indicating what proportion they had of the total income. This is the point of the well known story about Bill Gates greatly increasing the average wealth of customers at a bar the moment he walked in. This kind of dishonesty permeates our consideration of one of the most important democratic issues, namely, a basic society-wide economic equity.

Every once in a while citizens get fed up with this gross and continuing inequity and force legislators to do something. Usually the response is to fix a particularly glaring tax loophole. This band aid approach to tax fairness has contributed to a massive wealth and income disparity between the rich and the poor not seen since the end of the 19^th century. In what follows I want to offer a few suggestions on what should be done to correct this staggering imbalance.

First, there is a profound need to establish the basis for a tax system. I suggest that in a democracy that basis is the welfare of society as a whole. That welfare should define all other tax values such as fairness. That welfare requires that the distribution of wealth not be so disparate that democracy cannot function. Conventionally the tax basis has been some form of fairness, violated though it may be. This is, for example, the basis for our income tax system or our sales tax in which the monetary value of an item stipulates the amount of tax paid, unless the tax is being used for some other purpose, e.g. to reduce tobacco use. I think the tax system must be more firmly rooted than this because “fairness” can be variously defined, e.g. “It is fair that a person keep all the wealth he/she has managed to acquire,” or “It is fair that parents pass on all their wealth to their progeny.” This sense of fairness is deadly to a democracy. Taxes are essential to our democracy; without them we would have a society of the rich and the poor in which a democracy cannot exist. In the capitalist system wealth is better positioned to acquire more wealth than is the absence of wealth. Wealth thus inevitably becomes concentrated in the hands of a few and wealth is power. This being the case it is necessary to redistribute a portion of the gross national product to those with less income to insure the continuance of democracy. Our method for doing this is taxation. The wealthy, because of their economic and hence political power are continually contriving ways to avoid paying taxes. What is needed is an ongoing strategy for capturing taxes with the assurance and regularity that we exercise with worker salaries.

The tax system is already rigged in favor of the rich. My wife and I recently got a taste of this when we sold some property we had held for twenty years. Our profit was taxed at only 15% instead of the 28% we were accustomed to pay on our salaried earnings. Additionally the wealthy have a variety of ways of earning income, stock options, government subsidies, depletion allowances for extracting oil and minerals from public land (Notice, the worker can not depreciate his body, his only asset, as he ages.) and hiding income in the Cayman Islands.

I want now to suggest a way a vast amount of wealth, which is not now taxed, can be. It is called the Tobin Tax in recognition of James Tobin, an economist, who first proposed it. It is, like the sales tax and the value added tax, a transaction tax. Tobin was concerned with ameliorating the gross imbalance of wealth between the northern and southern halves of our planet. He was impressed with the billions of dollars that flow 24/7 around the globe. This is an enormous quantity of fiscal transactions. If these transactions could be taxed a small amount billions of dollars could be transferred to the poorest areas of our planet. The wealthy may hide their money in the Cayman Islands or disguise it in other forms of transactions, but increasing their wealth requires fiscal transactions. These are almost always electronic and the transactions themselves must be noted. Even money laundering requires a transaction. The importance of this source of revenue is further evidenced by the fact that the financial segment of our annual gross domestic product has replaced manufacturing as the predominant segment. Finance is now our major “industry.” A Tobin tax in California would do much to level out the tax contribution of the wealthy that Skelton is concerned about.

While taxation may seem a dull subject, its crucial role in protecting our democracy should be a focus of progressive thinking and action.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and Courage

As of this writing Hillary Clinton in, justifying her continuing campaign, pointed out that other presidential Democratic candidates ran their campaigns into June including, gratuitously, Bobby Kennedy whose campaign was cut short by assassination. She knew that possible assassination was being used to argue that Obama was “unelectable.” Though she later apologized for the remark, the intentional damage was done. She was playing on the continuing argument against Obama that if he is elected he, as a black man, would be exceptionally liable to be assassinated. I have heard this argument from otherwise well meaning people. The logic of the argument is, of course, that those who may threaten a candidate in this manner control our elections. This raises an issue I see all too seldom discussed, namely, the courage it takes to live and participate in a democracy. Being that democracy ultimately rests upon human reason, not humankind’s strongest characteristic, it is therefore exceptionally vulnerable to attacks that are emotionally driven, e.g. fear.

When people express their concern that Obama could be assassinated they often express it as a concern for Obama’s welfare. The fact that Obama, an obviously intelligent person, decided to run means that, at best people do not want to experience one more presidential assassination, at worst they see this argument as a way to keep a black man out of the presidency. Either way it is racist at its core because it assumes that being black is a cause for assassination. For a society to rise above its past it must have the courage to accept and challenge its imperfections. We have a candidate who is willing to do that. We should support him in his efforts to remedy this cultural blight. Martin Luther King accepted that he would possibly be assassinated. Should all of his accomplishments be diminished because he was assasinated? The same holds for Gandhi and the massive changes he wrought. There are violent elements in any society. Should society make no progress because of this?

As I have noted previously, progressives should look at Obama’s candidacy and presidency as a unique opportunity to take a major step in rectifying racism in this country. This is a disease that will eventually consume our society. Obama is offering us an opportunity to take this major step. We must take it.

As long as societies are the instruments for human improvement we must have the courage to use them for that purpose.

Bob Newhard

The ‘Underthrow’ of Democracy

We are all familiar with the processes of the overthrow of a democracy by force, but can a democracy be destroyed by the consent of the governed – the ‘underthrow’ of democracy? During the McCarthy period I used to ask myself this question and, more particularly, if it could, would I as the citizen of a democratic society, be thereby required to accept this decision by the majority of the people? In brief, can a democratic society democratically choose another form of government, say a dictatorship? In what follows I want to suggest that this is possible and, what I did not consider at that time, it is being done at this moment.

Some time ago John Dean wrote an article for Fndlaw in which he argued that it was possible to convert our democracy to a dictatorship within the constraints of the Constitution. I want to discuss the possibility that this could be, and possibly is, being done without the mass of the population knowing it or, in a sense, caring.

The first requirement is that the population is basically satisfied with its society. There is a pervasive sense of well being. Most people have adequate food and shelter and people’s minds are kept distracted by entertainment, a constant stream of innovation, and the general feeling that tomorrow will be better than today. This is the root theme of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which citizens are bred to their occupations and provided with soma drug-induced vacations whenever they showed signs of unrest. I think the evidence is that we have, in the main, such a population. For example, it puzzles me that, in view of the economic, foreign policy, and military debacles and the dismal prospects for the future, there has been no significant public unrest. Knowledgeable young people undertook the “Battle of Seattle’ and large numbers demonstrated against invading Iraq, yet these efforts generated no resistance from the population as a whole. While others have written of this phenomenon attributing it to corporate media control and hence citizen ignorance, I think it is more substantially attributable to citizen indifference due to being sheltered from the dire direct impacts of a debt-based economy. The relevant information is easily available on the Internet for those who care to look for it.

Assuming this to be the case, a second factor is that the citizenry has, through technology, size of population and the intrusion of wealth, been substantially divorced from the major decision making process. This has occurred to such an extent that even their legislative representatives have been removed from the process by an arbitrary executive – at least those who were not sheep to begin with. Again, no substantial protest.

This absence of protest has been in my judgement a significant factor in the rise of the notion of a unitary presidency in time of war. This situation is a clear indication that there is a movement in this country to create a dictatorship out of this democracy and that that movement has reached the highest levels of government including the true believers on the Supreme Court. While the movement is couched in terms of this presidential power only in times of war, it is obvious that we have an administration and a Republican candidate prepared for continuous war - McCain asserts 100 years. One hundred years of conditioning is more than enough to produce a generation accepting of dictatorship as a proper form of government. It took only forty years of a standing army to produce acceptance of perpetual militarism in this country. The fact that McCain made this statement makes it clear he has no concept of war’s destructive impact on a democratic society – or he is aware of it and, like Bush, intends to exercise his dictatorial powers.

Perhaps our democratic values became so commonplace, so seldom made the focus of thought, and their necessity disguised by affluence, that in our large and complex society power was moved from the people to a few who conduct a puppet show we call voting. Voting is the only democratic function most people are aware of. Yet how many of us have analyzed this process in terms of democratic practice? The candidates are largely chosen for us. Those that oppose the accepted doctrine are weeded out by denying them exposure in a large society dependent upon mass communications. Kucinich was an obvious victim of this process. Even the remaining “elect able” candidates are become the focus of trivia administered by the media. Serious consideration of major issues is not allowed to get through to the public. The people, therefore, make their selection on the basis of distracting trivia such as gay rights and abortion. The focus on small things when faced with large issues is a feature of childishness. Thus voting itself has been trivialized although its shell remains and democracy is thereby defeated or underthrown.

Bob Newhard

An Untold Story

In his new book, Bad Money, Kevin Phillips says that the staggering transformation of our financial institutions between 1987 and 2007 is one of the “greatest stories never told.” Among other things that period saw the financial sector of the economy replace manufacturing as the largest segment of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This was due in part to the increasing deregulation of the financial sector allowing the major financial institutions to invent new “products” with no regulatory oversight and evaluation. Among these products was the bundling of mortgages, which were then sold to investors as securities. The debts of millions of homeowners were thus commodified and placed on a speculative market. Speculation is the preeminent source for disassociating finance from reality. My question is, “Was this an unforeseen accident?”

In an article in the April 28, 2008 Dissent Mag blog by Michael Hudson (Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor) quotes the Wall Street Journal as follows, “Even the Wall Street Journal expressed surprise. Jon Hilsenrath noted the seeming irony: “In August 1999, as the tech-stock bubble was worsening, Alan Greenspan stood before central-banking colleagues in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and argued it wasn’t the central bank’s job to prevent asset bubbles. All it could do was clean up the mess after the bubble had burst.” On the contrary, the commentator noted, the Fed could have slowed the bubble by raising interest rates and boosting margin requirements on stock trading during the tech bubble. Mr. Greenspan could have heeded the advice of Fed Governor Ed Gramlich to slow and regulate subprime mortgage lending. Instead, Mr. Greenspan’s–and Mr. Paulson’s–idea was simply to clean up the bubble’s debt aftermath by bailing out Wall Street.” My point is that Greenspan knew exactly what the trouble was and elected to do nothing about it. Why? I believe it is clear that Greenspan callously allowed the financial community to milk every last dollar out of a failing market at the expense of millions of ordinary people. Contrary to the practice of corporate financiers, Republican politicians and the Democratic Leadership Council, the function of Greenspan’s Federal Reserve agency was to protect the American citizens from financial rapaciousness, not to help the financial community destroy the well being of millions and the credibility of their government. And that is my point. I suspect that this debacle has as at least one of its goals to further weaken government and thereby the only leverage the vast majority of Americans have for dealing with the enormously powerful multinational corporations that would dominate them and use them and their resources for their own purposes – not incidentally as soldiers.

I am also reading Broken Government, a book by John Dean. Dean describes in considerable detail how the Republicans have systematically and in defiance of Constitutionally mandated separation of the powers of government acted with an arbitrariness not seen before. The nexus of Dean’s concern is the disregard for “process” in the conduct of our governing bodies and that a proper concern for process is essential to a democratic government. He argues that the current belief in Washington and in the mainstream media is that citizens are not interested in process, only in results, actual or supposed. He offers substantial evidence that, to the contrary, people are very interested in the process of government. The failure of the media and politicians to focus on process has allowed the Republicans to massively and recklessly reorganize the federal government in the interests of corporations and to suppress a protesting public. I ask why this radical shift to unprecedented and unconstitutional arbitrariness in the exercise of our government? You may recall that the House under Newt Gingrich literally shut down the Federal government by denying any funding. This was unprecedented and while of short duration caused chaos. Again, under Tom Delay, Democrats representing at least half the population were routinely shut out of legislative committee meetings and were not informed of arbitrary votes, sometimes held at midnight, so that only Republicans were present. Notice that all trade agreements, and in this with the complicity of the DLC, have been negotiated without the representation of ordinary citizens. Labor unions were kept out of the process. These agreements, created at the behest of the corporate world, can overrule laws passed by a country’s representative legislature. Does democracy count for so little in what is supposed to be its most congenial home? And once more, when Dick Cheney met secretly with oil executives to divide up the oil reserves expected to fall under U. S. control with the invasion of Iraq, Cheney refused to divulge the content of those privately-reached agreements on the grounds of executive privilege. Why the pervasive secrecy of the Republican administration? I suggest that these things happened because corporate America wanted to reshape government to serve their interests only, which requires the destruction of democratic government.

My fundamental question is whether there is a connection between the refusal by Alan Greenspan to deal with the mortgage crisis and let the financial corporations reap as much profit as possible on the one hand and on the other the rampant arbitrariness of Republican governance. Could both of these phenomena constitute an effort to create a radically unregulated environment for corporate enterprise. This raises the fundamental question of whether there is a corporate interest in the destruction of our government and its ability to serve the people. This would be more than fascism. This would be the substitution of the top down dictatorial structure of corporations for the bottom up consent of the governed structure of democratic government. With this privatization of government functions everything would be done for profit, which is to say for those with the money to generate that profit. I used to think that corporations wanted to use our government, especially the military, for their own purposes. It now seems to me that they want to replace government by privatizing its functions for profit, including the military.

Grover Norquist, a power in the neocon movement, has openly declared he wants to destroy our government and turn its operations over to the private sector. Given the Republican’s pronounced antipathy to government, what better way to do it then by overburdening it with debt and excessive tax breaks for the wealthy? One of the favorite mantras of the business sector has been the notion of “creative destruction,” which is deemed to be a good thing. Hence we have seen over the last thirty five years or so the repeated arbitraging of viable businesses simply because the purchasing arbitrager saw a way to make money by breaking up a business, i.e. destroying it, and selling its parts. It would not surprise me that the corporate world sees government in much the same light. In this case they would break up government and privatize the pieces all of which would operate for profit. I do not think, in view of all the evidence, ranging from corporate attacks on social security to their domination of foreign governments for resources form oil to bananas, that such an enterprise is beyond multinational corporate consideration and possibly within their current practice.

As an indication of how dangerous this situation can be, not only to our civil liberties and Constitutional rights, but to human lives and the welfare of the planet, it is useful to take into consideration an observation by Kevin Phillips. He notes that Iran and Venezuela have begun to accept euros and yen rather than dollars for their oil. This can be the beginning of a shift away from the dollar as the dominant world currency and with it the power to control world finances. Could this rather than the asserted nuclear weapons capability of a small country be the real source of the call to war against Iran? Note that this call is not only that of Bush/Cheney, but increasingly of Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. We live in VERY complex times and are exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation. In times like these caution and a vigorous demand for truth before action are in order. These are the times that can precipitate monumental disaster.

Bob Newhard

Our Hollowed Out Society

This country in its economics (finance replacing manufacturing), culture (sensations replacing thought) and politics (trivia replacing substance) is a mere shell of its former self. It is the politics that I wish to explore here.

The anomaly is that this country and this planet have never faced a more daunting future and we know it. In the face of this we let the powers that be parade the equivalent of small town gossip as relevant political debate. Do the people of this nation and this world mean so little to our politicians and political parties that they are prepared to write them off to further a blind pursuit of power? As a democratic people we must stop this nonsense. We must define the issues, not the politicians. It is our future not theirs that matters. Our politics refuses to deal with this very real world and this very real future. Why?

In the depths of that question lies the most disturbing and dangerous of realities; a giant nation bereft of purpose except stalking about the earth with the only resource it has left – its military. After sixty plus years of the greatest societal affluence the world has ever known the American people have lost their grasp on reality. They have been saturated with a massive daily dose of delusive advertising (about 3,000 ads a day). Their technology has created a virtual world on television, and increasingly on the Internet, that routinely subverts their connection to reality. The absolute ludicrousness of the April 16^th ‘debate’ between Obama and Clinton amply illustrates this. This want of connection to reality fosters dangerous fantasies, whether of values destructive of human well being (there shall be no abortion or birth control as increasing human populations devastate the planet and destroy the future for their progeny), foreign relations (war is more productive than negotiation.), or politics (spin is more important than truth or relevance.) The danger lurking in this state of affairs is that the American people will either let their very powerful government devastate the rest of the world or, if panicked by the impending chaos, look for a scapegoat, say China and follow some white-horse-mounted deliverer into World War III, which will be the War to End All Wars, because there will be no one left to fight World War IV.

The only reality operative in our society as a whole is the pain and suffering of a declining economy and that for reasons that most American’s cannot comprehend. At least the progressives of the 19^th century understood the source of their suffering. William Cullen Bryant’s “Cross of Gold” speech was directed at the wealthy and the corporations. We no longer have a political party much less a prominent politician who will stand for the people against the wealthy.

One of the missions of progressives is to restore the sense of reality to this society. This is a precondition for any substantive improvement. Unfortunately, if the PDA web site is any indicator, so-called progressive democrats have expressed no outrage at ABC’s Clinton-Obama ‘debate’. These progressives seem too caught up in Democratic Party politics to be outraged at ABC’s deliberate effort to trivialize this country’s politics by substituting school-yard taunting for the massive national and global problems that should be the focus of our presidential debates. My suspicion is that the last thing corporations, including media corporations, want to see is a serious discussion of these overriding issues because such a discussion would inevitably point to corporate front groups such as the World Bank, the IMF and the variety of corporate-dictated trade agreements. Real progressives would be pointing the finger of accusation at the corporate media for this glaring travesty of their legal obligation to provide useful public information in exchange for their very profitable use of the public’s airwaves.

Bob Newhard

The Age of Fundamentalism

For reasons I am not sure I thoroughly understand, fundamentalism has shown up vigorously in this “advanced” stage of human history. It is not just in religion. It also has become predominant in economics and popular culture. It poses, in my judgment, an insidious and significant danger to a democratic society.

Religious fundamentalism is now found world wide. Christian fundamentalism is rampant in the United States, as is Muslim fundamentalism from the Mideast to Indonesia and Western China and Hindu fundamentalism has reversed that society’s effort to be secular. In all of these places it has already produced very destructive conflicts. It is an enemy of reason and science and its dogmatic rigidity makes it extremely inflexible at a time that is, and increasingly will be, demanding societal multiculturalism and reliance on the freedom to think and speak that science demands of itself and of the society that would produce the needed scientists.

In economics we have a rampant fundamentalist “free market” capitalism in which the operating assumption is a rigid laissez faire with no room for the regulation and transfer of wealth to society as a whole rather than a few exceptionally wealthy people. This has resulted in gross inequities and the largest gap between the rich and the poor since the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century. This is an economics that has forgotten its origins in political economy.

In popular culture there is mass participation in violent video games whose violence is justified in the context of good versus evil. Even the police have adopted the good guys/bad guys dichotomy of children. There is no room for the complexity of human beings. They must be classified one or the other. This leads to gross injustice and the largest prison population next to China’s.

As J. B. Bury points out in his book A History of Freedom of Thought, democracy is a very fragile form of government. The vast majority of civilized history has been autocratic. Fundamentalism, by its very nature, is autocratic. The modern surge of fundamentalism can, if successful, return us to a latter day form of the Dark Ages, in which curiosity, the passion for understanding, and the freedom of inquiry and expression they require will be lost. Samuel P. Huntington, who would have us believe in a clash of civilizations between East and West, is mistaken. Our basic problem is the clash of fundamentalism and freedom.

We must understand that fundamentalism, whether religious, economic, political or cultural, is an enemy of democracy and must be resisted wherever it occurs. If American’s understood this they would not be gulled so easily by religious fundamentalism seeking to dominate society under the guise of the freedom of religion. When one’s freedom of religion aims at the submission or demise of other religions, it is no longer operating under the freedom of religion provision of the Constitution.

A further point and one addressed by Sara Robinson in a two part essay titled Two Kinds of Americans: Us Versus Them to be found on the Internet at www.ourfuture.org, is the use of fundamentalism to divide and thereby rule a society. In the essay Robinson details how the Republican Party deliberately departed from a 25 year shared governance in 1968 and set out on a path to gain power by using racist fundamentalism to divide the country and thereby destroy the common good that had been the focus of United States governance since FDR’s New Deal. I strongly recommend reading the essay the second part of which is due to be published on the same web site on Tuesday April 8, 2008.

To my mind progressives have to make fighting fundamentalism in all its forms a focus of their effort. They should no more shy about bringing fundamentalist religion to task for its antidemocratic intentions and practices than they are about fighting fundamentalist economics.

Bob Newhard