The current bellicose, undemocratic, and corrupt presidential administration was put in power by the most religious movement in this country since the last fit of religiosity in the series of Great Awakenings to which this country has been subject. What are we to make of this?
These are the people who claim they are the moral majority. The discrepancy between this claim and the president and administration they put in power are in glaring contrast. Why so?
I believe that there is more to such a contrast than mere hypocrisy. What we are looking at is, I suggest, a reflection of the American’s self absorption. By self absorption I mean that the American value system is far more focused on the individual than on the society.
Notice that the so-called moral majority is concerned mainly with personal behaviors, although they do oppose some societal practices, e.g. teaching evolution. Their heavy emphasis and activism has been focused on abortion, same-sex marriage and other “misbehaviors” of private life. These are said to be personal sins and society must suppress them.
The result of this moral predisposition is to analyze and account for social issues in terms of individual responsibilities or individual failures. This approach fails to consider the complex relationships that a modern mass society generates and the consequences that flow from this fact. It also inhibits the ability to treat social and political arrangements as systems and therefore to look for systemic problems. Thus we know that there is a high correlation between crime and poverty and yet we address crime solely as an individual responsibility not as a consequence of a misdistribution of societal wealth.
For example, this intense focus on individual “responsibility” assumes that in a society of 300 million we can know of the personal failings of those in power as one might have in an early Puritan village. Additionally, when we try to compensate for this lack of knowledge of individuals by passing laws against proscribed behaviors we create far worse problems. Examples are the ten-year crime wave prohibition unleashed and the disastrous cost in lives and wealth of our ongoing war on drugs. These are direct consequences of the American proclivity to “personalize” social problems. That this is an old mistake is evidenced by Plato’s Republic in which knowledge is the primary human virtue. To make knowledge effective in society Plato advocates rule by a philosopher king, in other words a dictatorship of the wise. This proposal was made in the context of the world’s first constitutional democracy. What Americans have done is to substantially amplify this by applying it to a complex society of 300 million and substituting the values of an essentially tribal religion, Christianity, for Plato’s knowledge.
This failure to distinguish between social problems and moral issues is routinely employed by dictators and would be dictators. Note G. W. Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s reference to nations as evil. The leaders of a nation may in some sense be evil, although it is interesting that increasing amounts of “evil” are being reduced to psychological and genetic factors by science, but it is ludicrous to call a nation evil.
One of the most egregious manifestations of this disposition is found in the continuing refusal by Americans to see America as part of the world. We are a nation apart. For such a nation there is only one role in this highly integrated planet and that is to dominate the rest of the world. Until Americans firmly reject this posture they will have no peace and the level of human suffering and death will continue to escalate. The neocon criminals who sought to impose an American imperium on the rest of the world must be publicly and vigorously rejected to begin compensating for the harm we have done.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Real Surrealism
You may have read an August 7, 2008 report in the Californian (Remote-control warriors suffer war stress, too) regarding Predator drone operators at March Field. In case you did not, the article describes the daily life of these operators. They remotely fly Predator drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Their daily mission is to pilot their drones and fire the Predator’s weaponry to kill people that have been assigned them as targets. The Predator’s cameras are so accurate that they can distinguish between a man and a woman and image a person sitting on a bench. At the end of their shift they go home to their families, take the kids to a soccer game and carry on as a normal family. Or do they? Some of these soldiers say they can handle the daily job to kill and their family relations by keeping them separate. At what price? Others seek the help of psychiatrists caringly provided by the military.
What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.
We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.
This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.
Robert Newhard
What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.
We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.
This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.
Robert Newhard
Friday, September 5, 2008
Intellectual Honesty in Desperate Times
It is said the truth is the first casualty of war. I believe honesty precedes it.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The fault, dear Brutus...
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves” observes Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I would add “in our evolution.”
We humans in the course of our evolution acquired a brain that could abstract from its experiences and thereby create the ability to analyze and relate enmities that did not exist to our senses. Initially we did this in religion and worshiped our abstractions. Eventually, with science, we used this capacity to develop a profound prediction-capable use of abstractions, especially in mathematics. While all this was going on in or brains our emotions remained at their pre-intelligent level. Our emotions, e.g. fear, sex, distrust of the unfamiliar, etc., which functioned as our primal instruments of response, e.g. fight or flight, remained the same. We became an organism with a powerful, curious brain which began to develop understandings of the real world and develop a technology to extract from that natural world what we needed and desired. We have evolved so powerful a technology that we can destroy ourselves. We are now an organism that is bifurcated between a highly innovative, powerful, comprehending brain AND an emotional apparatus little different form that of our earliest ancestors. Our emotions, as decision makers, remain as potent as they did in early man. The result is that our brains have produced the capacity to destroy ourselves and our emotions are as capable of doing that as they were when men used spears and swords. I suggest that this fault line between the emotions and the intellect is the fundamental and perhaps irreducible source of our current dilemma. While our political and economic institutions are obviously in need of massive reform the major problem is the fault that lies within us.
Let me cite just a few random evidences of this fundamental human dichotomy by way of indicating its pervasiveness.
• People were appalled by the introduction of the machine gun into World War I. They saw it rightly as the introduction of the factory system into the slaughter of humans.
• We now routinely justify the killing of innocent children as collateral damage. A primary goal of the combatants in World War II was the destruction of human beings in order to weaken the will to fight. Infants and children, not soldiers, became the enemy because the brain’s technology made it possible.
• In the face of declining oil resources the United States produced the largest automobiles in its history, appealing thereby to dominance and safety at the expense of others.
• Amusement constitutes over 30% of the gross domestic product o the Unfired States. Human emotions have become the dominant consideration in promoting human consumption otherwise known as advertisement.
In each of these the brain’s technology produced the products the emotions desired. When our technology, powerful as it is, is placed at the service of our emotions, we know we are in trouble, especially when we are aware of the impending “Perfect Storm” of global warming, peak oil and the tyranny of corporations. Human emotions, which constitute the core of our values and patriotic and religious belief, simply are. They have no mechanism for adjudicating the values of other emotions. It takes the intellect to do that. As such the emotions are essentially arbitrary and they put an immense amount of human energy at the service of such arbitrariness. Additionally, because of this arbitrariness they are largely indifferent to, or even gleeful at, the results of the carnage they produce..
Knowing that emotion was the major decision maker long before we became humans and knowing that our brains are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene and knowing that our brains are far more powerful in understanding and manipulating the natural world, the promotion of the intellect to the position of primary decider is, in my judgment, the single most important and difficult task we human’s face if we are to survive the ominous complexities of our immediate future.
Robert Newhard
But in ourselves” observes Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I would add “in our evolution.”
We humans in the course of our evolution acquired a brain that could abstract from its experiences and thereby create the ability to analyze and relate enmities that did not exist to our senses. Initially we did this in religion and worshiped our abstractions. Eventually, with science, we used this capacity to develop a profound prediction-capable use of abstractions, especially in mathematics. While all this was going on in or brains our emotions remained at their pre-intelligent level. Our emotions, e.g. fear, sex, distrust of the unfamiliar, etc., which functioned as our primal instruments of response, e.g. fight or flight, remained the same. We became an organism with a powerful, curious brain which began to develop understandings of the real world and develop a technology to extract from that natural world what we needed and desired. We have evolved so powerful a technology that we can destroy ourselves. We are now an organism that is bifurcated between a highly innovative, powerful, comprehending brain AND an emotional apparatus little different form that of our earliest ancestors. Our emotions, as decision makers, remain as potent as they did in early man. The result is that our brains have produced the capacity to destroy ourselves and our emotions are as capable of doing that as they were when men used spears and swords. I suggest that this fault line between the emotions and the intellect is the fundamental and perhaps irreducible source of our current dilemma. While our political and economic institutions are obviously in need of massive reform the major problem is the fault that lies within us.
Let me cite just a few random evidences of this fundamental human dichotomy by way of indicating its pervasiveness.
• People were appalled by the introduction of the machine gun into World War I. They saw it rightly as the introduction of the factory system into the slaughter of humans.
• We now routinely justify the killing of innocent children as collateral damage. A primary goal of the combatants in World War II was the destruction of human beings in order to weaken the will to fight. Infants and children, not soldiers, became the enemy because the brain’s technology made it possible.
• In the face of declining oil resources the United States produced the largest automobiles in its history, appealing thereby to dominance and safety at the expense of others.
• Amusement constitutes over 30% of the gross domestic product o the Unfired States. Human emotions have become the dominant consideration in promoting human consumption otherwise known as advertisement.
In each of these the brain’s technology produced the products the emotions desired. When our technology, powerful as it is, is placed at the service of our emotions, we know we are in trouble, especially when we are aware of the impending “Perfect Storm” of global warming, peak oil and the tyranny of corporations. Human emotions, which constitute the core of our values and patriotic and religious belief, simply are. They have no mechanism for adjudicating the values of other emotions. It takes the intellect to do that. As such the emotions are essentially arbitrary and they put an immense amount of human energy at the service of such arbitrariness. Additionally, because of this arbitrariness they are largely indifferent to, or even gleeful at, the results of the carnage they produce..
Knowing that emotion was the major decision maker long before we became humans and knowing that our brains are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene and knowing that our brains are far more powerful in understanding and manipulating the natural world, the promotion of the intellect to the position of primary decider is, in my judgment, the single most important and difficult task we human’s face if we are to survive the ominous complexities of our immediate future.
Robert Newhard
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Accountability, Postmodernism and Barack Obama
For starters, let me ask you to read this recent exchange between Glen Greenwald and Cass Sunstein on Democracy Now. The exchange has to do with Obama’s support of the FISA bill despite his assertion that he would not support it. Sunstein is a Professor of Law at Harvard and a legal advisor to Obama. Greenwald is a well known writer on political issues and versed in Constitutional law.
AMY GOODMAN: I recently spoke to Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who’s been a leading congressional voice against the Bush spy program. This is some of what he had to say.
SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: The President takes the position that under Article II of the Constitution he can ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We believe that that’s absolutely wrong. I have pointed out that I think it is not only against the law, but I think it’s a pretty plain impeachable offense that the President created this program, and yet this immunity provision may have the effect not only of giving immunity to the telephone companies, but it may also allow the administration to block legal accountability for this crime, which I believe it is.
AMY GOODMAN: Cass Sunstein?
CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, there has been a big debate among law professors and within the Supreme Court about the President’s adherent authority to wiretap people. And while I agree with Senator Feingold that the President’s position is wrong and the Supreme Court has recently, indirectly at least, given a very strong signal that the Supreme Court itself has rejected the Bush position, the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching. There are people in the Clinton administration who share Bush’s view with respect to foreign surveillance. There are past attorney generals who suggested that the Bush administration position is right. So, I do think the Bush administration is wrong—let’s be very clear on that—but the notion that it’s an impeachable offense seems to me to distort the notion of what an impeachable offense is. That’s high crimes and misdemeanors. And an incorrect, even a badly incorrect, interpretation of the law is not impeachable.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.
And now you have an administration that—we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, “Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that.” Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, “Well, we can’t criminalize policy disputes.”
And what this has really done is it’s created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they’ll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, “Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it’s really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison.” And so, we’ve incentivized lawlessness in this country. I mean, the laws are clear that it’s criminal to do these things. The President has done them, and he—there’s no reason to treat him differently than any other citizen who breaks our laws.
I want to draw your attention to Sunstein’s statement “the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching.” and Greenwald’s excellent and perceptive reply beginning with “You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless…." In response to Sunstein would it not be appropriate to point out that any president might construe his actions as interpretive and thereby render the accountability the Constitution requires of the president ineffective? The president, according to Sunstein, can act like a dictator (unitary president) so long as that is his interpretation of the Constitution without thereby committing a crime. However, the branch of government responsible for interpreting the constitution is the Supreme Court not the Executive.
But the reason I find this exchange significant is that the passage from the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” to Sunstein;s “presidential interpretations” is that it is, in my judgment, a typical postmodernist reduction of clear statements to interpretations. Postmodernism holds that values, including the values upon which law is presumably based, are culturally defined and that therefore there can be no universal values which transcend cultures as such. This, of course, presents a problem when two cultures clash with deadly results, e.g.9/11. Is mankind incapable of reasonably calling this or the 800,000 Tutsi’s killed by Hutus in Rwanda a crime against humanity as such? If there are no human values transcending particular cultures world government becomes impossible.
One can surmise that Postmodernism arose out of reflections on World War II and the horrors that the reality of atomic warfare presented. There was a concern to provide a way to mitigate or avoid the cultural conflicts of a shrinking human world. If values could be reduced to cultural concerns then presumably we could avoid some of the worst conflicts by admitting the viability of all cultures within their own sphere of influence, But, as so often, the best laid plans of mice and men “gang oft agay.” Postmodernists have gone so far in this quest as to deny that science is anything more than Western folklore and no more valid outside the context of Western culture than that of Hindu cosmology outside of India. Thus while the initial motives may have been honorable the damage to human integrity has, in my opinion, been disastrous.
The reason that I bring Obama into this is that his legal training and academic career took place in universities in which postmodernism has had a significant impact. Harvard Law School, where Obama took his doctorate, and the University of Chicago Law School where he taught for twelve years both featured a form of postmodernism called Critical Theory or more specifically in Obama’s case Critical Race Theory. I realize that the political right has made much of these facts (See the article in USA Today by Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online), but I want to consider this in a broader context. Will a postmodernist approach to foreign affairs for instance, allow Obama to be more understanding of the situation of those who oppose United States policies under his administration? I suggest that it may well do so for postmodernism paces a heavy emphasis on culture as definitive of human issues. Will, however, postmodernism lead Obama to temporize on accountability? Much has been made of the consequences of failing to hold G. W. Bush et. al. accountable. Should we not now be exploring Obama’s views on this matter? It has been said that Barack Obama has the ability to let people of very different persuasions project their views on him. Why does he yet remain an enigma to so many? He has contradicted himself repeatedly as most politicians must if they are to garner votes from a polyglot populace, but less has been made of this fact than with other politicians. It suggests Ronald Reagan’s Teflon presidency.An interesting experiment is to ask yourself “What would Obama do” in a number of different significant scenarios. I suspect you will find puzzlement, but be uncertain whether the puzzlement stems for uncertainty about Obama or uncertainty about the scenario. What, for instance, will Obama do about global warming? Will he take the large risks associated with telling the American people and the corporations that an economy based on growth is at odds with human survival or will he try to finesse the issue by a patchwork of corporation-inspired profit-driven proposals? In my judgement, progressives have to push Obama hard on fundamental issues until he makes his positions clear. Too much is at stake not to do this.
Bob Newhard
AMY GOODMAN: I recently spoke to Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who’s been a leading congressional voice against the Bush spy program. This is some of what he had to say.
SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: The President takes the position that under Article II of the Constitution he can ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We believe that that’s absolutely wrong. I have pointed out that I think it is not only against the law, but I think it’s a pretty plain impeachable offense that the President created this program, and yet this immunity provision may have the effect not only of giving immunity to the telephone companies, but it may also allow the administration to block legal accountability for this crime, which I believe it is.
AMY GOODMAN: Cass Sunstein?
CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, there has been a big debate among law professors and within the Supreme Court about the President’s adherent authority to wiretap people. And while I agree with Senator Feingold that the President’s position is wrong and the Supreme Court has recently, indirectly at least, given a very strong signal that the Supreme Court itself has rejected the Bush position, the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching. There are people in the Clinton administration who share Bush’s view with respect to foreign surveillance. There are past attorney generals who suggested that the Bush administration position is right. So, I do think the Bush administration is wrong—let’s be very clear on that—but the notion that it’s an impeachable offense seems to me to distort the notion of what an impeachable offense is. That’s high crimes and misdemeanors. And an incorrect, even a badly incorrect, interpretation of the law is not impeachable.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.
And now you have an administration that—we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, “Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that.” Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, “Well, we can’t criminalize policy disputes.”
And what this has really done is it’s created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they’ll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, “Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it’s really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison.” And so, we’ve incentivized lawlessness in this country. I mean, the laws are clear that it’s criminal to do these things. The President has done them, and he—there’s no reason to treat him differently than any other citizen who breaks our laws.
I want to draw your attention to Sunstein’s statement “the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching.” and Greenwald’s excellent and perceptive reply beginning with “You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless…." In response to Sunstein would it not be appropriate to point out that any president might construe his actions as interpretive and thereby render the accountability the Constitution requires of the president ineffective? The president, according to Sunstein, can act like a dictator (unitary president) so long as that is his interpretation of the Constitution without thereby committing a crime. However, the branch of government responsible for interpreting the constitution is the Supreme Court not the Executive.
But the reason I find this exchange significant is that the passage from the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” to Sunstein;s “presidential interpretations” is that it is, in my judgment, a typical postmodernist reduction of clear statements to interpretations. Postmodernism holds that values, including the values upon which law is presumably based, are culturally defined and that therefore there can be no universal values which transcend cultures as such. This, of course, presents a problem when two cultures clash with deadly results, e.g.9/11. Is mankind incapable of reasonably calling this or the 800,000 Tutsi’s killed by Hutus in Rwanda a crime against humanity as such? If there are no human values transcending particular cultures world government becomes impossible.
One can surmise that Postmodernism arose out of reflections on World War II and the horrors that the reality of atomic warfare presented. There was a concern to provide a way to mitigate or avoid the cultural conflicts of a shrinking human world. If values could be reduced to cultural concerns then presumably we could avoid some of the worst conflicts by admitting the viability of all cultures within their own sphere of influence, But, as so often, the best laid plans of mice and men “gang oft agay.” Postmodernists have gone so far in this quest as to deny that science is anything more than Western folklore and no more valid outside the context of Western culture than that of Hindu cosmology outside of India. Thus while the initial motives may have been honorable the damage to human integrity has, in my opinion, been disastrous.
The reason that I bring Obama into this is that his legal training and academic career took place in universities in which postmodernism has had a significant impact. Harvard Law School, where Obama took his doctorate, and the University of Chicago Law School where he taught for twelve years both featured a form of postmodernism called Critical Theory or more specifically in Obama’s case Critical Race Theory. I realize that the political right has made much of these facts (See the article in USA Today by Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online), but I want to consider this in a broader context. Will a postmodernist approach to foreign affairs for instance, allow Obama to be more understanding of the situation of those who oppose United States policies under his administration? I suggest that it may well do so for postmodernism paces a heavy emphasis on culture as definitive of human issues. Will, however, postmodernism lead Obama to temporize on accountability? Much has been made of the consequences of failing to hold G. W. Bush et. al. accountable. Should we not now be exploring Obama’s views on this matter? It has been said that Barack Obama has the ability to let people of very different persuasions project their views on him. Why does he yet remain an enigma to so many? He has contradicted himself repeatedly as most politicians must if they are to garner votes from a polyglot populace, but less has been made of this fact than with other politicians. It suggests Ronald Reagan’s Teflon presidency.An interesting experiment is to ask yourself “What would Obama do” in a number of different significant scenarios. I suspect you will find puzzlement, but be uncertain whether the puzzlement stems for uncertainty about Obama or uncertainty about the scenario. What, for instance, will Obama do about global warming? Will he take the large risks associated with telling the American people and the corporations that an economy based on growth is at odds with human survival or will he try to finesse the issue by a patchwork of corporation-inspired profit-driven proposals? In my judgement, progressives have to push Obama hard on fundamental issues until he makes his positions clear. Too much is at stake not to do this.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The Rich, the Poor and Justice
Try an experiment with me, a gedanken experimentelle or thought experiment as the philosopher Baruch Spinoza called it. It is commonly noted that the
This sort of thought experiment prompts us, by the enormity of necessary change it impresses upon us, to ask what conceivably can be done? We must find a way to transfer global wealth to the poor areas of our planet in a manner that causes minimal disruption of the complex systems of the developed countries. I suggest, as I have in the past, that the best way to do this is by taxing the major sources of excessive wealth and this on a global basis so that the wealthy cannot use the idiosyncrasies of national governments to escape this taxation. The device for doing this, as I have previously argued, is the Tobin Tax. This is a tax on the billions of daily financial transactions that fly around this world 24/7. The value of the Tobin Tax as a means of avoiding massive conflict and violence has not received the attention it deserves. For those of you who wish to learn more about the Tobin Tax and to think about its many ramifications please see the article on the Tobin tax in Wikipedia.
Bob Newhard
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Kabuki Dance
I was writing on a different topic, but the news that Barack Obama had voted for the FISA bill was so stunning in its implications that I felt it necessary to deal with those implications.
Bob Newhard
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