How is it that the citizens of the most powerful country the world had ever known are so given to fear that they permit the shredding of their Constitution, the launching of a war against innocents and the uncivilized use of torture that had no U. S. precedent? Have they lost confidence or purpose?
The New York Times (April 22, 2009) quotes a memo from Adm. Dennis C. Blair, Obama's National Intelligence Director, to his staff in which he states "high value information came from those (torture) interrogation measures." While this declaration was proved false by an actual interrogator, I asked myself at the time how this nation finds torture acceptable when in the midst of World War II with the devastating attack on Hawaii and the occasional shelling by Nazi submarines we did not find it either necessary or desirable? I have felt for some time that ordinary citizens of this democracy have lost the courage of earlier generations. When London was being bombed to smithereens, the British had 200 detainees, and Winston Churchill said, "We don’t torture." Today people in this country are prepared to destroy our Constitution out of fear. One measure of maturity is an ability to accept risk and persist in a human manner. Our citizens accept far greater risk when they drive down the street than they do from terrorists, yet they enter the danger of the "driving zone" casually every day. That we need to take precautions is clear, and that we do. That we need to shred our Constitution in response to terrorism betrays a citizen weakness fatal to democracy. Those who still approve of G. W. Bush most often argue that he kept us safe, which betrays the weakness we suffer from.
This defense of Bush administration torture has been made before. Unfortunately the argument has been couched in terms of whether valuable information was obtained rather than what are the full consequences of torture. Suppose we grant that "high value information" was obtained. Without knowing the value of that information and without bringing in all the other consequences of torture the phrase "high value" is meaningless. Was the information of such value that using the rack or singeing the victim at the stake would be warranted?
The defense of this torture has been based solely on American national interest. What if, in pursuing our national interest in this fashion, other countries felt either justified or compelled to torture also? Would a world addicted to torture be an advance for humanity? That is what the Geneva Convention is all about.
If I am correct in finding a difference in citizen courage between earlier generations and now, what could be the cause? Among the causes for this change I think the Cold War has had a lot to do with it. The baby boomers as children had to "duck and cover" and regular civil defense sirens built into them at a very young age. We lived for decades with immanent Soviet attack kept as a background for our daily lives. Many people built bomb shelters. Our movies were often based on what would the world be like after the nuclear exchange had taken place. Our leaders often talked of using the nuclear option. We had the face-off of the Cuban missile crisis. This partial litany should indicate how thoroughly fear was instilled in the American mind during these years. We have become a society of incipient panic. We need to understand what has happened to us and begin the process of readjustment before we do ourselves and the world irreparable damage. (Some interesting thoughts along this line may be found in the article Farewell to the American Century by Andrew Bacevich at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/04/30/bacevich/print.html.)
If Americans could ever get it through their heads that they are not masters of this planet; that what we do others will also do; that we must always weigh our decisions in terms of the kind of world we are likely to generate; then perhaps we could contribute to a world that humanity, ourselves included, would find much more conducive to our happiness than it has been.
After I had finished this post I discovered an excellent article by Gary Kamiya titled America's Necessary Dark Night of the Soul. It is his view of what we must do to overcome what fear has wrought. It can be found at Salon.com at http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/05/01/torture_investigations/print.html.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Speaking Truth to Noise
The recent "tea party" demonstrations by the Republican Party raise once again what I believe will become, and in fact now is, one of the most insidious threats to democracy, namely excessive wealth.
The so called tea party was funded by Dick Armey's corporate-funded FreedomWorks and vigorously promoted nationwide by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. The event was premised on distortion, i.e. the Boston Tea Parry was not a protest against taxes, it was a protest against taxes without representation. The need for the tax increases in this state and nation is to address the fiscal debacle caused primarily by Republican destruction of financial regulatory oversight imposed after the Great Depression. All this anti-tax blather is in the context of massive tax breaks for the wealthy and the largest gap between the rich and the poor in a hundred years.
We have very serious problems in our world and society of which our current economic situation, bad as it is, is not the worst. Yet the wealthy and their minions will exercise their power and pervasively deceptive influence on the citizenry to distort and obfuscate the truth no matter what the cost to humanity.
We are often urged to speak truth to power, indeed to find solace in so speaking. However, in the cacophony of lies, distortions and distractions that technology provides the wealthy the assumption that the voice of truth will be heard is tenuous at best.
The truth is that excessive wealth and democracy are incompatible. Progressives need to come to grips with this truth and raise the wealth issue to prominence. We must become very clear on how the wealthy employ their resources to preserve their control and subvert the democracy. This will require their subordination to the needs of society. In a time of overpopulation, rapidly decreasing resources and drastic climate change it is extremely dangerous to let wealth continue to play a dominant role, especially in one of the world's wealthiest nations. Kevin Phillips in his book Wealth and Democracy provides a history of the insidious role wealth has played in our society. I would add that the mechanics and consequences of wealth accumulation for a democracy must be clearly articulated in order to reverse our traditional worship of wealth. The fundamental axiom of wealth is that wealth attracts wealth. The wealthy are more likely to attract more wealth than are the non-wealthy. This is how family fortunes such as those of the Rockefellers, Kochs and Coors have been permitted to so thoroughly distort our democracy that the majority of us have far less influence on our legislatures than do the wealthy.
Until progressives make the concentration of wealth a preeminent focus of reform they will not be, in the fundamental sense necessary, truth speakers and the obfuscating and half measures of the Obama administration will continue to the point of a social crisis that could well leave us with a fascist regime. We must point out that Bill Gate's billions are a threat to democracy, despite giving millions to fight aids. We must realize that H. W. Bush's "thousand points of light" solution to social problems is a ploy of the rich to deprive citizens of both the resources and public choice that the taxes avoided would have produced for society. We must see charity, especially in an affluent society, as a failure for a democratic society to provide adequately for its citizens. Bill Gates' father, an affluent physician, argued against the repeal of the estate tax successfully pushed by the Bush administration. His son did not. Perhaps Gates senior understood the malevolent effects that the accumulation of great family fortunes has had on democracy.
I should point out that I am also opposed to MoveOn's acceptance of money from billionaire George Soros who made his fortune in one of the most pernicious forms of enterprise, e.g. speculating in changing monetary values. One only needs to think of the democratically-determined social needs that could have been realized with Soros' self-enrichment.
The daunting part of this is that a sustained focus on the adverse effects of wealth, demanding as it is, is but a part of bringing reality into citizen focus in a culture of distraction.
Bob Newhard
The so called tea party was funded by Dick Armey's corporate-funded FreedomWorks and vigorously promoted nationwide by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. The event was premised on distortion, i.e. the Boston Tea Parry was not a protest against taxes, it was a protest against taxes without representation. The need for the tax increases in this state and nation is to address the fiscal debacle caused primarily by Republican destruction of financial regulatory oversight imposed after the Great Depression. All this anti-tax blather is in the context of massive tax breaks for the wealthy and the largest gap between the rich and the poor in a hundred years.
We have very serious problems in our world and society of which our current economic situation, bad as it is, is not the worst. Yet the wealthy and their minions will exercise their power and pervasively deceptive influence on the citizenry to distort and obfuscate the truth no matter what the cost to humanity.
We are often urged to speak truth to power, indeed to find solace in so speaking. However, in the cacophony of lies, distortions and distractions that technology provides the wealthy the assumption that the voice of truth will be heard is tenuous at best.
The truth is that excessive wealth and democracy are incompatible. Progressives need to come to grips with this truth and raise the wealth issue to prominence. We must become very clear on how the wealthy employ their resources to preserve their control and subvert the democracy. This will require their subordination to the needs of society. In a time of overpopulation, rapidly decreasing resources and drastic climate change it is extremely dangerous to let wealth continue to play a dominant role, especially in one of the world's wealthiest nations. Kevin Phillips in his book Wealth and Democracy provides a history of the insidious role wealth has played in our society. I would add that the mechanics and consequences of wealth accumulation for a democracy must be clearly articulated in order to reverse our traditional worship of wealth. The fundamental axiom of wealth is that wealth attracts wealth. The wealthy are more likely to attract more wealth than are the non-wealthy. This is how family fortunes such as those of the Rockefellers, Kochs and Coors have been permitted to so thoroughly distort our democracy that the majority of us have far less influence on our legislatures than do the wealthy.
Until progressives make the concentration of wealth a preeminent focus of reform they will not be, in the fundamental sense necessary, truth speakers and the obfuscating and half measures of the Obama administration will continue to the point of a social crisis that could well leave us with a fascist regime. We must point out that Bill Gate's billions are a threat to democracy, despite giving millions to fight aids. We must realize that H. W. Bush's "thousand points of light" solution to social problems is a ploy of the rich to deprive citizens of both the resources and public choice that the taxes avoided would have produced for society. We must see charity, especially in an affluent society, as a failure for a democratic society to provide adequately for its citizens. Bill Gates' father, an affluent physician, argued against the repeal of the estate tax successfully pushed by the Bush administration. His son did not. Perhaps Gates senior understood the malevolent effects that the accumulation of great family fortunes has had on democracy.
I should point out that I am also opposed to MoveOn's acceptance of money from billionaire George Soros who made his fortune in one of the most pernicious forms of enterprise, e.g. speculating in changing monetary values. One only needs to think of the democratically-determined social needs that could have been realized with Soros' self-enrichment.
The daunting part of this is that a sustained focus on the adverse effects of wealth, demanding as it is, is but a part of bringing reality into citizen focus in a culture of distraction.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Private morality, public morality, global morality and Prudence
Gordon Brown, the British Prime minister, has been making the rounds of the world's major capitols pushing for what he calls "global morality." He is doing this in advance of the G20 meeting opening in London April 1, 2009. He appears to be very concerned that the conventional way of viewing the world economy, e.g. currency, productivity and wealth, is not sufficiently focused oh human well being, especially as revealed by the current global economic crisis. He apparently believes that the only remedy is to incorporate a "global morality" into the global economy.
This got me thinking about whether morality is scalable. Going back at least to the 18th century Enlightenment two kinds or levels of morality have been distinguished, private morality and public morality. Private morality is generally regarded as dealing with those things that are done in private and do not affect others, examples frequently used are adultery and marijuana consumption. Public morality is concerned with the well being of groups of individuals, e.g. racial discrimination, environmental pollution. Interestingly, Thom Hartman sees this distinction as distinguishing conservatives focused on private morality from liberals focused on public morality. His article on this is titled Rush Limbaugh May Teach Conservatives A Lesson can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1003-01.htm.
But what about global morality? At first such a concept sounds ridiculous. The plethora of racial, religious, and ethnic differences that have and still create so much havoc within our species would seem to doom any global morality to failure. It should be noted that moral systems, unlike noetic systems which are based on fact and subject to testing as to facticity, are based substantially on our emotions, which fact generated the 18th century notion of the moral sentiment. The intellectual challenge that moral systems face is how to build a moral system on something as slippery as our emotions. It has yet to be done with anywhere near the success of noetic systems such as those of science.
Additionally, this search for a global moral basis is not as recent as we might suppose. It was Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice who uttered, "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?" This is an appeal to human commonality, albeit to justify revenge.
One of the first tasks is to find what it is in the global conglomeration of humans to which moral sentiment is or can be attached. This sentiment has to be specific enough to be recognized by all humans as a human feature, yet capable of generating that sentiment in a population of billions. I believe that the necessary ingredient is there because all armies have to depersonalize the enemy into an object before the killing can begin. Indeed, in World War 1 on Christmas eve of 1914 German and English soldiers, on their own declared a truce, visited each other in no man's land, exchanged gifts and shared whiskey. Obviously a shared culture allowed common thoughts of home to burst through despite everything including their officer command structure. Can we find a similar kind of basis, complete with such a powerful sentiment, upon which to build a global morality? Notice that this event occurred in the context of shared suffering. While dramatic events such as these indicate the possibility, however tenuous, that humans may find a common moral framework it appears to be more in the nature of a project than a solution at this time.
However, if a common moral sentiment cannot be found and generalized into a global morality then I suggest that we should forget morality as a basis for solving this global problem and turn to prudence instead, which I suspect is the root of morality anyway.
Prudence can be based on the need for survival of the human species, upon which presumably all humans could not only agree, but actively pursue. This can be much more easily promoted than global morality. My suspicion is that we will have to expend a good deal of energy and ingenuity before we realize that much of what was taken for granted in the past must now be regarded as a focus of prudence not ownership. G. W. Bush and his coterie of neocons sought to control a natural resource, i.e. oil, instead of regarding it as a human resource to be prudently used for the benefit of all. In this case oil should be regarded as a materials resource, e.g. plastic, rather than as an energy resource, which increases global warming. If we practice the discipline of prudence on a broad enough scale for a long enough time we may, as a species, create an environment for a shared morality.
Bob Newhard
This got me thinking about whether morality is scalable. Going back at least to the 18th century Enlightenment two kinds or levels of morality have been distinguished, private morality and public morality. Private morality is generally regarded as dealing with those things that are done in private and do not affect others, examples frequently used are adultery and marijuana consumption. Public morality is concerned with the well being of groups of individuals, e.g. racial discrimination, environmental pollution. Interestingly, Thom Hartman sees this distinction as distinguishing conservatives focused on private morality from liberals focused on public morality. His article on this is titled Rush Limbaugh May Teach Conservatives A Lesson can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1003-01.htm.
But what about global morality? At first such a concept sounds ridiculous. The plethora of racial, religious, and ethnic differences that have and still create so much havoc within our species would seem to doom any global morality to failure. It should be noted that moral systems, unlike noetic systems which are based on fact and subject to testing as to facticity, are based substantially on our emotions, which fact generated the 18th century notion of the moral sentiment. The intellectual challenge that moral systems face is how to build a moral system on something as slippery as our emotions. It has yet to be done with anywhere near the success of noetic systems such as those of science.
Additionally, this search for a global moral basis is not as recent as we might suppose. It was Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice who uttered, "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?" This is an appeal to human commonality, albeit to justify revenge.
One of the first tasks is to find what it is in the global conglomeration of humans to which moral sentiment is or can be attached. This sentiment has to be specific enough to be recognized by all humans as a human feature, yet capable of generating that sentiment in a population of billions. I believe that the necessary ingredient is there because all armies have to depersonalize the enemy into an object before the killing can begin. Indeed, in World War 1 on Christmas eve of 1914 German and English soldiers, on their own declared a truce, visited each other in no man's land, exchanged gifts and shared whiskey. Obviously a shared culture allowed common thoughts of home to burst through despite everything including their officer command structure. Can we find a similar kind of basis, complete with such a powerful sentiment, upon which to build a global morality? Notice that this event occurred in the context of shared suffering. While dramatic events such as these indicate the possibility, however tenuous, that humans may find a common moral framework it appears to be more in the nature of a project than a solution at this time.
However, if a common moral sentiment cannot be found and generalized into a global morality then I suggest that we should forget morality as a basis for solving this global problem and turn to prudence instead, which I suspect is the root of morality anyway.
Prudence can be based on the need for survival of the human species, upon which presumably all humans could not only agree, but actively pursue. This can be much more easily promoted than global morality. My suspicion is that we will have to expend a good deal of energy and ingenuity before we realize that much of what was taken for granted in the past must now be regarded as a focus of prudence not ownership. G. W. Bush and his coterie of neocons sought to control a natural resource, i.e. oil, instead of regarding it as a human resource to be prudently used for the benefit of all. In this case oil should be regarded as a materials resource, e.g. plastic, rather than as an energy resource, which increases global warming. If we practice the discipline of prudence on a broad enough scale for a long enough time we may, as a species, create an environment for a shared morality.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Consequences of Crowding
The other day I read about a doctor in the small town of Camden Indiana. He began getting patients with a rash of small pimple like protrusions that quickly turned into saucer-sized wounds. He sent tissue samples to the state laboratory and was told it was methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA. Strains of these bacteria are often referred to as "flesh-eating." The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS. The doctor in trying to account for the number of patients he was seeing began to wonder if the many hog farms in the vicinity might have something to do with it. Researchers in Holland had discovered that the bacteria could pass from pigs to humans. In short, the doctor determined that the highly crowded pig farms (think pork factories) might be involved. These farms are immense enclosures which look like factories from the outside with tall feed silos that have large food delivery systems emanating from them. He found that they were functioning as massive MRSA incubators.
This got me thinking about some of the consequences of crowding. If the intense crowding of pigs can create a bacterium factory, what about the intense crowding of human beings? Mike Davis, a history professor at U. C. Irvine, recently published a book Planet of the Slums. Mike, who has written a number of books on the world's social conditions, points out that as of last year more of the world's population is living in urban than in rural areas. This is a first for mankind. The large majority of this increased urbanization consists of vast slums. Other than the often-cited social antagonisms that result from animal, including human, crowding, are we creating human disease incubators in slums of a million or more people? Mike has also written a book (The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu) on the pandemic potential of avian flu, which is moving from Chinese small farms to the chicken factories of Hong Kong. Crowding, on the scale that human beings have done it, contains the seeds of our own destruction. Is it not possible to see that we have far more in common than we have in differences? If moral concern for the poor of this planet will not move mankind to adequately address the massive disparities in global resource allocation, will an imminent global Black Plague do it?
Finally, in this paean to population idiocy, I will mention another recently-read article on Quiverfull. Quiverfull is a movement among Christians, mostly Protestants, who use Psalm 127 "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They shall not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." as an imperative to have as many children as God gives them, usually 8 to 12. They view this practice as the way to advance the kingdom of their god by having more children than their adversaries. This movement is thought to have tens of thousands of adherents and is growing exponentially. It is supported by the head of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Of course, these people are not alone. The Roman Catholics and the Muslims have the same goal and are practicing the same means. These people say overpopulation be damned, we will breed more than our religious opponents. Thus in the throes of a present and increasing overpopulation and its attendant horrors, we have large religious groups waging a war for world domination using birth rate as the ammunition. Can we not call out and indict these enemies of humanity?
Bob Newhard
This got me thinking about some of the consequences of crowding. If the intense crowding of pigs can create a bacterium factory, what about the intense crowding of human beings? Mike Davis, a history professor at U. C. Irvine, recently published a book Planet of the Slums. Mike, who has written a number of books on the world's social conditions, points out that as of last year more of the world's population is living in urban than in rural areas. This is a first for mankind. The large majority of this increased urbanization consists of vast slums. Other than the often-cited social antagonisms that result from animal, including human, crowding, are we creating human disease incubators in slums of a million or more people? Mike has also written a book (The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu) on the pandemic potential of avian flu, which is moving from Chinese small farms to the chicken factories of Hong Kong. Crowding, on the scale that human beings have done it, contains the seeds of our own destruction. Is it not possible to see that we have far more in common than we have in differences? If moral concern for the poor of this planet will not move mankind to adequately address the massive disparities in global resource allocation, will an imminent global Black Plague do it?
Finally, in this paean to population idiocy, I will mention another recently-read article on Quiverfull. Quiverfull is a movement among Christians, mostly Protestants, who use Psalm 127 "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They shall not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." as an imperative to have as many children as God gives them, usually 8 to 12. They view this practice as the way to advance the kingdom of their god by having more children than their adversaries. This movement is thought to have tens of thousands of adherents and is growing exponentially. It is supported by the head of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Of course, these people are not alone. The Roman Catholics and the Muslims have the same goal and are practicing the same means. These people say overpopulation be damned, we will breed more than our religious opponents. Thus in the throes of a present and increasing overpopulation and its attendant horrors, we have large religious groups waging a war for world domination using birth rate as the ammunition. Can we not call out and indict these enemies of humanity?
Bob Newhard
Sunday, March 8, 2009
On Dealing Honestly With Poverty
The other day, in conversation with a relatively affluent professional, I remarked on the immense gap between the rich and the rest of us. He felt that the existing arrangement was acceptable. I noticed that I have been using "the rich and the rest of us" lately rather than the "rich and the poor." I think I have picked this up from the political literature I read and I believe it is used there to enlarge the population opposed to the very rich in this time of diminishing economic activity. In other words "the poor" would not be politically viable.
In any event, this change in locution got me asking why we have abandoned the long-established rich/poor dichotomy. I suspect that this change is ultimately due to the American cultural refusal to deal honestly with poverty as a human condition, not unlike some contagious diseases and that, as with disease, we need to find a remedy.
If we were concerned to deal candidly with poverty we would ask why do we have the cliché "the poor are always with us?" instead of "the rich are always with us." After all, it has been the rich who have dominated the mass of mankind. It is they who have started most of our wars. It is they who have oppressed the working class. It is they, in short, who have treated a class of human beings, the poor, as objects to be discarded when their serviceability has been used up. It is also the rich that create societies of the rich and the poor in which democracy cannot survive. Currently this attack by the wealthy is being carried out by the Republicans who, of all things, accuse Obama, by proposing increased taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, of conducting "class warfare."
Of course, when the Bush administration gave the wealthiest an enormous tax break, which the rest of us would have to subsidize, it was not class warfare, because the wealthy would reinvest those funds in enterprises. Nor, when Ronald Reagan created the "welfare queen", was it class warfare.
However this glaring duplicity is not my point. It is that this society will accept the mistreatment that the wealthy subject it to rather than seek a just economy in which the society as a whole benefits from its productivity. As a case in point the wealthy have created a national economy, and hence the welfare of us all, on the skittish response of wealthy investors to every shift in the financial wind. Is this any way to run a country's economy? Our economy is too important to be put in the hands of wealthy privateers seeking their own ends. The mere fact that Henry Paulson, one of the architects of the house of cards that collapsed in 2007 could be kept on as Secretary of the Treasury under Bush to throw hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street financiers with little accountability and that Obama has continued much of this practice, illustrates the utter self-absorption of the monetary elite. This shows how "regulation" can be and has been manipulated for the benefit of the few. It also shows the extent of the gullibility of the American citizenry who apparently believe such an approach is necessary to save capitalism and the freedom that is supposedly contingent upon it. It is doubtful that either Kafka or Becket could have dreamed up such an absurd misplacement of faith on such a large scale.
What can be done? I am not sure that we yet know how to organize a human economy so that the full human potential of its citizens can be optimized. However, given what our experience with capitalism has revealed, I believe a few precepts are indicated.
• All investment should be kept as close to production as possible. Money invested only to generate more money is counter-productive and should be carefully scrutinized if not banned. Using money to simply generate more money is a primary bane of capitalism.
• Human welfare, including care for the planet we inhabit and the other species with which we share some portion of our DNA, should be the focus of our economy. If an enterprise cannot be justified on this basis it should not be permitted.
• Society should be viewed as the fundamental requirement for civilization. Without it we are but beasts in the jungle.
• The objective of society should be the optimum realization of each citizen's potential.
Bob Newhard
In any event, this change in locution got me asking why we have abandoned the long-established rich/poor dichotomy. I suspect that this change is ultimately due to the American cultural refusal to deal honestly with poverty as a human condition, not unlike some contagious diseases and that, as with disease, we need to find a remedy.
If we were concerned to deal candidly with poverty we would ask why do we have the cliché "the poor are always with us?" instead of "the rich are always with us." After all, it has been the rich who have dominated the mass of mankind. It is they who have started most of our wars. It is they who have oppressed the working class. It is they, in short, who have treated a class of human beings, the poor, as objects to be discarded when their serviceability has been used up. It is also the rich that create societies of the rich and the poor in which democracy cannot survive. Currently this attack by the wealthy is being carried out by the Republicans who, of all things, accuse Obama, by proposing increased taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, of conducting "class warfare."
Of course, when the Bush administration gave the wealthiest an enormous tax break, which the rest of us would have to subsidize, it was not class warfare, because the wealthy would reinvest those funds in enterprises. Nor, when Ronald Reagan created the "welfare queen", was it class warfare.
However this glaring duplicity is not my point. It is that this society will accept the mistreatment that the wealthy subject it to rather than seek a just economy in which the society as a whole benefits from its productivity. As a case in point the wealthy have created a national economy, and hence the welfare of us all, on the skittish response of wealthy investors to every shift in the financial wind. Is this any way to run a country's economy? Our economy is too important to be put in the hands of wealthy privateers seeking their own ends. The mere fact that Henry Paulson, one of the architects of the house of cards that collapsed in 2007 could be kept on as Secretary of the Treasury under Bush to throw hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street financiers with little accountability and that Obama has continued much of this practice, illustrates the utter self-absorption of the monetary elite. This shows how "regulation" can be and has been manipulated for the benefit of the few. It also shows the extent of the gullibility of the American citizenry who apparently believe such an approach is necessary to save capitalism and the freedom that is supposedly contingent upon it. It is doubtful that either Kafka or Becket could have dreamed up such an absurd misplacement of faith on such a large scale.
What can be done? I am not sure that we yet know how to organize a human economy so that the full human potential of its citizens can be optimized. However, given what our experience with capitalism has revealed, I believe a few precepts are indicated.
• All investment should be kept as close to production as possible. Money invested only to generate more money is counter-productive and should be carefully scrutinized if not banned. Using money to simply generate more money is a primary bane of capitalism.
• Human welfare, including care for the planet we inhabit and the other species with which we share some portion of our DNA, should be the focus of our economy. If an enterprise cannot be justified on this basis it should not be permitted.
• Society should be viewed as the fundamental requirement for civilization. Without it we are but beasts in the jungle.
• The objective of society should be the optimum realization of each citizen's potential.
Bob Newhard
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The Very Idea of Progressivism
The following is neither a synoptic history of progressivism nor a detailed analysis of it. It is rather one person's perspective on one aspect of its origins and logical goal.
To me progressivism is a stage in a turning away from authoritarianism that began with the Renaissance when Italians began to take the Roman artifacts that lay all about them as well as the Roman and Greek writers as the source for an alternative way of understanding humanity. Up until that time authority, in the form of the Catholic Church, had declared what man was and even what his world was.
The door the Renaissance opened eventually ushered in the Age of Reason in which reason was asserted to be a more reliable guide to understanding man and his world. This eventuated in replacing the religious basis for morality with a basis in human experience and behavior. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that lying was not wrong because religion said it was. It was wrong because a society could not exist if everybody lied. Thus a test for a moral injunction became," What if everybody did that?" This was a moral rebellion against authority. As to matters of fact, in which the Church claimed explanatory rights using the Bible, first Copernicus presented his view of the earth and the sun as mere speculation to avoid the punishment of the Church. More explicitly, Galileo pointed out that the Church and by implication the Bible were, as a matter of fact, wrong. The Church's view was an egregious example of authoritarian overreach in which human values are ascribed a de facto reality.
Another major step in this transition was the declaration in 1597 by Sir Francis Bacon, the first formulator of the scientific method, that knowledge is power. Up until this point value of knowledge had been generally regarded as intrinsic. The fact that knowledge could generate power over nature as well as understand it was, in effect, the birth of technology as we know it. At this point Western man had freed itself from much of the authoritarianism of the Dark and Middle ages and had established an alternative to religious authoritarianism.
As this rebellion against authority expanded into other levels of society it generated the political movement toward democracy. Some argue that the Protestant Reformation was an essential ingredient in this process. I submit that the all Protestantism did was establish other authoritarian regimes, e.g. Calvin's Geneva, the Pilgrim's banishment of Roger Williams, and Luther's attack on the Anabaptists. Among the most pronounced political expressions of the attack on authoritarianism was the philosophical work of Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Mill, Hume, Bent ham and the Frenchman Rousseau. In this process they defined the state as a contract between the citizens and their government. As such the state could no longer act arbitrarily without the consent of the governed. The American Revolution saw the first thorough implementation of this body of thought. At this point the rebellion against political authoritarianism had succeeded. The state became a function of its citizens.
As the Industrial Revolution, a product of the freed human mind, set in people were increasingly agglomerated into the cities, driven either by confiscation of their land by enclosure laws or primogeniture laws of inheritance. Here they were crowded together in an unsanitary environment of cheap housing, fractured communities, and poverty. This is the world described by Dickens and illustrated by Hogarth. These people provided a cheap source of labor and were victimized both by their long hours of work, poor food and the worst of tenement housing. However, the factory, by gathering many people in one place also provided an environment for organizing that was not available in rural areas. I suggest that it was at this point and under these conditions that the intellectually-birthed rebellion against authority that had led to democracy, now led to the birth of progressivism as we know it. People had democratized their political world; now they would seek to democratize their work and social worlds.
It is, in my judgment, no accident that the rise of political democracy and the industrial revolution are almost exactly coextensive. The human mind, freed from authority, began to reappraise all its institutions in terms of human values. When it turned to the social and work conditions generated by the Industrial Revolution it applied those very human values of fairness and justice. The Industrial Revolution, while accentuating the gap between the rich and the poor also divorced political power from the land. This created an environment in which those struggling for a more just society at least were not burdened as much with class distinctions and the notion that people ought to "stay in their place."
Although in the founding of the American republic wealth and hence property, much of it commercial, played a prominent role in creating our founding documents, (see Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy), progressivism did not begin to flourish until after the Civil War. The immense jump in industrialization, especially in the North, occasioned the conditions of concentrated poverty that had earlier been unleashed in England. Additionally the massive immigration to the United States of the period brought many of the socialist ideas from Europe. In the United States the Industrial Revolution took hold later than in Europe. Because of our country's large size and the continued presence of the frontier we did not experience the urban poverty-based revolutions in 1848 that Europe did. The frontier became an idee fixe in the American mind and has been politically employed since, notably by Ronald Reagan and his "can do", "walk tall" mantras. It has kept us culturally infantile when it comes to social justice and the common good. As corporations, e.g. railroads, oil, steel grew into conglomerates they began to undertake control of our government. A country of citizens gulled by the Horatio Alger myth thought they were free even as their freedom, based on citizen efficacy, was stolen - not least by the illegal and unchallenged assertion that corporations were persons. The citizen's right of free speech became their newspaper's and eventually their media empire's as they exercised their free speech. As the corporations prospered by weakening the citizens' control over their government and their own lives those citizens were forced into greater and greater poverty. Cheap labor was imported for the mills and sweatshops of industry. Instead of being forced to pay a livable wage, the wealthy kept the difference and became even wealthier. This is in notable contrast to the overseas exportation of industry to take advantage of cheap labor in our time. However progressivism did not stop at dealing with the inequalities of the economy. It spread to all facets of American life. There was a progressive movement in education led by the philosopher John Dewey. Progressivism found expression in law notably in the influence of Justice Brandeis. In literature it found expression in the writings of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis as well as muckrakers like Ida Tarbell.
During the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration progressivism took root as a nation-wide effort to improve the lot of the American people. This effort resulted in the most egalitarian period in American history. It demonstrated the broad viability of the progressive, people-first approach to governance. It went so far in F.D.R.'s Four Freedoms, proposed as an addendum to the Bill of Rights, as to include freedom from want and the freedom from fear. Notably, all Ronald Reagan had to do was oppose it with the American Horatio Alger myth of self reliance, which he used to destroy government as a citizen-focused institution and that rapidly segued into a "me first" social ethos, in order to bring it down. This simple fact suggest that one of progressivism's central tasks is to redefine American values in terms of the common good focused on helping the individual to optimize her/his potential. This will require a good deal of thought.
As the world becomes more and more independent progressives will have to be ahead of the curve if violence and the destruction of human freedom are to be mitigated as the obvious forces of over-population, declining resources, global warming and environmental degradation converge. One already sees the World Social Forum opposed to the World Economic Forum. It is, in my judgment, an open question as to whether the goals of progressivism and those of capitalism are compatible. Progressivism seeks to free all humans, capitalism only the wealthy.
While some have made distinctions between progressives and populists *, I have sought herein to try to show its roots in the rejection of intellectual, then political and eventually social authoritarianism and its replacement by democracy. Progressivism is the product of a fundamental idea, namely, freedom from tyranny initially of the mind, eventually of the complete human being.
Bob Newhard
* ("Progressivism found support among small businessmen, professionals, and middle-class urban reformers",) populists (" the disgruntled farmers who fueled the Populist movement.") For these quotes see The Dawn of Liberalism: Progressivism http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture11.html
To me progressivism is a stage in a turning away from authoritarianism that began with the Renaissance when Italians began to take the Roman artifacts that lay all about them as well as the Roman and Greek writers as the source for an alternative way of understanding humanity. Up until that time authority, in the form of the Catholic Church, had declared what man was and even what his world was.
The door the Renaissance opened eventually ushered in the Age of Reason in which reason was asserted to be a more reliable guide to understanding man and his world. This eventuated in replacing the religious basis for morality with a basis in human experience and behavior. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that lying was not wrong because religion said it was. It was wrong because a society could not exist if everybody lied. Thus a test for a moral injunction became," What if everybody did that?" This was a moral rebellion against authority. As to matters of fact, in which the Church claimed explanatory rights using the Bible, first Copernicus presented his view of the earth and the sun as mere speculation to avoid the punishment of the Church. More explicitly, Galileo pointed out that the Church and by implication the Bible were, as a matter of fact, wrong. The Church's view was an egregious example of authoritarian overreach in which human values are ascribed a de facto reality.
Another major step in this transition was the declaration in 1597 by Sir Francis Bacon, the first formulator of the scientific method, that knowledge is power. Up until this point value of knowledge had been generally regarded as intrinsic. The fact that knowledge could generate power over nature as well as understand it was, in effect, the birth of technology as we know it. At this point Western man had freed itself from much of the authoritarianism of the Dark and Middle ages and had established an alternative to religious authoritarianism.
As this rebellion against authority expanded into other levels of society it generated the political movement toward democracy. Some argue that the Protestant Reformation was an essential ingredient in this process. I submit that the all Protestantism did was establish other authoritarian regimes, e.g. Calvin's Geneva, the Pilgrim's banishment of Roger Williams, and Luther's attack on the Anabaptists. Among the most pronounced political expressions of the attack on authoritarianism was the philosophical work of Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Mill, Hume, Bent ham and the Frenchman Rousseau. In this process they defined the state as a contract between the citizens and their government. As such the state could no longer act arbitrarily without the consent of the governed. The American Revolution saw the first thorough implementation of this body of thought. At this point the rebellion against political authoritarianism had succeeded. The state became a function of its citizens.
As the Industrial Revolution, a product of the freed human mind, set in people were increasingly agglomerated into the cities, driven either by confiscation of their land by enclosure laws or primogeniture laws of inheritance. Here they were crowded together in an unsanitary environment of cheap housing, fractured communities, and poverty. This is the world described by Dickens and illustrated by Hogarth. These people provided a cheap source of labor and were victimized both by their long hours of work, poor food and the worst of tenement housing. However, the factory, by gathering many people in one place also provided an environment for organizing that was not available in rural areas. I suggest that it was at this point and under these conditions that the intellectually-birthed rebellion against authority that had led to democracy, now led to the birth of progressivism as we know it. People had democratized their political world; now they would seek to democratize their work and social worlds.
It is, in my judgment, no accident that the rise of political democracy and the industrial revolution are almost exactly coextensive. The human mind, freed from authority, began to reappraise all its institutions in terms of human values. When it turned to the social and work conditions generated by the Industrial Revolution it applied those very human values of fairness and justice. The Industrial Revolution, while accentuating the gap between the rich and the poor also divorced political power from the land. This created an environment in which those struggling for a more just society at least were not burdened as much with class distinctions and the notion that people ought to "stay in their place."
Although in the founding of the American republic wealth and hence property, much of it commercial, played a prominent role in creating our founding documents, (see Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy), progressivism did not begin to flourish until after the Civil War. The immense jump in industrialization, especially in the North, occasioned the conditions of concentrated poverty that had earlier been unleashed in England. Additionally the massive immigration to the United States of the period brought many of the socialist ideas from Europe. In the United States the Industrial Revolution took hold later than in Europe. Because of our country's large size and the continued presence of the frontier we did not experience the urban poverty-based revolutions in 1848 that Europe did. The frontier became an idee fixe in the American mind and has been politically employed since, notably by Ronald Reagan and his "can do", "walk tall" mantras. It has kept us culturally infantile when it comes to social justice and the common good. As corporations, e.g. railroads, oil, steel grew into conglomerates they began to undertake control of our government. A country of citizens gulled by the Horatio Alger myth thought they were free even as their freedom, based on citizen efficacy, was stolen - not least by the illegal and unchallenged assertion that corporations were persons. The citizen's right of free speech became their newspaper's and eventually their media empire's as they exercised their free speech. As the corporations prospered by weakening the citizens' control over their government and their own lives those citizens were forced into greater and greater poverty. Cheap labor was imported for the mills and sweatshops of industry. Instead of being forced to pay a livable wage, the wealthy kept the difference and became even wealthier. This is in notable contrast to the overseas exportation of industry to take advantage of cheap labor in our time. However progressivism did not stop at dealing with the inequalities of the economy. It spread to all facets of American life. There was a progressive movement in education led by the philosopher John Dewey. Progressivism found expression in law notably in the influence of Justice Brandeis. In literature it found expression in the writings of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis as well as muckrakers like Ida Tarbell.
During the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration progressivism took root as a nation-wide effort to improve the lot of the American people. This effort resulted in the most egalitarian period in American history. It demonstrated the broad viability of the progressive, people-first approach to governance. It went so far in F.D.R.'s Four Freedoms, proposed as an addendum to the Bill of Rights, as to include freedom from want and the freedom from fear. Notably, all Ronald Reagan had to do was oppose it with the American Horatio Alger myth of self reliance, which he used to destroy government as a citizen-focused institution and that rapidly segued into a "me first" social ethos, in order to bring it down. This simple fact suggest that one of progressivism's central tasks is to redefine American values in terms of the common good focused on helping the individual to optimize her/his potential. This will require a good deal of thought.
As the world becomes more and more independent progressives will have to be ahead of the curve if violence and the destruction of human freedom are to be mitigated as the obvious forces of over-population, declining resources, global warming and environmental degradation converge. One already sees the World Social Forum opposed to the World Economic Forum. It is, in my judgment, an open question as to whether the goals of progressivism and those of capitalism are compatible. Progressivism seeks to free all humans, capitalism only the wealthy.
While some have made distinctions between progressives and populists *, I have sought herein to try to show its roots in the rejection of intellectual, then political and eventually social authoritarianism and its replacement by democracy. Progressivism is the product of a fundamental idea, namely, freedom from tyranny initially of the mind, eventually of the complete human being.
Bob Newhard
* ("Progressivism found support among small businessmen, professionals, and middle-class urban reformers",) populists (" the disgruntled farmers who fueled the Populist movement.") For these quotes see The Dawn of Liberalism: Progressivism http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture11.html
Sunday, February 8, 2009
On (Adults) Growing Up in the World They Created
Human beings have an inherent problem of scale. When things get too big, whether buildings or systems, we start to distance ourselves from them. If they get so big that they overwhelm us in their complexity and seriousness we, childlike, close our eyes. Why, we must ask, are we paralyzed in the presence of this enormity of global overpopulation and what can we do to overcome it? To understand the dangers implicit in this behavior and find ways to counter it is one of mankind's greatest tasks if it is to survive the convergence of the massive forces descending upon us. All responsible experts, by which I mean those capable of taking evidence as the basis for judgment, now agree that the big word is "if." One of the problems with even this observation is that the word if is enough to generate childlike irresponsibility. That is, if we even suspect we can't do it, why try.
These thoughts occurred to me while reading an excellent essay by Professor Ken Small. The essay titled Global population reduction: confronting the inevitable can be found at file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Robert/Application%20Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ozc2s59x.default/ScrapBook/data/20090205223848/index.html
One approach is sometimes called the salami method, that is slicing up the problem into smaller more "manageable" parts. This approach, while certainly more accommodating of our human limitations, has several risks built into it that must be recognized and addressed. First it requires that the problem be well enough understood so that it is broken into its constituent pieces at relevant, addressable, sections. This in itself is complicated by all the factors that must be considered in this reduction process. Population growth includes the problem of contravening ingrained human values, e.g. the "need" to have children. It has an ethnic value, e.g. if we don't maintain our numbers our culture will perish. It has the problem of redistributing the world's resources and the very idea of ownership.
The next problem is how to orchestrate this salami technique so that the most necessary of these various "slices" are addressed at a time and in a sequence that will get the results we need. As you will note from Small's essay he is looking at the generation, approximately 20 years, as the basic "slice" to orchestrate the needed changes. He anticipates about 200 years of generational change to bring the earth's human population down to a sustainable level. This process allows us to begin asking, "What should my generation do to further this population reduction. This in tern presents us, if all the conditions of thought and understanding I mentioned above are met, to begin productively thinking, planning and acting so that the next generation will have a basis to build on.
So the issue for this generation is to articulate the problem as best we can and find the cut points for "slicing." Identify this generation's slice; that is what we need to accomplish in the next 20 years? Then, plan and promote the process and actions tjat must be undertaken. There will, of course, be a lot of learning from experience as we progress. We will have to use our intelligence to outsmart our human nature. In the future I will try to present some thoughts on how we might proceed in such an endeavourer.
For purposes of illustration let us postulate a global population of 10 billion by 2050. This is actually within the margin of possibility. Taking the upper limit for a sustainable population of 2 billion, which is upper midrange in the estimated earth carrying capacity, we would need to reduce population by 8 billion in 200 years or 10 generations. This would, in crude terms, require a reduction rate of about 800 million per generation. One could expect, however, that as mankind acculturated itself to the necessity of this reduction that it would take place at a faster rate the further along the process went.
But let us target on this generation's 800 million. Understanding the goal is to sufficiently reduce global population with as little violence as possible. What priorities should be set to achieve the necessary reduction?
Immediately it becomes obvious that the least violent method of reducing population is to reduce the birth rate. Thus we need a massive investment in birth control. This immediately runs into an intreched religious resistance found in our culture. We will have to make the consequences of not reducing human population so clear, as Al Gore did with global warming, that this can be overcome. It probably will require limiting family size. China's one child per couple policy, which with a variety of exemptions applies to 36% of the population, has prevented over 250 million births between the program's inception in 1979 and 2000. This is an average of about 166 million per generation. This begins to provide a scale to measure what needs to be done if we are to achieve a global 800 million reduction for the world as a whole in this first generation. It is important to understand why only 36% of the Chinese population was required to participate in the program. For instance one of the major exemptions was for rural families because they needed children for a labor force. Parents who were themselves only children were allowed to have more than one child for family lineage purposes. Thus the Chinese took into account both economic and cultural concerns. China has about 16.5% of the world's population of 6 billion. A global population reduction done on the same scale for the same 20 years would have been 960 million, well over our 800 million 20-year target. This suggests that the Chinese approach could be used as a model to be modified by cultural and other demands, just as China modified their plan for cultural and economic purposes. This further suggests that if one society of 1 billion can achieve these results without major conflict that it may be possible for the world at large to do so. I am well aware of the downside of the Chinese effort, eg. killing female babies by exposure to ensure a male child to carry on the family name. These are cultural factors that need to be improved. However, the consequences of not making these reductions will be far more disastrous for humanity than maintaining the current methods of family inheritance or lineage.
Bob Newhard
These thoughts occurred to me while reading an excellent essay by Professor Ken Small. The essay titled Global population reduction: confronting the inevitable can be found at file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Robert/Application%20Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ozc2s59x.default/ScrapBook/data/20090205223848/index.html
One approach is sometimes called the salami method, that is slicing up the problem into smaller more "manageable" parts. This approach, while certainly more accommodating of our human limitations, has several risks built into it that must be recognized and addressed. First it requires that the problem be well enough understood so that it is broken into its constituent pieces at relevant, addressable, sections. This in itself is complicated by all the factors that must be considered in this reduction process. Population growth includes the problem of contravening ingrained human values, e.g. the "need" to have children. It has an ethnic value, e.g. if we don't maintain our numbers our culture will perish. It has the problem of redistributing the world's resources and the very idea of ownership.
The next problem is how to orchestrate this salami technique so that the most necessary of these various "slices" are addressed at a time and in a sequence that will get the results we need. As you will note from Small's essay he is looking at the generation, approximately 20 years, as the basic "slice" to orchestrate the needed changes. He anticipates about 200 years of generational change to bring the earth's human population down to a sustainable level. This process allows us to begin asking, "What should my generation do to further this population reduction. This in tern presents us, if all the conditions of thought and understanding I mentioned above are met, to begin productively thinking, planning and acting so that the next generation will have a basis to build on.
So the issue for this generation is to articulate the problem as best we can and find the cut points for "slicing." Identify this generation's slice; that is what we need to accomplish in the next 20 years? Then, plan and promote the process and actions tjat must be undertaken. There will, of course, be a lot of learning from experience as we progress. We will have to use our intelligence to outsmart our human nature. In the future I will try to present some thoughts on how we might proceed in such an endeavourer.
For purposes of illustration let us postulate a global population of 10 billion by 2050. This is actually within the margin of possibility. Taking the upper limit for a sustainable population of 2 billion, which is upper midrange in the estimated earth carrying capacity, we would need to reduce population by 8 billion in 200 years or 10 generations. This would, in crude terms, require a reduction rate of about 800 million per generation. One could expect, however, that as mankind acculturated itself to the necessity of this reduction that it would take place at a faster rate the further along the process went.
But let us target on this generation's 800 million. Understanding the goal is to sufficiently reduce global population with as little violence as possible. What priorities should be set to achieve the necessary reduction?
Immediately it becomes obvious that the least violent method of reducing population is to reduce the birth rate. Thus we need a massive investment in birth control. This immediately runs into an intreched religious resistance found in our culture. We will have to make the consequences of not reducing human population so clear, as Al Gore did with global warming, that this can be overcome. It probably will require limiting family size. China's one child per couple policy, which with a variety of exemptions applies to 36% of the population, has prevented over 250 million births between the program's inception in 1979 and 2000. This is an average of about 166 million per generation. This begins to provide a scale to measure what needs to be done if we are to achieve a global 800 million reduction for the world as a whole in this first generation. It is important to understand why only 36% of the Chinese population was required to participate in the program. For instance one of the major exemptions was for rural families because they needed children for a labor force. Parents who were themselves only children were allowed to have more than one child for family lineage purposes. Thus the Chinese took into account both economic and cultural concerns. China has about 16.5% of the world's population of 6 billion. A global population reduction done on the same scale for the same 20 years would have been 960 million, well over our 800 million 20-year target. This suggests that the Chinese approach could be used as a model to be modified by cultural and other demands, just as China modified their plan for cultural and economic purposes. This further suggests that if one society of 1 billion can achieve these results without major conflict that it may be possible for the world at large to do so. I am well aware of the downside of the Chinese effort, eg. killing female babies by exposure to ensure a male child to carry on the family name. These are cultural factors that need to be improved. However, the consequences of not making these reductions will be far more disastrous for humanity than maintaining the current methods of family inheritance or lineage.
Bob Newhard
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