I know I have written before on America's lost grip on reality, but there is, in my judgment, new evidence of this phenomenon and that it is becoming very dangerous. I have previously remarked the flight to fantasy evident in substituting creationism for evolution and the concomitant use of politics to replace science in the pursuit of that goal. I have also remarked that celebrities have replaced heroes in the minds of children; that the passion to be noticed, Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, has produced multimillion dollar industries such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter; that millions of people avidly adopt avatars and endlessly play global fantasy games, etc. But, as I said in my last column on this subject, it is dangerous. Witness the recent rash of death “jokes” about Obama by Republicans, e.g. hunting tags for Obama and as I write this column Fox News' Glenn Beck broadcast his hope that poison is added to Nancy Pelosi's wine. The Republicans believe these tactics, including the psychotic but effective assertion that Obama intends, through his healthcare plan, to kill your grandmother, have turned the political tide that ran so strongly against them in the 2008 election—and this in 6 months. If they are right and some liberal writers seem to agree, then the American people are obviously and dangerously unhinged. People now feel free to brandish firearms at political meetings.
Democracy cannot withstand this indifference to reality. It will give way to the chaos generated by emotion-driven conflicts over myths of race, religion, gender and age difference. In the latter case there is a developing effort to pit the young against the old as the movement of wealth to fewer and fewer people deprives society of the resources needed to insure the broad economic base a democracy requires.
Another indicator that this society has lost its bearings can be found in a recently published book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement in which the authors, two professors of social psychology, are mainly concerned with cultural as distinct from individual narcissism. Their judgment, with an abundance of evidence, is that there has been something like a sea change in American culture and it is not for the good. They list a number of social ills that are attributable to this social narcissism to a greater or lesser extent. These ills range from the mortgage debacle to plastic surgery and the whole makeover industry to the plague of “reality” shows. The major result is, of course, social disintegration and all that can flow from that. Under the best of circumstances there is an inherent conflict in democracy between the individual's liberty and the requirements of the democratic society necessary to assure that liberty. Jefferson sought to bridge this bifurcation by making the aim of the state to assist individuals in realizing their full potential. It was assumed, perhaps naively, that such self realization would be consistent with a democratic society.
In trying to understand why society appears to be falling apart I have begun to wonder if, along with the pressures of over population and the fragmenting effect of technology, a new awareness of human fragility is contributing to this disintegration. Never before in human history have humans known so clearly that their world can be destroyed and perhaps is in that process already and that tey are the cause. Aware of the willingness of humans to destroy each other, mankind now fears that it could, and perhaps will, destroy itself.
I remember a final scene in the movie version of Neville Shute's novel On the Beach, in which a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States has unleashed an enormous radioactive cloud that was progressively killing all life as it circulated around the planet. Australia would complete the cloud's globe-girdling trip. People knew it was coming. They fragment into those who pray and passionately declare that Jesus is returning, by which method they supposedly escape the impending doom, and those who accept their fate and have an enormous beach party. Mankind is increasingly aware of its destiny. Is it starting to fragment into the religious deniers and the entertainment addicted accepters? I personally think Shute should have had a third group indulging in violence as they displayed their anger at such a fate. Somebody had to be responsible! We keep telling ourselves that there is still time, if we act quickly, to avoid the various catastrophes awaiting us. Can we really expect the bulk of mankind to act quickly? At its best, will not such an effort create massive conflict as humans fight for diminishing resources and this in the context of nuclear destructiveness? If some external intelligence were to observe humanity playing out this scenario, would it not think the efforts of those who seek to avoid the cascading convergence of such species-ending forces pitiful in their irrelevance? We must, in my judgment, be brutally honest before we can be productively progressive, else we too live in a fantasy.
Bob Newhad
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The Shadow Falls
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
So wrote T. S. Eliot in his poem The Hollow Men.
The speculators are back, flipping property. The real revitalization—repairing and renting the homes—will have to wait.
So wrote Alyssa Katz in her article There Goes the Neighborhood in the September 2009 issue of The American Prospect magazine.
There is an amorphousness in the processes of modern societies that was not there for the vast majority human existence. It is that murky, ill-defined area between decision and act. which when institutionalized (think government or corporations), is responsible for much of what goes wrong in our societies. Because of it we are much less sure of how our decisions will eventuate. We consume vast amounts of our resources in this gray area.
Ever since civilization began to appear there has been the gap between what G. W. Bush called the deciders and the rest of society. However, it was quite clear what was the king's or the priest's and what was that of the ordinary person. There was little “grayness” in the difference although there was in the use the king or priest made of his resources. Nowadays however, with huge populations and complicated technology that generates a near impenetrable fog, (some would call it a black hole) mankind has been put adrift in a fog of its own making.
I think the recent rash of anger experienced by politicians as they returned to their constituents, while much of it may have been triggered by the bigots of religion and race and loud-mouthed sound biters, reflected an effort on the part of much of this country's citizenry to penetrate the grayness which confronts them. Who is responsible for our situation? How did it happen? How will it be remedied? These questions are fundamental to people at this time and search as they may they basically get no answers. As Katz points out, massive amounts of public debt incurred to keep people in their homes by reducing their mortgage payments have been waylaid by the institutions that government chose to do this job. They have been largely consumed or made less effective by the grayness. This is among the reasons that progressives much preferred FDR's approach of creating jobs so the necessary remedy is made explicit to the people. The remedy does not trickle down through the very institutions that caused the problem in the first place.
This shadowland is the playground of the devious and manipulative among us. It provides the ability to intercept communication between the governed and the governors and makes for decisions and agreements made in secret. It is the root cause for the continuing call for accountability. Why, for instance, do the wealthy have no three strikes law for fraud or are sentenced to minimum security prisons or house arrest when the common burglar is sent to the harshest of overcrowded jails?
One of the greatest threats in an era of increasing instability is that a “savior” in fascist garb will come riding out of this fog of confusion and increased alienation with a clear and simple message, usually rooted in the society's myths and prejudices. One need only examine the cultural myths and bigotries Hitler and Mussolini appealed to in order to acquire absolute power.
Finally, all of this is compounded by humanity facing global realities it has not faced in 10,000 years and this time we know it in advance.
When one writes in the above terms one is expected, in this wildly optimistic society, to present some sort of remedy. However, every possible remedy seems fraught with its own perils. It is tempting to say, as some have, that our societies are too big. They must be reduced in size so that citizens have at least some acquaintance with those that govern them and the mechanisms employed in governing, but how is this to be done when we have a technology that is global in scale and generates wealth and power on that scale?
There are those who say we need to remove much of the technology we have created and live much closer to the land and elements, which were the cradle of our existence for the vast majority of our species' existence. But even if we tried, there is not enough land and resources left to provide an “acre and a horse” for each family, We are, in short, living on the edge of chaos lost in a miasma of deliberate ambiguity and focused on ourselves rather than our species.
Bob Newhard
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
So wrote T. S. Eliot in his poem The Hollow Men.
The speculators are back, flipping property. The real revitalization—repairing and renting the homes—will have to wait.
So wrote Alyssa Katz in her article There Goes the Neighborhood in the September 2009 issue of The American Prospect magazine.
There is an amorphousness in the processes of modern societies that was not there for the vast majority human existence. It is that murky, ill-defined area between decision and act. which when institutionalized (think government or corporations), is responsible for much of what goes wrong in our societies. Because of it we are much less sure of how our decisions will eventuate. We consume vast amounts of our resources in this gray area.
Ever since civilization began to appear there has been the gap between what G. W. Bush called the deciders and the rest of society. However, it was quite clear what was the king's or the priest's and what was that of the ordinary person. There was little “grayness” in the difference although there was in the use the king or priest made of his resources. Nowadays however, with huge populations and complicated technology that generates a near impenetrable fog, (some would call it a black hole) mankind has been put adrift in a fog of its own making.
I think the recent rash of anger experienced by politicians as they returned to their constituents, while much of it may have been triggered by the bigots of religion and race and loud-mouthed sound biters, reflected an effort on the part of much of this country's citizenry to penetrate the grayness which confronts them. Who is responsible for our situation? How did it happen? How will it be remedied? These questions are fundamental to people at this time and search as they may they basically get no answers. As Katz points out, massive amounts of public debt incurred to keep people in their homes by reducing their mortgage payments have been waylaid by the institutions that government chose to do this job. They have been largely consumed or made less effective by the grayness. This is among the reasons that progressives much preferred FDR's approach of creating jobs so the necessary remedy is made explicit to the people. The remedy does not trickle down through the very institutions that caused the problem in the first place.
This shadowland is the playground of the devious and manipulative among us. It provides the ability to intercept communication between the governed and the governors and makes for decisions and agreements made in secret. It is the root cause for the continuing call for accountability. Why, for instance, do the wealthy have no three strikes law for fraud or are sentenced to minimum security prisons or house arrest when the common burglar is sent to the harshest of overcrowded jails?
One of the greatest threats in an era of increasing instability is that a “savior” in fascist garb will come riding out of this fog of confusion and increased alienation with a clear and simple message, usually rooted in the society's myths and prejudices. One need only examine the cultural myths and bigotries Hitler and Mussolini appealed to in order to acquire absolute power.
Finally, all of this is compounded by humanity facing global realities it has not faced in 10,000 years and this time we know it in advance.
When one writes in the above terms one is expected, in this wildly optimistic society, to present some sort of remedy. However, every possible remedy seems fraught with its own perils. It is tempting to say, as some have, that our societies are too big. They must be reduced in size so that citizens have at least some acquaintance with those that govern them and the mechanisms employed in governing, but how is this to be done when we have a technology that is global in scale and generates wealth and power on that scale?
There are those who say we need to remove much of the technology we have created and live much closer to the land and elements, which were the cradle of our existence for the vast majority of our species' existence. But even if we tried, there is not enough land and resources left to provide an “acre and a horse” for each family, We are, in short, living on the edge of chaos lost in a miasma of deliberate ambiguity and focused on ourselves rather than our species.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, August 9, 2009
American Lumpen or the Politicization of Ignorance
There is, I believe, a developing political movement of the uneducated by choice. By this I mean a flaunting of ignorance for political purposes with the intention of appealing to the ignorant as being just like them. Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin are prime examples. To be ignorant is to be trustworthy.
Despite the fact that the founders of this country included a high incidence of intellectuals aware and engaged in the philosophy, science, economic and political thinking of the day, our country turned against intellectualism early in its history and it became fashionable to condemn intellectuals as “elitists.” Richard Hofstadter remarks this process in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Adlai Stevenson was so branded in my own time.
I suggest that the current form of politicized ignorance began with Richard Nixon's sending the Republican Party south to get the popular constituency it needed. This was done deliberately by a corporate America that had already moved the New England textile industry south to take advantage of cheap labor and anti-union state governments using a typically American contradictory euphemism, right to work laws. Hence we have the anomaly of the poor and middle class Southern whites in the service of the wealthy Northerners. Only in America!
The South, especially the Deep South, has been an intellectually backward part of this country since its founding, mainly because of racism. This continues today principally because Southerners are trapped by the guilt of pervasive racism. Because of this they remain very defensive. In effect they have no place to go intellectually. They cannot accept the human race as such and hence are not free to explore and understand the complexity of our species. The ascendency of the South in the Republican Party has made anti-intellectualism an unstated plank in the platform of that party. I should add that it is in the interests of the corporations that control the Republican Party to encourage rampant ignorance because people can more easily be seduced by advertising, both commercial and political, and by appeals to their emotions.
This process has resulted in one of the two major parties of this country promoting candidates who believe in creationism, deem global warming a conspiracy of the United Nations and a “Birthers” movement denying that President Obama was born in the United States This is more than folly, it is dangerous. A society with this number of people unhinged from reality becomes exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation. It confuses fact with belief and feels free to create “facts” that suit their motives. This is the kind of social mentality that permitted the rise of fascist regimes in Europe. I believe we can see this kind of ignorance in action in the current Republican-orchestrated ruckus at town hall meetings by Democratic Congressional representatives. This is the kind of bully boy tactic that the Nazis employed. In this respect it is also instructive to note that a prime mover of these attacks, Rush Limbaugh, has accused Obama of being a fascist. This kind of assertion by those who practice fascist techniques is done to preempt use of the term by applying it to their opposition first. Notice it is not the usual “commie” demonizing of the Republican past. The fact that these ludicrous, devious, misuses of language can be so effective is a measure of the degree the American public is removed from reality and thereby so profoundly gullible. That we are entering the throes of fascism is underscored in the article Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism? found at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141819
Culturally, this can, I believe, be traced in significant part to the ascendency of the role of advertising in our society. The pervasiveness and insidiousness of 24/7 saturation of advertising, the application of advanced psychological knowledge to its development and the vast amount of fiscal resources available to it, have produced a citizenry increasingly incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction and therefore prone to accept the emotionally satisfying rather than the noetically verified. That this society is the most powerful on the planet does not bode well for our species.
Robert Newhard
Postscript: Bill Maher has an interesting take on the abysmal level of American ignorance at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-smart-president_b_253996.html?view
Despite the fact that the founders of this country included a high incidence of intellectuals aware and engaged in the philosophy, science, economic and political thinking of the day, our country turned against intellectualism early in its history and it became fashionable to condemn intellectuals as “elitists.” Richard Hofstadter remarks this process in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Adlai Stevenson was so branded in my own time.
I suggest that the current form of politicized ignorance began with Richard Nixon's sending the Republican Party south to get the popular constituency it needed. This was done deliberately by a corporate America that had already moved the New England textile industry south to take advantage of cheap labor and anti-union state governments using a typically American contradictory euphemism, right to work laws. Hence we have the anomaly of the poor and middle class Southern whites in the service of the wealthy Northerners. Only in America!
The South, especially the Deep South, has been an intellectually backward part of this country since its founding, mainly because of racism. This continues today principally because Southerners are trapped by the guilt of pervasive racism. Because of this they remain very defensive. In effect they have no place to go intellectually. They cannot accept the human race as such and hence are not free to explore and understand the complexity of our species. The ascendency of the South in the Republican Party has made anti-intellectualism an unstated plank in the platform of that party. I should add that it is in the interests of the corporations that control the Republican Party to encourage rampant ignorance because people can more easily be seduced by advertising, both commercial and political, and by appeals to their emotions.
This process has resulted in one of the two major parties of this country promoting candidates who believe in creationism, deem global warming a conspiracy of the United Nations and a “Birthers” movement denying that President Obama was born in the United States This is more than folly, it is dangerous. A society with this number of people unhinged from reality becomes exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation. It confuses fact with belief and feels free to create “facts” that suit their motives. This is the kind of social mentality that permitted the rise of fascist regimes in Europe. I believe we can see this kind of ignorance in action in the current Republican-orchestrated ruckus at town hall meetings by Democratic Congressional representatives. This is the kind of bully boy tactic that the Nazis employed. In this respect it is also instructive to note that a prime mover of these attacks, Rush Limbaugh, has accused Obama of being a fascist. This kind of assertion by those who practice fascist techniques is done to preempt use of the term by applying it to their opposition first. Notice it is not the usual “commie” demonizing of the Republican past. The fact that these ludicrous, devious, misuses of language can be so effective is a measure of the degree the American public is removed from reality and thereby so profoundly gullible. That we are entering the throes of fascism is underscored in the article Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism? found at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141819
Culturally, this can, I believe, be traced in significant part to the ascendency of the role of advertising in our society. The pervasiveness and insidiousness of 24/7 saturation of advertising, the application of advanced psychological knowledge to its development and the vast amount of fiscal resources available to it, have produced a citizenry increasingly incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction and therefore prone to accept the emotionally satisfying rather than the noetically verified. That this society is the most powerful on the planet does not bode well for our species.
Robert Newhard
Postscript: Bill Maher has an interesting take on the abysmal level of American ignorance at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-smart-president_b_253996.html?view
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Wealth, Property and the Dire Need for Reform
In a world and time such as ours it is not unusual to be outraged by human conduct, but sometimes the outrageous event provides insight into just how bad things are and why they are that way. The so-called budget deal reached by California's governor and its legislature is one of these. 500,000 children will no longer have health insurance and thousands of infirm elderly people will no longer have home care. Meanwhile a proposed severance tax on oil to redress some of the budget shortfall was eliminated and the oil companies were allowed to resume offshore drilling after 40 years of protecting our environment against this practice. In the midst of the legislative struggle caused by a Republican minority the wealthy Republican governor provided the perfect paradigm for what has gone wrong with this society when he said that he would wait out the legislative battle by basking in his jacuzzi while smoking a favorite cigar. This is the modern equivalent of Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned.
The need to control wealth for societal benefit is a world-wide priority on a par with the need to reduce human population. Contemplate this. Let the enormity of the implications settle in: The 1996 U.N. Human Development Report report gave the mind-boggling statistic that the net worth of the 358 richest persons in the world was equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 percent of the world's population, that is, of 2.3 billion people. The aberrant distribution of wealth in the United States has resulted in an unresponsive government, a munitions-for-profit industry second to none and war without even a credible pretext. This kind of maldistribution of wealth is an ancient problem for humanity, but technology and a vastly overpopulated planet have made its elimination critical to human survival.
One of the greatest bastions of wealth is private property. The old myths of private property will have to be mitigated if not abandoned. Notably, private property, while taken note of in the Constitution, was never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. This would imply that private property is not essential to freedom, which is the burden of the Declaration of Independence. This planet is our species' only home. Nobody can own it. “It” will be here after we are long gone. Ownership is after all a social convention expressed in law. Some societies, including those of Indigenous Americans, did not have this notion. As a human convention it can be changed. Perhaps we will have to develop some system of “right to use” to replace ownership. This was a hot topic for philosophers of the 18th century when the United States was founded. I think this was so, in part, because Europeans were still finding their way out of centuries of feudalism. Initially transcontinental trade followed by the manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution created great wealth for non- aristocrats.. Private property was thus viewed as a hedge against the land-based dominance of the aristocracy and the crown. In brief, private property was a defacto banner of individual freedom. Is property a right as John Locke contended or is it a human convention as David Hume argued? Because property now has global significance and has become so powerful an influence on human well being it is, in my judgment, high time we began a reconsideration of the full implications of property ownership. Simply consider that Coca Cola can deprive Indian farmers of the aquifer they have used for centuries. Shell Oil can pollute African jungles with impunity. And Goldman-Sachs and the other money-manipulating corporations of Wall Street can cause a global economic collapse.
We can begin the kind of reform that is needed by defining property as a right of use conferred by society for purposes it deems useful. This, in effect, is what the corporation was intended to do. Incorporation is a grant by society to engage in a specified kind of business for specified purposes and, initially, for a specified period of time.
Enhancing this concept of the corporation so as to insure that the public good said to result from the approved incorporation is clearly defined would be a large step in the needed direction. Society should reserve the right to retract incorporation when the public good ceases to be served. This should be accompanied by the removal of corporate personhood illegitimately obtained by corporations in the 19th century. After all, if they are persons the repeal of their incorporation would be a form of homicide.
Bob Newhard
Postscript: As I was finishing this column David Sirota posted on Alternet an article on how the richest 1% of Americans are trying to subvert universal health care. It can be found at http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141520/how_the_ultra-rich_are_trying_to_kill_health_reform/ health care
The need to control wealth for societal benefit is a world-wide priority on a par with the need to reduce human population. Contemplate this. Let the enormity of the implications settle in: The 1996 U.N. Human Development Report report gave the mind-boggling statistic that the net worth of the 358 richest persons in the world was equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 percent of the world's population, that is, of 2.3 billion people. The aberrant distribution of wealth in the United States has resulted in an unresponsive government, a munitions-for-profit industry second to none and war without even a credible pretext. This kind of maldistribution of wealth is an ancient problem for humanity, but technology and a vastly overpopulated planet have made its elimination critical to human survival.
One of the greatest bastions of wealth is private property. The old myths of private property will have to be mitigated if not abandoned. Notably, private property, while taken note of in the Constitution, was never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. This would imply that private property is not essential to freedom, which is the burden of the Declaration of Independence. This planet is our species' only home. Nobody can own it. “It” will be here after we are long gone. Ownership is after all a social convention expressed in law. Some societies, including those of Indigenous Americans, did not have this notion. As a human convention it can be changed. Perhaps we will have to develop some system of “right to use” to replace ownership. This was a hot topic for philosophers of the 18th century when the United States was founded. I think this was so, in part, because Europeans were still finding their way out of centuries of feudalism. Initially transcontinental trade followed by the manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution created great wealth for non- aristocrats.. Private property was thus viewed as a hedge against the land-based dominance of the aristocracy and the crown. In brief, private property was a defacto banner of individual freedom. Is property a right as John Locke contended or is it a human convention as David Hume argued? Because property now has global significance and has become so powerful an influence on human well being it is, in my judgment, high time we began a reconsideration of the full implications of property ownership. Simply consider that Coca Cola can deprive Indian farmers of the aquifer they have used for centuries. Shell Oil can pollute African jungles with impunity. And Goldman-Sachs and the other money-manipulating corporations of Wall Street can cause a global economic collapse.
We can begin the kind of reform that is needed by defining property as a right of use conferred by society for purposes it deems useful. This, in effect, is what the corporation was intended to do. Incorporation is a grant by society to engage in a specified kind of business for specified purposes and, initially, for a specified period of time.
Enhancing this concept of the corporation so as to insure that the public good said to result from the approved incorporation is clearly defined would be a large step in the needed direction. Society should reserve the right to retract incorporation when the public good ceases to be served. This should be accompanied by the removal of corporate personhood illegitimately obtained by corporations in the 19th century. After all, if they are persons the repeal of their incorporation would be a form of homicide.
Bob Newhard
Postscript: As I was finishing this column David Sirota posted on Alternet an article on how the richest 1% of Americans are trying to subvert universal health care. It can be found at http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141520/how_the_ultra-rich_are_trying_to_kill_health_reform/ health care
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Perils of Boredom
I have often wondered what has allowed our affluent country, under no undue stress, to become so fundamentally polarized? There was no major depression, no unpopular war. Even the Cold War had settled down to an agreed-upon detente. I don't think it is sufficient to say Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich or Grover Norquist did it. I suggest people such as these were merely catalysts, who for their own purposes tapped into a pervasive social phenomenon: boredom.
When a society becomes sufficiently affluent the necessities that drive human beings are diminished. The greater the affluence and the wider its distribution the more profound is this loss of necessity, which people like Bill Bennett have glossed and misused as the loss of a “moral compass.” This cultural loss of focus is a byproduct of affluence and results in a heavy emphasis on amusement as an antidote to the boredom that ensues. It also makes a society more vulnerable to political manipulation.
Notice that Ronald Reagan's main message was not greater affluence. It was not even overcoming the Russians, although this was prominent. It was that Americans should “walk tall.” That they should move in the world independent of other nations and cultures. That they personally should be self-sufficient and forgo the securities of government support. Shortly before Reagan was elected, President Carter drew attention to America's cultural boredom in his “malaise” speech of 1979, which subsequently played a significant role in his defeat in the election. Americans did not want to hear the truth: they wanted to feel good about themselves. Reagan and/or his advisers were aware of the same phenomenon and used it to gain office and turn the country over to corporate rapine and religious bigotry. What Reagan did was persuade Americans that they were still the self-dependent pioneers that their forebears presumably had been. People did not ask how the criteria of the frontier might play out in a nation of hundreds of millions and a world facing nuclear weaponry. This was the reinstilled purpose, benighted though it was, for American political life. Americans, so devoid of historical awareness, did not see that we had been through what Reagan proposed before. The age of the Robber Barons had amply demonstrated what an economy dominated by the frontier dog-eat-dog encounters between economic goliaths who had no regard for the common good was like and what its consequences were, e.g. repeated recessions and depressions.
Robert Nisbet in his book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary
observes that “The range of cures or terminations of boredom is a wide one: migration, desertion, war, revolution, murder, calculated cruelty to others, suicide, pornography, alcohol, narcotics. Tiberius relishing those he tortured, or Sherlock Holmes taking to the needle, the pains and results of boredom are everywhere to be seen, and nowhere more epidemically than in Western society at the present time.”
Obviously the political process was one of moving the country from a common interest politics to a self interest politics. Once the pressure of the Great Depression was off and the prosperity following World War II had taken effect, people thought they no longer needed government except for military purposes. A public hubris set in, massively encouraged by the corporate financial sector eager to weaken the people's control of them. We are now living with the consequences.
The social hazards of affluence are many. Among the most subtle, yet dangerous, is the tendency to boredom. Barbara Tuchman, I believe in her book The Guns of August, notes that the Great Powers of Europe were armed to the teeth and had detailed plans for invading each other prior to World War I and that this was commonly known. She describes one episode in which German. French and English college students are congenially noting that they would probably be fighting each other soon. Such is the absolute idiocy of boredom. In a world bent on massive introduction of technology, with the resultant removal of necessity, this poses an ominous portent for future generations. What the antidote might be I am not sure. We know that social purpose can address boredom, whether for good or ill. However, purpose as a motivator is very risky in its reliance upon the emotions and difficult to maintain for the same reason. Perhaps we will wind up breeding boredom-resistant humans as Aldous Huxley suggests in Brave New World.
Bob Newhard
When a society becomes sufficiently affluent the necessities that drive human beings are diminished. The greater the affluence and the wider its distribution the more profound is this loss of necessity, which people like Bill Bennett have glossed and misused as the loss of a “moral compass.” This cultural loss of focus is a byproduct of affluence and results in a heavy emphasis on amusement as an antidote to the boredom that ensues. It also makes a society more vulnerable to political manipulation.
Notice that Ronald Reagan's main message was not greater affluence. It was not even overcoming the Russians, although this was prominent. It was that Americans should “walk tall.” That they should move in the world independent of other nations and cultures. That they personally should be self-sufficient and forgo the securities of government support. Shortly before Reagan was elected, President Carter drew attention to America's cultural boredom in his “malaise” speech of 1979, which subsequently played a significant role in his defeat in the election. Americans did not want to hear the truth: they wanted to feel good about themselves. Reagan and/or his advisers were aware of the same phenomenon and used it to gain office and turn the country over to corporate rapine and religious bigotry. What Reagan did was persuade Americans that they were still the self-dependent pioneers that their forebears presumably had been. People did not ask how the criteria of the frontier might play out in a nation of hundreds of millions and a world facing nuclear weaponry. This was the reinstilled purpose, benighted though it was, for American political life. Americans, so devoid of historical awareness, did not see that we had been through what Reagan proposed before. The age of the Robber Barons had amply demonstrated what an economy dominated by the frontier dog-eat-dog encounters between economic goliaths who had no regard for the common good was like and what its consequences were, e.g. repeated recessions and depressions.
Robert Nisbet in his book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary
observes that “The range of cures or terminations of boredom is a wide one: migration, desertion, war, revolution, murder, calculated cruelty to others, suicide, pornography, alcohol, narcotics. Tiberius relishing those he tortured, or Sherlock Holmes taking to the needle, the pains and results of boredom are everywhere to be seen, and nowhere more epidemically than in Western society at the present time.”
Obviously the political process was one of moving the country from a common interest politics to a self interest politics. Once the pressure of the Great Depression was off and the prosperity following World War II had taken effect, people thought they no longer needed government except for military purposes. A public hubris set in, massively encouraged by the corporate financial sector eager to weaken the people's control of them. We are now living with the consequences.
The social hazards of affluence are many. Among the most subtle, yet dangerous, is the tendency to boredom. Barbara Tuchman, I believe in her book The Guns of August, notes that the Great Powers of Europe were armed to the teeth and had detailed plans for invading each other prior to World War I and that this was commonly known. She describes one episode in which German. French and English college students are congenially noting that they would probably be fighting each other soon. Such is the absolute idiocy of boredom. In a world bent on massive introduction of technology, with the resultant removal of necessity, this poses an ominous portent for future generations. What the antidote might be I am not sure. We know that social purpose can address boredom, whether for good or ill. However, purpose as a motivator is very risky in its reliance upon the emotions and difficult to maintain for the same reason. Perhaps we will wind up breeding boredom-resistant humans as Aldous Huxley suggests in Brave New World.
Bob Newhard
Friday, June 26, 2009
On a Proper Frame of Reference
At our recent Citizens for Democracy meeting we had a discussion of plans for medical care in the United States. As the discussion progressed I was struck by the extent to which other issues became important in the discussion, especially cost.
Human beings, I believe, have a proclivity for thinking about the immediate and working their way to tangential issues as necessity seems to demand. This style of thinking, which I shall call “inside out” may be found less appropriate as the magnitude of human concerns becomes global. In what follows I want to explore a bit what happens when we think “outside in” global concerns first.
Suppose we approach the issue of health care from a global perspective. First there is the issue of health itself. Health means different things on a global, as distinct from a a national, point of view. The health of Americans, for example, may depend far more on global pandemics spawned in the massive slums of Africa, Asia and Latin America, than it does on single payer versus multiple payer health care schemes. Mike Davis discusses the dire consequences of a bird flu pandemic in his book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu which describes the potential, if not immanent, destructiveness of such a pandemic. This global perspective strongly suggests that we get clear about the social value of health care before we start talking about the cost of health care. This shift in priorities allows us to begin addressing the issue in terms of health rather than cost. It suggests that we in the United States need to address the social consequences of NOT having universal health care. This, in turn requires that we have a primary focus on the prevention of illness. One of the anomalies of U. S. health care is that the United States, despite its expenditure on medical services, ranks 50th out of 224 nations in life expectancy according to 2009 estimates from the CIA World Factbook.
From the point of view of the human species public sanitation, for example, has been responsible for saving more lives and extending the useful life span of more individuals than the introduction of life-extending devices, e.g. pace makers and stents, into the bodies of the elderly. A 2002 study of Medicare expenses for those 65 and older found costs averaged $37,581 during the last year of life versus $7,365 for non terminal years. If prevention were the primary target of health care large proportions of the population, including the poor, would be the focus of the heath care debate now going on, not who pays for what.
From a species point of view health is closely related to survival. This suggests that a major focus of health concern and investment should be on improving the health environment of the earth's multi-million resident slums. The world's largest slum is the 2.2 million Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. As the world's population continues to grow, these will be the breeding grounds of major health calamities.
The potential (inevitability?) of these slums to breed global catastrophe raises a second fundamental health issue: overpopulation. We know that the more interaction between animals, the more likely it is that the pathogens that infect them will be transmitted. This fact is compounded by the ability of these pathogens to mutate often and unpredictably. The closer that humans live to each other, e.g, the slums or the more often they come in contact, e.g. the global movement of people, the more likely a global pandemic will be created. Population growth has to be seen as a primary health issue and addressed as such. The health of the human species has to be a primary focus for reducing human population. I say this because our species has demonstrated a remarkable ability to abstract, symbolize, understand and apply our experience. There is a deeper meaning to René Descartes' “I think therefore I am.” To my mind it can be understood as I think therefor I am human.
While the above comments are by no means exhaustive, they do point, in my judgment, to something like the health care debate we should be having. We have not even established the value of health care. We have let the market do that, which is heavily biased toward those who have the money, not toward meeting health needs. We need to break out of this small box of health versus cost to health for human survival and optimization. We need to confront those institutions, whether religious or nationalist, that advocate population growth, as threatening human health. In brief, we need to keep our eyes on the fundamental meaning of health for our species, consider more specific issues in these human terms and, finally, not confuse the immediate with the real. Mankind must learn that it is its own worst enemy and its only salvation.
Bob Newhard
Human beings, I believe, have a proclivity for thinking about the immediate and working their way to tangential issues as necessity seems to demand. This style of thinking, which I shall call “inside out” may be found less appropriate as the magnitude of human concerns becomes global. In what follows I want to explore a bit what happens when we think “outside in” global concerns first.
Suppose we approach the issue of health care from a global perspective. First there is the issue of health itself. Health means different things on a global, as distinct from a a national, point of view. The health of Americans, for example, may depend far more on global pandemics spawned in the massive slums of Africa, Asia and Latin America, than it does on single payer versus multiple payer health care schemes. Mike Davis discusses the dire consequences of a bird flu pandemic in his book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu which describes the potential, if not immanent, destructiveness of such a pandemic. This global perspective strongly suggests that we get clear about the social value of health care before we start talking about the cost of health care. This shift in priorities allows us to begin addressing the issue in terms of health rather than cost. It suggests that we in the United States need to address the social consequences of NOT having universal health care. This, in turn requires that we have a primary focus on the prevention of illness. One of the anomalies of U. S. health care is that the United States, despite its expenditure on medical services, ranks 50th out of 224 nations in life expectancy according to 2009 estimates from the CIA World Factbook.
From the point of view of the human species public sanitation, for example, has been responsible for saving more lives and extending the useful life span of more individuals than the introduction of life-extending devices, e.g. pace makers and stents, into the bodies of the elderly. A 2002 study of Medicare expenses for those 65 and older found costs averaged $37,581 during the last year of life versus $7,365 for non terminal years. If prevention were the primary target of health care large proportions of the population, including the poor, would be the focus of the heath care debate now going on, not who pays for what.
From a species point of view health is closely related to survival. This suggests that a major focus of health concern and investment should be on improving the health environment of the earth's multi-million resident slums. The world's largest slum is the 2.2 million Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. As the world's population continues to grow, these will be the breeding grounds of major health calamities.
The potential (inevitability?) of these slums to breed global catastrophe raises a second fundamental health issue: overpopulation. We know that the more interaction between animals, the more likely it is that the pathogens that infect them will be transmitted. This fact is compounded by the ability of these pathogens to mutate often and unpredictably. The closer that humans live to each other, e.g, the slums or the more often they come in contact, e.g. the global movement of people, the more likely a global pandemic will be created. Population growth has to be seen as a primary health issue and addressed as such. The health of the human species has to be a primary focus for reducing human population. I say this because our species has demonstrated a remarkable ability to abstract, symbolize, understand and apply our experience. There is a deeper meaning to René Descartes' “I think therefore I am.” To my mind it can be understood as I think therefor I am human.
While the above comments are by no means exhaustive, they do point, in my judgment, to something like the health care debate we should be having. We have not even established the value of health care. We have let the market do that, which is heavily biased toward those who have the money, not toward meeting health needs. We need to break out of this small box of health versus cost to health for human survival and optimization. We need to confront those institutions, whether religious or nationalist, that advocate population growth, as threatening human health. In brief, we need to keep our eyes on the fundamental meaning of health for our species, consider more specific issues in these human terms and, finally, not confuse the immediate with the real. Mankind must learn that it is its own worst enemy and its only salvation.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Brave New World a la Corporate Capitalism and Corporate Deception
Aldous Huxley delivered his view of our future technologized world in his book Brave New World. In its May 25, 2009 issue Time Magazine delivers a Special Report detailing its view of the emerging world of work. I quote from its cover: “You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won't look much like your old one. There is no longer a ladder and you may never get to retire, but there is a world of opportunity if you can figure out a new path. Ten lessons for succeeding in the new American workplace.” This is a world of me-first, aggressive entrepreneurs in which everyone is responsible for themselves. Time tells the inhabitants of this inevitable and immediate future that they can forget the benefits that accompany employment such as social security, health, etc. As entrepreneurs they will buy their own “benefits.” The report is replete with statements from experts, reports from government agencies and statistics. There is no external goal to all this “creative” activity. It is Adam Smith's invisible hand writ large. Whatever the market, that monstrous creation of money, wants it will get. If people's needs cannot find a suitable place in the market, usually the needs of the poor, they will not be met.
Interestingly, the report envisions many opportunities for entrepreneurs to create franchising corporations, thereby betraying the implicit conflict between small business and small-business-destroying corporations. As has often been observed, the mark of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over and expect to get a different result.
By way of buttressing its argument, it says that the cost of startup companies is decreasing constantly, making this form of economic effort affordable to more people. It does not mention that startups fail at a rate as high as 90% after two years. While there are many critics of this figure, mostly from business sources, a constant failure rate of even 50% would create a very unstable economy. We Americans do not appreciate the value that long-term stable companies and especially, governmental entities,contribute to the stability of our society.
Underneath all of this however is the insidious societal fragmentation that modern capitalism has introduced into our society. This is a dog-eat-dog world of survival competition between individuals, which no society can long tolerate and remain a democracy. As always it will produce top dogs who will dominate the society. This kind of raw capitalism is inimical to democracy.
There is an effort to take the edge off this economic horizon by noting that, to a significant extent, the leaders of these enterprises are likely to be women because their softer feminine style of leadership is more productive in this economy of team effort – understanding the team may consist of members scattered around the world. While women are certainly capable of management, if their's is a softer form of leadership somebody should tell Meg Whitman ex CEO of Ebay and now a Republican candidate for California governor. Meg would cut 30,000 state jobs. For this billionaire woman this is obviously preferable to going after the excessively wealthy at a time when the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than it has been in the last hundred years. So much for the softer feminine management style. It is also rumored that Carly Fiorina, ex CEO of Hewlett-Packard will seek to replace Barbara Boxer.
Why, one may ask, is a mainstream national publication publishing such an article in view of the obvious current failure of just this kind of economics? This is Milton Friedman's capitalism with a vengeance dolled up as our inevitable future. I suspect this is part of the corporate media's attempt to divert public attention from the non-market solutions to the debacle that unregulated capitalism has wrought. It is an attempt to dazzle the public, especially the young, with the manifold opportunities for wealth through entrepreneurship. What is neglected, as it so often is, is the impact on the social fabric of our society. If we let the marketplace and the wealthy who dominate it prescribe the economic system of the future we thereby let them prescribe the social welfare of the people. We have had more than enough of this gross deception. It is high time we made a major issue of the danger unfettered capitalism poses to democracy and the welfare of its people.
This then is the consummate duplicity of the corporate media: to sell the populace on a future of an entrepreneur-dominated economy, which of course would leave no room for multinational multi-product corporations. They feel safe in doing this because they have the resources to buy up any untoward competition that might develop. The bottom line is that progressives must vigorously challenge this future. First, we need to clearly and energetically demonstrate how the market is being used to structure our society. Second, it is necessary to show people why the market is a lousy paradigm for organizing a humane society. Its goals are not to create a better, more just society, but to maximize profit, which alone creates its values. Third, we need to clearly articulate an alternative to the “free market.” This latter can be done by articulating a mixed economy of regulated capitalism for social benefit. Economies such as those of the Scandinavian countries are examples. However, some believe leaving even a remnant of capitalism in place would allow it cancer-like to gain control again as wealth becomes increasingly aggregated by the few. An economy of, for and by the people needs to keep capitalism at the periphery of society. The early citizens of this country were very distrustful of corporations. Some of the colonies were themselves corporations controlled by investors in England. Hence they strictly controlled corporations, which were authorized mainly for building infrastructure, e.g roads and canals. These corporations were sunsetted at the termination of the project. Are we still wise enough to make corporations subordinate to the accomplishment of social goals?
Bob Newhard
Interestingly, the report envisions many opportunities for entrepreneurs to create franchising corporations, thereby betraying the implicit conflict between small business and small-business-destroying corporations. As has often been observed, the mark of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over and expect to get a different result.
By way of buttressing its argument, it says that the cost of startup companies is decreasing constantly, making this form of economic effort affordable to more people. It does not mention that startups fail at a rate as high as 90% after two years. While there are many critics of this figure, mostly from business sources, a constant failure rate of even 50% would create a very unstable economy. We Americans do not appreciate the value that long-term stable companies and especially, governmental entities,contribute to the stability of our society.
Underneath all of this however is the insidious societal fragmentation that modern capitalism has introduced into our society. This is a dog-eat-dog world of survival competition between individuals, which no society can long tolerate and remain a democracy. As always it will produce top dogs who will dominate the society. This kind of raw capitalism is inimical to democracy.
There is an effort to take the edge off this economic horizon by noting that, to a significant extent, the leaders of these enterprises are likely to be women because their softer feminine style of leadership is more productive in this economy of team effort – understanding the team may consist of members scattered around the world. While women are certainly capable of management, if their's is a softer form of leadership somebody should tell Meg Whitman ex CEO of Ebay and now a Republican candidate for California governor. Meg would cut 30,000 state jobs. For this billionaire woman this is obviously preferable to going after the excessively wealthy at a time when the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than it has been in the last hundred years. So much for the softer feminine management style. It is also rumored that Carly Fiorina, ex CEO of Hewlett-Packard will seek to replace Barbara Boxer.
Why, one may ask, is a mainstream national publication publishing such an article in view of the obvious current failure of just this kind of economics? This is Milton Friedman's capitalism with a vengeance dolled up as our inevitable future. I suspect this is part of the corporate media's attempt to divert public attention from the non-market solutions to the debacle that unregulated capitalism has wrought. It is an attempt to dazzle the public, especially the young, with the manifold opportunities for wealth through entrepreneurship. What is neglected, as it so often is, is the impact on the social fabric of our society. If we let the marketplace and the wealthy who dominate it prescribe the economic system of the future we thereby let them prescribe the social welfare of the people. We have had more than enough of this gross deception. It is high time we made a major issue of the danger unfettered capitalism poses to democracy and the welfare of its people.
This then is the consummate duplicity of the corporate media: to sell the populace on a future of an entrepreneur-dominated economy, which of course would leave no room for multinational multi-product corporations. They feel safe in doing this because they have the resources to buy up any untoward competition that might develop. The bottom line is that progressives must vigorously challenge this future. First, we need to clearly and energetically demonstrate how the market is being used to structure our society. Second, it is necessary to show people why the market is a lousy paradigm for organizing a humane society. Its goals are not to create a better, more just society, but to maximize profit, which alone creates its values. Third, we need to clearly articulate an alternative to the “free market.” This latter can be done by articulating a mixed economy of regulated capitalism for social benefit. Economies such as those of the Scandinavian countries are examples. However, some believe leaving even a remnant of capitalism in place would allow it cancer-like to gain control again as wealth becomes increasingly aggregated by the few. An economy of, for and by the people needs to keep capitalism at the periphery of society. The early citizens of this country were very distrustful of corporations. Some of the colonies were themselves corporations controlled by investors in England. Hence they strictly controlled corporations, which were authorized mainly for building infrastructure, e.g roads and canals. These corporations were sunsetted at the termination of the project. Are we still wise enough to make corporations subordinate to the accomplishment of social goals?
Bob Newhard
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