Many have speculated on the diametric difference between Obama's campaign message of fundamental change and the fundamental lack of change in his actions and policies as President. Some say Obama did not bring change because the office of President changed him. Others, with whom I agree, say that Obama never intended to bring change, that he is the great deceiver. From his very first decision to name Rahm Immanuel as his Chief of Staff and his ouster of Howard Dean as head of the Democratic National Committee it was clear that nothing resembling the change he trumpeted during his campaign was going to take place. It has only gotten worse. There is a large and chilling lesson to be learned from this enormous deception. That lesson is crystal clear in telling us who is in charge of this country and what their intentions are for those of us who live here and those on this planet that may suffer from the use of America's power both economic and military.
From his 700 million dollar bailout of major US banks (talk about "trickle down"), to his pursuit of American oil hegemony on the shores of the Caspian Sea, otherwise known as the Afghanistan surge, Obama has demonstrated his allegiance to the wealthy of this nation and the continued political domination of corporations. It is, in my judgment, imperative that the people of this country become focused on corporate America as the single largest threat to their democracy and personal well being. Profit, not people, has been the articulating dominator of this country far too long. It is now a question of them or us. Obama, with a mandate no president has had since Ronald Reagan, refused to use it to redirect this country to the welfare of its citizens instead of the welfare of its wealthy.
The depth of Osama's commitment to the wealthy and their corporations is portrayed in an excellent, well documented report by David DeGraw titled Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down. The report can be found at http://ampedstatus.com/af-pak-war-racket-the-obama-illusion-comes-crashing-down. DeGraw describes how the Afghanistan surge is actually directed at denying Russia and China access to one of the world's largest oil reserves located on the Kazakhstan coast of the Caspian Sea. More accurately, it is aimed at providing that oil to United States oil corporations. Wall Street firms, especially Goldman-Sachs, are involved in this effort by way of setting up an oil commodities market outside the United States to handle the world-wide competition for this oil. Thus, to make the depth of the deception that is the Afghanistan War a little clearer, the United States military is waging war, killing and being killed, for the benefit of oil corporations who will not only make immense amounts of money from that oil, but will, in addition, manipulate the speculative market for this oil to further raise the oil's cost and their profits. This monstrous undertaking involving the killing and maiming of the innocent in the thousands for the benefit of egregiously wealthy corporations, their officers and investors, is but an instance of the capitalist greed we have unleashed upon the world. We progressives must make clear the depths of calumny that the people are being subject to. DeGraw's essay is a good place to start.
As a result of Obama's abandonment of progressives it is, in my judgment, fruitless to continue the pursuit of some sort of accommodation with him. He patently is not interested. The problem is what is to be done to save our democracy in the absence of political clout. Some, such as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are focused on electing progressive candidates to national, state and local political offices. Commendable as this is, I do not think we have time for this approach. The Copenhagen climate conference, for example, has demonstrated that the wealthy portion of the planet is prepared to sacrifice the poorer southern nations of the world, especially Africa, by way of "cap and trade" the market for which strongly favors the wealth of the rich countries. The United States is a major player in this effort, which would lock in this market approach until at least 2020, which is way beyond the time we have to act on this most momentous of issues. As I say, we do not have time for an incremental approach to changing our government and our national priorities.
To my mind progressives have to organize to take the issues and the short term impacts that they will generate to the people. As an example, Sam Pizzigati has proposed that instead of just increasing the taxes on the rich, who, with their time and money, will energetically seek to reverse them, we need in addition to cap both the top and the bottom of the annual income scale. Sam's essay can be found at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109pizzigati.html . Decades ago Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income for all citizens. He saw that, with the advancement of technology and the consequent elimination of jobs, the job could no longer be the sole vehicle for distributing the gross national product. A guaranteed annual income or some surrogate would "cap" the bottom of the economic scale. Capping the maximum income that a citizen could receive would not only create a more equitable society, it would, by linking the welfare of the rich and the poor with these "caps," provide a constant awareness among the citizenry of equity, especially when the wealthy begin their often devious efforts to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of society. The importance of this latter point can be demonstrated by reflecting on how Reagan persuaded the average American that increasing the wealth of the already wealthy by tax breaks and other measures would stimulate the economy and thereby provide jobs for the rest of us. In this connection it should also be noticed that we have been indoctrinated to accept the "business cycle" as normal. What is seldom pointed out is that since the advent of modern technology, especially computers and robots, after every recession there have been fewer jobs available. In other words the "normal" business cycle is now in the business of eliminating jobs. As long as the job remains the basic means of distributing the gross national product this problem can only increase.
I think we can now see more clearly what Ralph Nader has been saying for years, namely, that in the area of corporate domination of American society there is no significant difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They are both wedded to corporate domination of our country and our world. As for the latter matter Arundhati Roy, in her book of essays titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers has described the corporate pillaging of India by the very same corporations that have been so detrimental to our own society. What David DeGraw has shown us about Obama and what Sam Pizzigati has proposed as a remedy for the dominating role of wealth in our society reflects both the cause of our terrible times and the kind of remedy progressives need to pursue. Lacking a political party progressives need to push both the underlying cause of our dysfunctional and increasingly dangerous societal behavior and the kind of remedies need. This is exactly what the progressives did at the turn of the 20th century with their push to base our currency on silver and gold rather than the much scarcer gold alone, which the wealthy could so easily control. This is the significance of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. Let us go forth and do likewise.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Progressivism Reborn or A New Progressive Paradigm
One of the salient failures of contemporary progressivism is the absence of a basic progressive paradigm. The conservatives under Ronald Reagan used the paradigm of an inept malmotivated government as the enemy to overcome. Government was portrayed as the enemy of freedom. The "positive" side of this paradigm was "freedom" from government, indeed as we have seen, from democracy itself. That is because the freedom of the wealthy is at war with the democracy that secures freedom for the rest of us. The genius in this "freedom" paradigm is that it appeals to a basic human desire. The range of political games that can be played between the paradigms of big brother and the self identity that is the basic motivator of freedom, is enormous and the conservatives have played them to the point of the ME generation," Greed is Good", and the moose-skinning individualism of Sarah Palin. However, the real name of the game was not big brother and freedom, but corporate capitalism's takeover of an otherwise distracted country. By the rigging of this country for maximum corporate profit conservatism is and has been a profound enemy of democracy. Our voting has been about as effective as that of Soviet Russians voting for members of the Duma. We no longer have a democracy, but a plutocracy.
It is instructive, however, to understand why the conservatives have been so successful in transferring massive amounts of wealth to the rich with no uproar from the populace. As noted above, they have a designated enemy and a positive remedy. Progressives, I suggest, need a similar paradigm used for the benefit of the people and honest in portraying the world as it is. A progressive paradigm, I think, must posit excessive wealth as the enemy. Highly concentrated wealth is what has created a dominant source of power, deprived us of an effective vote and hollowed out our economy by substituting finance for industry and shipping jobs off shore. It is the wealthy that formed G. W. Bush's acknowledged base, i.e. "the haves and the have mores" and generated the Iraq war to maximize corporate profit. In brief, excessive, maldistributed wealth has been the source of massive harm to our citizens and mankind in general. Progressives need to forcefully detail the magnitude of the harm that excessive wealth has done. We need to detail the effects of the greatest gap between the rich and the rest of us in nearly a century.
The "positive" part of a progressive paradigm will, in my judgment, require deeper thought and understanding of human motivation than we now have. When Ronald Reagan tapped freedom as the goal of society he called into play a basic human desire. Progressives must find an equally fundamental element in human nature to call upon. The problem can be understood when one reflects upon the fact that the whole of human civilization has been accomplished in the face of basic human predilections. Civilization is not in our primitive genes. It was built up substantially as a result of thought and the overcoming of our basic human predilections. Thought, for most human beings, is not a fundamental response mechanism, which accounts for our species' increasingly terrible short sightedness. What to do? I suspect that we must make clear the necessity of the group for our survival as a species. We are after all a social animal. We can begin this process by making widely known the many times that group responses to danger have saved us when individual responses would have or did fail. Why, after all, do we gather together when threatened? Thus the paradigms of the destructiveness of excessive wealth and the value of groups (some say communities) as vehicles for mitigating conflicts that would otherwise be extremely deleterious to humankind could provide a focus for progressive proposals and practices.
This still leaves the larger and much more difficult question as to what progressivism should pursue in the long or very long run. Questions of this sort force one to get very clear about what one means by progressivism. I suspect at root progressivism means creating a society in which the community sees its task as optimizing the potential of its citizens and citizens see their responsibility to carry forward a society that will optimize the potential of future citizens. This will require a much longer range of forethought than is currently permitted by the extremely short term next-quarter's-profit thinking of contemporary corporate horizons. The whole of capitalism, as now practiced, is made both irrelevant and dangerous by such a requirement. But human beings have practiced the art of responsibility to the future. The five nation Iroquois Confederation, at the time of this nation's founding, considered all of their proposed actions in terms of the welfare of those to the seventh generation in the future. They could do this because their world changed relatively little from generation to generation. They controlled birth rates to maintain their relationship to their natural resources. For us to do likewise we will not only have to control our reproduction rate, we will have to slow our uncontrolled development and deployment of new technology. Considerations such as these begin to highlight the immensity of the task facing progressivism. It prompts me to ask as some have asked of democracy itself, is it up to the task? We have, however, little choice if our species is to persist.
Bob Newhard
It is instructive, however, to understand why the conservatives have been so successful in transferring massive amounts of wealth to the rich with no uproar from the populace. As noted above, they have a designated enemy and a positive remedy. Progressives, I suggest, need a similar paradigm used for the benefit of the people and honest in portraying the world as it is. A progressive paradigm, I think, must posit excessive wealth as the enemy. Highly concentrated wealth is what has created a dominant source of power, deprived us of an effective vote and hollowed out our economy by substituting finance for industry and shipping jobs off shore. It is the wealthy that formed G. W. Bush's acknowledged base, i.e. "the haves and the have mores" and generated the Iraq war to maximize corporate profit. In brief, excessive, maldistributed wealth has been the source of massive harm to our citizens and mankind in general. Progressives need to forcefully detail the magnitude of the harm that excessive wealth has done. We need to detail the effects of the greatest gap between the rich and the rest of us in nearly a century.
The "positive" part of a progressive paradigm will, in my judgment, require deeper thought and understanding of human motivation than we now have. When Ronald Reagan tapped freedom as the goal of society he called into play a basic human desire. Progressives must find an equally fundamental element in human nature to call upon. The problem can be understood when one reflects upon the fact that the whole of human civilization has been accomplished in the face of basic human predilections. Civilization is not in our primitive genes. It was built up substantially as a result of thought and the overcoming of our basic human predilections. Thought, for most human beings, is not a fundamental response mechanism, which accounts for our species' increasingly terrible short sightedness. What to do? I suspect that we must make clear the necessity of the group for our survival as a species. We are after all a social animal. We can begin this process by making widely known the many times that group responses to danger have saved us when individual responses would have or did fail. Why, after all, do we gather together when threatened? Thus the paradigms of the destructiveness of excessive wealth and the value of groups (some say communities) as vehicles for mitigating conflicts that would otherwise be extremely deleterious to humankind could provide a focus for progressive proposals and practices.
This still leaves the larger and much more difficult question as to what progressivism should pursue in the long or very long run. Questions of this sort force one to get very clear about what one means by progressivism. I suspect at root progressivism means creating a society in which the community sees its task as optimizing the potential of its citizens and citizens see their responsibility to carry forward a society that will optimize the potential of future citizens. This will require a much longer range of forethought than is currently permitted by the extremely short term next-quarter's-profit thinking of contemporary corporate horizons. The whole of capitalism, as now practiced, is made both irrelevant and dangerous by such a requirement. But human beings have practiced the art of responsibility to the future. The five nation Iroquois Confederation, at the time of this nation's founding, considered all of their proposed actions in terms of the welfare of those to the seventh generation in the future. They could do this because their world changed relatively little from generation to generation. They controlled birth rates to maintain their relationship to their natural resources. For us to do likewise we will not only have to control our reproduction rate, we will have to slow our uncontrolled development and deployment of new technology. Considerations such as these begin to highlight the immensity of the task facing progressivism. It prompts me to ask as some have asked of democracy itself, is it up to the task? We have, however, little choice if our species is to persist.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Malicious Doubt
Doubt has had a checkered history in Western Civilization. For long periods during the Dark and much of the Middle Ages it was dangerous to express doubt on religious matters. However, with the rise of science doubt found a definite role in human inquiry. Doubt is essential to science. It is what allows science to avoid dogmatism and encourage inquiry and not infrequently controversy. With science doubt became essential to the establishment of fact. Doubt is also an acknowledgement of human noetic finitude. However, doubt is also an emotional response to the world about us and to other humans.
With the advent of advertising, and its applied psychology, doubt as an emotional response became a fundamental tool for promoting corporate agendas. David Michaels in his book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health begins his account with the tobacco industry's campaign against the mounting evidence that tobacco smoking caused cancer. This has been a 50 year battle against mounting scientific evidence including the Surgeon General's declaration of the danger of tobacco smoking and eventually fighting the accusation that tobacco advertising was targeting children. To this day we permit the sale of a known addictive carcinogen. The primary ingredient in the tobacco industry's defense was doubt. The evidence against tobacco smoking was statistical. The tobacco company argued that until a laboratory test could demonstrate the connection between smoking and cancer in human beings, forget mice, regulation of their product was unwarranted. Thus the companies were able to raise doubt (the emotional variety) in the public's mind by opposing the "hard" sciences of physiology and chemistry to the supposed "soft" science of statistics, i.e. the public belief that if you can lie with statistics all statistics are suspect. The tobacco companies would have you forget the fact that all epidemiology is founded on statistics. Thus doubt so used in advertising was as good as disproof, without disproof's risk of being exposed. One can't be sued for doubting something. Doubt is not false advertising.
This Madison Avenue technique of using unjustified doubt to defeat truth moved with alacrity to politics. A most notable case was the defeat of the Clinton health care plan. The Harry and Louise television ad promoted by the pharmaceutical corporations did much to defeat this effort to get a national health plan. The ad did not say that a national health plan was dangerous, unethical, destructive of free enterprise, un-American, etc. It even granted that some improvement was necessary. It merely had Harry and Louise, in conversation at home, express reservations as to whether this plan was the right one. In other words it instilled doubt in the viewer's mind. That was as good as proving the health plan was wrong with no risk of contradiction and much less controversy.
Another, and for the purposes of this column final, example of the use of doubt not only to dissuade masses of people, but to replace knowledge with myth, is the modern rise of creationism. This is not merely a subversion of knowledge, but a direct attack upon it. The proponents of creationism begin by casting doubt on evolution, by calling it "merely" a theory thereby leaving it open to doubt and justifying the teaching of competing theories in public schools. They did this by equating the scientific meaning of theory and the common notion that a theory is nothing but an opinion. In science a theory is, first of all, capable of acquiring evidence and thereby increasingly verifiable. Theories may thus have more or less evidence for them and to that extent constitute knowledge. Because the popular mind equates knowledge with certainty, theories are always less noetically reliable than knowledge. It should be pointed out that the only area in which we actually have certainty is when conclusions are logically drawn from premises that have the conclusion imbedded in them. We call this discipline mathematics. Discoveries can be made here because we may be unclear about the premises we use. For example, for centuries Euclid's geometry was believed to be the only possible geometry and as such described the real world. However, in the 19th century two perfectly consistent non-Euclidian geometries were developed, one by Riemann, the other by Lobachevsky. Among other things two parallel lines could intersect in these geometries. Further when Einstein was looking for a geometry to describe the universe of relativity, which Euclid's did not, he found that Riemann's system worked perfectly. Thus pure mathematical innovation became a function of an empirical science. This, in very rough outline, exemplifies how scientific theories are developed. They are not insubstantial speculations.
Another approach to trying to get the public to understand the nature of scientific knowledge is undertaken by Richard Dawkins in a Free Inquiry article titled The Fact of Evolution adapted from his new book The Greatest Show On Earth:The Evidence for Evolution. In this article Dawkins seeks to articulate the nature of evidence. In it Dawkins describes some of the consequences of denying evolution's facticity. He points out that the evidence for evolution is far more substantial than, for example, that of the Jewish holocaust, yet even though there are holocaust deniers there is no mass belief that the holocaust did not happen. More important to my mind, is pointing out the scientific consequences of denying evolution. Evolution is necessary to the study of genetics and to the understanding of the relatedness of all life forms. To quote Dawkins, "Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond, sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Yet people will doubt it, which is what I mean by the psychological response we call doubt and it is this "doubt" that is fed, manipulated and promoted by those having powerful interests other than truth. The searchers after profit and power are not to be trusted as searchers for truth.
What are the perils that confront a society that has been conditioned to emotional responses to its problems, in this case the emotional correlate of doubt, in place of the factual, evidentiary use of the term? First there are no built in limits to the emotional use of language. The only test is whether it solicits the emotional response of the user. The truth or falsity of language, its facticity, is not only independent of its emotional use, it is often deliberately contravened by the emotional use. Thus a society that cannot distinguish between fact and emotion is doomed to be a continuing victim of deception, untested decision making and the cruelest of social consequences. The whole catastrophe of our Middle East involvement, the horrendous death rates, the societal destruction and the massive waste of money drastically needed for humane purposes can be laid at the feet of a massive substitution of the emotional connotations of language for its cognitive uses. Language matters!
Bob Newhard
With the advent of advertising, and its applied psychology, doubt as an emotional response became a fundamental tool for promoting corporate agendas. David Michaels in his book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health begins his account with the tobacco industry's campaign against the mounting evidence that tobacco smoking caused cancer. This has been a 50 year battle against mounting scientific evidence including the Surgeon General's declaration of the danger of tobacco smoking and eventually fighting the accusation that tobacco advertising was targeting children. To this day we permit the sale of a known addictive carcinogen. The primary ingredient in the tobacco industry's defense was doubt. The evidence against tobacco smoking was statistical. The tobacco company argued that until a laboratory test could demonstrate the connection between smoking and cancer in human beings, forget mice, regulation of their product was unwarranted. Thus the companies were able to raise doubt (the emotional variety) in the public's mind by opposing the "hard" sciences of physiology and chemistry to the supposed "soft" science of statistics, i.e. the public belief that if you can lie with statistics all statistics are suspect. The tobacco companies would have you forget the fact that all epidemiology is founded on statistics. Thus doubt so used in advertising was as good as disproof, without disproof's risk of being exposed. One can't be sued for doubting something. Doubt is not false advertising.
This Madison Avenue technique of using unjustified doubt to defeat truth moved with alacrity to politics. A most notable case was the defeat of the Clinton health care plan. The Harry and Louise television ad promoted by the pharmaceutical corporations did much to defeat this effort to get a national health plan. The ad did not say that a national health plan was dangerous, unethical, destructive of free enterprise, un-American, etc. It even granted that some improvement was necessary. It merely had Harry and Louise, in conversation at home, express reservations as to whether this plan was the right one. In other words it instilled doubt in the viewer's mind. That was as good as proving the health plan was wrong with no risk of contradiction and much less controversy.
Another, and for the purposes of this column final, example of the use of doubt not only to dissuade masses of people, but to replace knowledge with myth, is the modern rise of creationism. This is not merely a subversion of knowledge, but a direct attack upon it. The proponents of creationism begin by casting doubt on evolution, by calling it "merely" a theory thereby leaving it open to doubt and justifying the teaching of competing theories in public schools. They did this by equating the scientific meaning of theory and the common notion that a theory is nothing but an opinion. In science a theory is, first of all, capable of acquiring evidence and thereby increasingly verifiable. Theories may thus have more or less evidence for them and to that extent constitute knowledge. Because the popular mind equates knowledge with certainty, theories are always less noetically reliable than knowledge. It should be pointed out that the only area in which we actually have certainty is when conclusions are logically drawn from premises that have the conclusion imbedded in them. We call this discipline mathematics. Discoveries can be made here because we may be unclear about the premises we use. For example, for centuries Euclid's geometry was believed to be the only possible geometry and as such described the real world. However, in the 19th century two perfectly consistent non-Euclidian geometries were developed, one by Riemann, the other by Lobachevsky. Among other things two parallel lines could intersect in these geometries. Further when Einstein was looking for a geometry to describe the universe of relativity, which Euclid's did not, he found that Riemann's system worked perfectly. Thus pure mathematical innovation became a function of an empirical science. This, in very rough outline, exemplifies how scientific theories are developed. They are not insubstantial speculations.
Another approach to trying to get the public to understand the nature of scientific knowledge is undertaken by Richard Dawkins in a Free Inquiry article titled The Fact of Evolution adapted from his new book The Greatest Show On Earth:The Evidence for Evolution. In this article Dawkins seeks to articulate the nature of evidence. In it Dawkins describes some of the consequences of denying evolution's facticity. He points out that the evidence for evolution is far more substantial than, for example, that of the Jewish holocaust, yet even though there are holocaust deniers there is no mass belief that the holocaust did not happen. More important to my mind, is pointing out the scientific consequences of denying evolution. Evolution is necessary to the study of genetics and to the understanding of the relatedness of all life forms. To quote Dawkins, "Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond, sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Yet people will doubt it, which is what I mean by the psychological response we call doubt and it is this "doubt" that is fed, manipulated and promoted by those having powerful interests other than truth. The searchers after profit and power are not to be trusted as searchers for truth.
What are the perils that confront a society that has been conditioned to emotional responses to its problems, in this case the emotional correlate of doubt, in place of the factual, evidentiary use of the term? First there are no built in limits to the emotional use of language. The only test is whether it solicits the emotional response of the user. The truth or falsity of language, its facticity, is not only independent of its emotional use, it is often deliberately contravened by the emotional use. Thus a society that cannot distinguish between fact and emotion is doomed to be a continuing victim of deception, untested decision making and the cruelest of social consequences. The whole catastrophe of our Middle East involvement, the horrendous death rates, the societal destruction and the massive waste of money drastically needed for humane purposes can be laid at the feet of a massive substitution of the emotional connotations of language for its cognitive uses. Language matters!
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Context of Freedom
Democracy has been defined in our founding documents and in our beliefs about society as equality on the one hand and as merit-based on the other. We have "All men are created equal" in our Declaration of Independence on the one hand and the Horatio Alger myth of the self-made man on the other. Both of these archetypes are rooted in the European rebellion against monarchy and inherited wealth and status. The conflict between these two democratic values has been glossed by asserting that equality means equality of opportunity not equal access to society's resources. Jefferson sought to bridge this gap by using education as a device for creating upward mobility based on accomplishment. This is the duality that underlay Ronald Reagan's attack on the Rooseveltian consensus - the rights of merit versus the rights conferred on humans as such. We are now living with the results of this unresolved duality.
Politically, in England the conflict between egalitarianism and meritocracy played out this way. Prior to the Thatcher government the Labour Party supported programs closely analogous to those promulgated by Franklin Roosevelt in this country. The major domestic thrust was to promote the well being of the population at large. Thatcher, like Reagan, who was in many respects her protégé, set out to destroy the world labour had built since the end of World War II. You may recall her attacks on the unionized coal miners and the privatizing of the British railway system. She did this on the premise that Britain had to free its best talent (the corporations) to energize a new economics driven by profit. Under Tony Blair the Labour Party, seeking to compete with the Tories, substituted upward mobility for equality as did Bill Clinton's substitution of workfare for welfare, which gave us the working poor - exactly the kind of labor that corporations desire. Notice the high incidence of Walmart employees who qualify for food stamps, which means the American taxpayer is subsidizing this commercial behemoth.
This issue is addressed in a recent study "In Pursuit of
Egalitarianism - And why social mobility cannot get us there" by Rebecca Hickman that raises the question whether the value of freedom is better served by a culture based on merit-driven upward mobility, or by a society based on equality. This document may be downloaded at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/ . In this paper Hickman argues that freedom is better served by egalitarianism than by meritocracy. The reason is that freedom is a product of society, which meritocracy by rewarding those having "merit" more than others debilitates. Merit is, by definition, scarcer than the average. Hence a society's wealth will inevitably migrate to those having merit thereby creating a bifurcated society in which not only wealth and power, but freedom itself are agglomerated to those having merit. Hence a meritocracy cannot distribute freedom any more than it can wealth and power. This is why Republicans were so freaked out when Obama said wealth should be spread around a little. They know that wealth is power and spreading wealth around means spreading power around, which is democracy. A meritocracy thus is, in fact, an enemy of democracy. Meritocracy is a version of an old story, going back at least to Plato, in which personal values such as merit, when applied to society as a whole, result in gross unfairness and despotism. With Plato the primacy of knowledge led to the philosopher king, a dictatorship. Perhaps the most revealing statement of the American meritocracy was George W. Bush's message to a banquet of wealthy supporters. He told them "You are my base." This is about as anti-democratic as a politician can get. Yet, tellingly, I have been unable to find any such characterization of that utterance; so deep has become the American acceptance of inequality.
Egalitarianism, contrary to what conservatives would have people believe, makes every citizen a stakeholder and not only distributes wealth, power and freedom more evenly, but it greatly diminishes a society's internal friction and promotes cooperation thereby mitigating such disasters as as the governmental abandonment of Katrina victims. Egalitarianism is an old bugaboo of conservatives that is said to lead to domination by the majority and the stifling of personal merit. This is the burden of Ayn Rand's writing, the ideological roots of libertarianism. And as George Orwell observed in his allegory Animal Farm, some people are more equal than others. However, this is merely to observe that any virtue can be subverted. Obviously in a meritocracy some people are, of necessity, more equal than others. Because Communism used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" it does not mean it makes sense. The dictator of the Soviet Union was, for example, Joseph Stalin who was not above murdering dissenting proletarians just as capitalist dictators such as Mussolini, Pinochet and China's leadership have done. Dictatorships can arise in any society, but in a society where fairness and concern for all is the operative narrative it is much less likely to do so.
The failure to grasp the significance of the distinction between meritocracy and egalitarianism in practice has led to Ronald Reagan's war on the poor, the beginning of a massive shift of national wealth to the rich and the debasement of the Democratic party as it fell prey to the wealthy and tried to emulate the Republicans' pernicious use of merit to deprive our society of the resources it needs to assure something of a level playing field to all of its citizens.
Bob Newhard
Politically, in England the conflict between egalitarianism and meritocracy played out this way. Prior to the Thatcher government the Labour Party supported programs closely analogous to those promulgated by Franklin Roosevelt in this country. The major domestic thrust was to promote the well being of the population at large. Thatcher, like Reagan, who was in many respects her protégé, set out to destroy the world labour had built since the end of World War II. You may recall her attacks on the unionized coal miners and the privatizing of the British railway system. She did this on the premise that Britain had to free its best talent (the corporations) to energize a new economics driven by profit. Under Tony Blair the Labour Party, seeking to compete with the Tories, substituted upward mobility for equality as did Bill Clinton's substitution of workfare for welfare, which gave us the working poor - exactly the kind of labor that corporations desire. Notice the high incidence of Walmart employees who qualify for food stamps, which means the American taxpayer is subsidizing this commercial behemoth.
This issue is addressed in a recent study "In Pursuit of
Egalitarianism - And why social mobility cannot get us there" by Rebecca Hickman that raises the question whether the value of freedom is better served by a culture based on merit-driven upward mobility, or by a society based on equality. This document may be downloaded at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/ . In this paper Hickman argues that freedom is better served by egalitarianism than by meritocracy. The reason is that freedom is a product of society, which meritocracy by rewarding those having "merit" more than others debilitates. Merit is, by definition, scarcer than the average. Hence a society's wealth will inevitably migrate to those having merit thereby creating a bifurcated society in which not only wealth and power, but freedom itself are agglomerated to those having merit. Hence a meritocracy cannot distribute freedom any more than it can wealth and power. This is why Republicans were so freaked out when Obama said wealth should be spread around a little. They know that wealth is power and spreading wealth around means spreading power around, which is democracy. A meritocracy thus is, in fact, an enemy of democracy. Meritocracy is a version of an old story, going back at least to Plato, in which personal values such as merit, when applied to society as a whole, result in gross unfairness and despotism. With Plato the primacy of knowledge led to the philosopher king, a dictatorship. Perhaps the most revealing statement of the American meritocracy was George W. Bush's message to a banquet of wealthy supporters. He told them "You are my base." This is about as anti-democratic as a politician can get. Yet, tellingly, I have been unable to find any such characterization of that utterance; so deep has become the American acceptance of inequality.
Egalitarianism, contrary to what conservatives would have people believe, makes every citizen a stakeholder and not only distributes wealth, power and freedom more evenly, but it greatly diminishes a society's internal friction and promotes cooperation thereby mitigating such disasters as as the governmental abandonment of Katrina victims. Egalitarianism is an old bugaboo of conservatives that is said to lead to domination by the majority and the stifling of personal merit. This is the burden of Ayn Rand's writing, the ideological roots of libertarianism. And as George Orwell observed in his allegory Animal Farm, some people are more equal than others. However, this is merely to observe that any virtue can be subverted. Obviously in a meritocracy some people are, of necessity, more equal than others. Because Communism used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" it does not mean it makes sense. The dictator of the Soviet Union was, for example, Joseph Stalin who was not above murdering dissenting proletarians just as capitalist dictators such as Mussolini, Pinochet and China's leadership have done. Dictatorships can arise in any society, but in a society where fairness and concern for all is the operative narrative it is much less likely to do so.
The failure to grasp the significance of the distinction between meritocracy and egalitarianism in practice has led to Ronald Reagan's war on the poor, the beginning of a massive shift of national wealth to the rich and the debasement of the Democratic party as it fell prey to the wealthy and tried to emulate the Republicans' pernicious use of merit to deprive our society of the resources it needs to assure something of a level playing field to all of its citizens.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 1, 2009
On Reading Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-rich Can Save Us"
I am reading Ralph Nader's new book, a novel, titled "Only the Super-rich Can Save Us." I have not yet finished it, but I believe I am far enough along to discuss Nader's view of the state of the union and its desperate need for radical change, albeit within the constraints of capitalism. Nader's shift to dependence upon the super rich may well reflect his sense of the depth of trouble, both current and immanent, this nation faces. It may even be his non-violent antidote to a plight for which the violence of revolution has so frequently been the result.
Reviewers have drawn attention to the disparity between Nader's decades-long opposition to the role of wealth, especially corporate wealth, in our society and a book with the title Only the Super-rich Can Save Us. What happened? My thought is that Nader has determined that there can be no successful social or political movement in this country without sufficient access to the media. Our society is too big, too complex, and too disparate to do it the way it was done in the 1930s. Then, thousands of people worked in the same plant, where communication and organization were facilitated by that simple fact. Today, technology has scattered workers for the same corporation all over the planet. Because we never required a substantial support for public discourse when we licensed the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum, todays privately controlled media can trump any public policy it dislikes with a media barrage. For purposes of national discourse we have thus made ourselves hostage to wealth and privilege and the power that goes with it. Nader has fought long and hard for forty years. It is a dire warning for progressives when a person of his dedication, intelligence and knowledge finds no other way to initiate the changes we need without the cooperation of the wealthy. This is an indicator of how bad it really is.
Not only has Nader decided access to wealth is absolutely necessary to a progressive overhaul of government, he has also apparently decided that that Tom DeLay's FreedomWorks approach to generating political clout is desirable. In this book his billionaires group repeatedly undertakes "stunts" ala FreedomWork's Tea Party program to stimulate public involvement on the group's progressive goals. Whereas FredomWorks is funded by the likes of the Mellon fortune's Richard Scaife, Nader's group is dependent upon billionaires and multimillionaires of a progressive persuasion, e.g. Warren Buffet and Ted Turner. In these money terms alone it would seem progressives are bound to lose because most of these kinds of people are very conservative. However, it appears that Nader believes that once the gross injustices and wealth disparity of our society are laid bare and made manifest to the public the desired changes will take place.
One of the questionable premises of the book is that government needs to be brought much more proximate to people's daily lives. While I agree, I have yet to find a way, given our large population, the impact of modern technology and what history and the social sciences tell us about human behavior, that government can be downsized to the community level Nader supposes. One of Nader's fictional groups, which sets itself this downsizing goal, winds up admitting that such functions as national security and dealing with major disasters will require a sufficiently strong national government. My question of this supposed arrangement is what makes Nader think that, over time, wealth and hence power will not gravitate to a national government that controls the military?
All in all, this book, by a very intelligent, beltway knowledgeable and profoundly concerned progressive is well worth reading. Of the 40,000 first edition print run, thirty five thousand sold in the first week. If, after finishing the book, changes in the above perceptions or significant other approaches to creating a just democracy become apparent, I will update this assessment.
Lest I appear too dour and serious about the book I should say it is something of a rollicking romp as the billionaires plot their strategies to initially disrupt the corporate world while employing strategies and tactics to replace it with a citizen-driven economy and politics. It is anything but a boring read and it is focused on initiating and installing a progressive agenda.
One final observation: We now have two giants of the progressive movement Nader and Michael Moore in his "Capitalism: a Love Story"; pleading with progressives to deal with the horrors that corporate capitalism has produced. One of the great civic questions of our time is why so little outrage has been demonstrated. Nader, I believe, thinks it is due to a want of effective communication. Moore has communicated his heart out in his films to the point that if his latest film does not generate something of an uprising, he may give up the effort. What has been done to the American people that when they know they were lied into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, seen a major city destroyed by hurricane and left destitute and seen how the wealthy and their greed have pillaged their economy to the point of a major depression, remain either cowed or indifferent except for a lunatic fringe that attributes all these calamities to God's will and man's sin. Are we looking at the psychological consequences of almost sixty years of unmitigated prosperity that through technologies such as television have produced a citizenry so given to delusion that they no longer believe there is a reality for which political leaders can be held accountable? If so, the rich have found a way to demoralize a society without the exhaustion of war.
Bob Newhard
Reviewers have drawn attention to the disparity between Nader's decades-long opposition to the role of wealth, especially corporate wealth, in our society and a book with the title Only the Super-rich Can Save Us. What happened? My thought is that Nader has determined that there can be no successful social or political movement in this country without sufficient access to the media. Our society is too big, too complex, and too disparate to do it the way it was done in the 1930s. Then, thousands of people worked in the same plant, where communication and organization were facilitated by that simple fact. Today, technology has scattered workers for the same corporation all over the planet. Because we never required a substantial support for public discourse when we licensed the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum, todays privately controlled media can trump any public policy it dislikes with a media barrage. For purposes of national discourse we have thus made ourselves hostage to wealth and privilege and the power that goes with it. Nader has fought long and hard for forty years. It is a dire warning for progressives when a person of his dedication, intelligence and knowledge finds no other way to initiate the changes we need without the cooperation of the wealthy. This is an indicator of how bad it really is.
Not only has Nader decided access to wealth is absolutely necessary to a progressive overhaul of government, he has also apparently decided that that Tom DeLay's FreedomWorks approach to generating political clout is desirable. In this book his billionaires group repeatedly undertakes "stunts" ala FreedomWork's Tea Party program to stimulate public involvement on the group's progressive goals. Whereas FredomWorks is funded by the likes of the Mellon fortune's Richard Scaife, Nader's group is dependent upon billionaires and multimillionaires of a progressive persuasion, e.g. Warren Buffet and Ted Turner. In these money terms alone it would seem progressives are bound to lose because most of these kinds of people are very conservative. However, it appears that Nader believes that once the gross injustices and wealth disparity of our society are laid bare and made manifest to the public the desired changes will take place.
One of the questionable premises of the book is that government needs to be brought much more proximate to people's daily lives. While I agree, I have yet to find a way, given our large population, the impact of modern technology and what history and the social sciences tell us about human behavior, that government can be downsized to the community level Nader supposes. One of Nader's fictional groups, which sets itself this downsizing goal, winds up admitting that such functions as national security and dealing with major disasters will require a sufficiently strong national government. My question of this supposed arrangement is what makes Nader think that, over time, wealth and hence power will not gravitate to a national government that controls the military?
All in all, this book, by a very intelligent, beltway knowledgeable and profoundly concerned progressive is well worth reading. Of the 40,000 first edition print run, thirty five thousand sold in the first week. If, after finishing the book, changes in the above perceptions or significant other approaches to creating a just democracy become apparent, I will update this assessment.
Lest I appear too dour and serious about the book I should say it is something of a rollicking romp as the billionaires plot their strategies to initially disrupt the corporate world while employing strategies and tactics to replace it with a citizen-driven economy and politics. It is anything but a boring read and it is focused on initiating and installing a progressive agenda.
One final observation: We now have two giants of the progressive movement Nader and Michael Moore in his "Capitalism: a Love Story"; pleading with progressives to deal with the horrors that corporate capitalism has produced. One of the great civic questions of our time is why so little outrage has been demonstrated. Nader, I believe, thinks it is due to a want of effective communication. Moore has communicated his heart out in his films to the point that if his latest film does not generate something of an uprising, he may give up the effort. What has been done to the American people that when they know they were lied into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, seen a major city destroyed by hurricane and left destitute and seen how the wealthy and their greed have pillaged their economy to the point of a major depression, remain either cowed or indifferent except for a lunatic fringe that attributes all these calamities to God's will and man's sin. Are we looking at the psychological consequences of almost sixty years of unmitigated prosperity that through technologies such as television have produced a citizenry so given to delusion that they no longer believe there is a reality for which political leaders can be held accountable? If so, the rich have found a way to demoralize a society without the exhaustion of war.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Progressives, Quo Vadis?
I have asked myself repeatedly why progressives have failed to make Rupert Murdoch a poster child for what is wrong with this country. He has spawned the demagogues of hate, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and now Glenn Beck. He has turned political debate into the emotion-driven rancor usually found at professional wrestling matches or a Jerry Springer show. He has eviscerated American television news by turning it into sex, violence and entertainment. He has done these things while commanding the largest media empire on earth. And yet progressives have failed to pillory Murdoch with a constant well-developed persona. He remains in the background manipulating American politics as he wills. During the great depression there was no hesitation about repeatedly portraying the fat cat J. P Morgan as an enemy of the people. Why have progressives, not to mention Democrats, been so timid in their attacks on this enemy of democracy? MoveOn did bring out a faux edition of the Wall Street Journal in an effort to stymie permission for his purchase of that paper, but this was a one time stunt, not part of a consistent effort to create and provide the public with an appropriate image of the man. Upton Sinclair had no trouble characterizing the railroad barons' control of California politics as an octopus. Presumably the same image would be appropriate for Murdoch and his multiple media tentacles, to effectively articulate and continuously draw attention to his deleterious impact on our democratic processes. This is a man who owns every means of communication and information transfer known to man and seeks to establish his communications control world wide. This is far too much power for a single human being to possess and constitutes a threat to democracy world wide. He has demonstrated his willingness to cooperate with dictatorships in China. He indulges in massive tax avoidance. And he overwhelms the political discourse of this country with his raucous appeal to raw human emotion bent on vilifying those who oppose his agenda of wealth.
Murdoch has been the subject of satire in a John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, movie entitled The Octopus. The British have a much firmer grasp on this man's persona and ambition. We need to stigmatize him with the truth repeatedly, to draw the connection between Fox News and the effort to defeat health care for all. He himself undoubtedly has a personal physician in attendance on demand. Excessive wealth needs to be pilloried as the enemy of democracy and what better icon than Murdoch?
This all needs to be done before democracy sinks in the face of the multipronged onslaught of wealth. Why have progressives not taken up the challenge of a sustained focus on the threat of excessive wealth?
This issue was brought more clearly in focus for me as I recently read the Coal King by Upton Sinclair. This is a novel based on a 1914 Colorado coal mine strike. In it Sinclair portrays the abject lives of poor immigrant miners, most of whom could not speak English. As in his novel The Jungle, Sinclair describes their harsh and dangerous working conditions, low pay and, in the case of these miners, the total control the corporate mine owners exercised over these trapped human beings. He tellingly portrays the struggle of union progressives to bridge the gap between themselves and the illiterate miners, often drawing attention to the erroneous assumptions these well-intentioned people made. The corporate mine owners lived their lives of elegance within 35 miles of their mines.
This latter fact struck a resonating chord with me because I was also reading Thom Hartman's new book Threshold at the same time. In it Hartman draws a distinction between regional corporate CEOs who remain in the main decent human beings for whom it is still important to keep in mind at least some of the human consequences of their decisions and multinational corporate CEOs who lack such concerns to the extent that they are properly regarded as psychopaths. I was recently talking to a marketing consultant for corporations who used the same term to describe major corporate CEOs. The point here is that between 1914 and toddy the regional CEO has become somewhat humanized. It is the large national and multinational corporate CEO that has assumed the mantle of callous indifference as a requirement of business "success." Could this be called progress? Hartman asked himself an interesting question, namely, why are major multinational corporate CEOs paid up to a billion dollars a year? The corporate boards of directors say they have to pay those sums to get the best talent and ability. Hartman asked why the number of these people is so small. Why is there no one available in a large pool of well trained, experienced, MBAs willing to do the job for, say, 800 million dollars? Why, in short, does this kind of money not create a larger employment market? Hartman's answer is that the best profit-generating CEO's of major multination corporations unique qualification is not education or business acumen. The sole major difference between the highest paid CEOs and others is their willingness and ability to treat employees as objects. These people can easily merge corporations, sell off unneeded assets and thereby lay off thousands of people as easily as they can sell off surplus buildings and equipment.
Herein lies, I believe, one of the major reasons progressives have been relatively ineffective. In addition to the obvious fact that movements can be better organized in factories and mines in which thousands of workers are brought together in one place, the corporate decision makers have been so removed from the society of ordinary people that progressives do not know how to deal with them. In the early part of the 20th century one could close down an auto plant, severely impacting corporate profit. How do progressives close down Fox News using people from a wide variety of occupations, sometimes with very different agendas, distributed around the country and increasingly around the world? Do we not need to reconceive the means of progressive change from the job and all it entails to society itself? Instead of the strike do we not need to find the solution in changing our society's preoccupation with money and profit to a people-first use of economic productivity? If we do not undertake such a fundamental revaluation, it will not be long before the coalition of the wealthy will totally dominate humanity and destroy what remnants of democracy we still have.
Bob Newhard
Murdoch has been the subject of satire in a John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, movie entitled The Octopus. The British have a much firmer grasp on this man's persona and ambition. We need to stigmatize him with the truth repeatedly, to draw the connection between Fox News and the effort to defeat health care for all. He himself undoubtedly has a personal physician in attendance on demand. Excessive wealth needs to be pilloried as the enemy of democracy and what better icon than Murdoch?
This all needs to be done before democracy sinks in the face of the multipronged onslaught of wealth. Why have progressives not taken up the challenge of a sustained focus on the threat of excessive wealth?
This issue was brought more clearly in focus for me as I recently read the Coal King by Upton Sinclair. This is a novel based on a 1914 Colorado coal mine strike. In it Sinclair portrays the abject lives of poor immigrant miners, most of whom could not speak English. As in his novel The Jungle, Sinclair describes their harsh and dangerous working conditions, low pay and, in the case of these miners, the total control the corporate mine owners exercised over these trapped human beings. He tellingly portrays the struggle of union progressives to bridge the gap between themselves and the illiterate miners, often drawing attention to the erroneous assumptions these well-intentioned people made. The corporate mine owners lived their lives of elegance within 35 miles of their mines.
This latter fact struck a resonating chord with me because I was also reading Thom Hartman's new book Threshold at the same time. In it Hartman draws a distinction between regional corporate CEOs who remain in the main decent human beings for whom it is still important to keep in mind at least some of the human consequences of their decisions and multinational corporate CEOs who lack such concerns to the extent that they are properly regarded as psychopaths. I was recently talking to a marketing consultant for corporations who used the same term to describe major corporate CEOs. The point here is that between 1914 and toddy the regional CEO has become somewhat humanized. It is the large national and multinational corporate CEO that has assumed the mantle of callous indifference as a requirement of business "success." Could this be called progress? Hartman asked himself an interesting question, namely, why are major multinational corporate CEOs paid up to a billion dollars a year? The corporate boards of directors say they have to pay those sums to get the best talent and ability. Hartman asked why the number of these people is so small. Why is there no one available in a large pool of well trained, experienced, MBAs willing to do the job for, say, 800 million dollars? Why, in short, does this kind of money not create a larger employment market? Hartman's answer is that the best profit-generating CEO's of major multination corporations unique qualification is not education or business acumen. The sole major difference between the highest paid CEOs and others is their willingness and ability to treat employees as objects. These people can easily merge corporations, sell off unneeded assets and thereby lay off thousands of people as easily as they can sell off surplus buildings and equipment.
Herein lies, I believe, one of the major reasons progressives have been relatively ineffective. In addition to the obvious fact that movements can be better organized in factories and mines in which thousands of workers are brought together in one place, the corporate decision makers have been so removed from the society of ordinary people that progressives do not know how to deal with them. In the early part of the 20th century one could close down an auto plant, severely impacting corporate profit. How do progressives close down Fox News using people from a wide variety of occupations, sometimes with very different agendas, distributed around the country and increasingly around the world? Do we not need to reconceive the means of progressive change from the job and all it entails to society itself? Instead of the strike do we not need to find the solution in changing our society's preoccupation with money and profit to a people-first use of economic productivity? If we do not undertake such a fundamental revaluation, it will not be long before the coalition of the wealthy will totally dominate humanity and destroy what remnants of democracy we still have.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Illusions and a Remedy
When I despair of the rampant triviality of our society, the substitution of emotion for thought and the increasing removal from the real world that conditions our species' existence, I find it useful to retrace the path of human development from prehistory on. To see where we came from the proto humans, the species that branched off from the tree that became us; to witness the gradual rise of brain size and organization; to see how we began to apply that increased reasoning ability to our surroundings and to ourselves; these are the realities from which we come. These form the foundation of what we are and what we can be.
Recently Chris Hedges published his new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle in which he shares the same despair. With chapters titled the Illusion of Literacy, of Love, of Wisdom, of Happiness and of America, he unleashes a withering analysis of our extremely decadent society. He begins the book with a quote from James Baldwin as follows, "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." This is the consequence that people have to understand. Shallowness breeds violence
However, Hedges' remedy for this state of affairs is a return to God. He begins the first chapter with a quote from John Ralston Saul's book Voltaire's Bastards in part as follows, "Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence." As is so frequently the case, even with the Religious Right that Hedges despises, a litany of the ills of our society is followed with a prescription for a return to God. But is not God one of the most pervasive and destructive of our illusions? It is especially dangerous because it asserts an untreatable reality, inevitably imposes absolute values on a world of great variability and thereby leads humans to non-negotiable conflicts resolvable only by violence.
If humans are to achieve the peace they so deeply desire in a culturally shrinking world of increasing population, they will have to appeal to something other than their gods. One possibility I find useful is substituting humanity itself and the context of our development for a deity, not as an object of worship, but as a unifying reference point. Everything we value has arisen in the course of our development. The civilization we seek to preserve and enhance has arisen in the context of this long history of our development as humans. We need badly to understand this development and hence to understand ourselves. We need to understand as well what has propelled us so frequently to disaster and multiply that by our increasing capacity for self destruction. For those who find such an undertaking too mundane, who require something immensely larger than themselves, something mysterious, something spiritual, let them contemplate a natural universe whose immensity Carl Sagan tried to capture in his mantras of "billions and billions of galaxies" and "we are all stardust," which none the less is addressable by human reason. A shift of cultural focus of this sort will make our common humanity, our dependence upon this planet and our shared commonality with the other species of this planet the source for our values and inspiration for our further development. That human beings are capable of this species-wide commonality is evidenced by our response to huge natural disasters such as the Indonesian earthquake/tsunami which disregarded religious and cultural differences that in other contexts have bred enmity and violence. In brief, the remedy for the perils of illusion is not another illusion, but a much better understanding of our humanity and the natural roots from which it has evolved. We had the intelligence to master our environment, now let us use that intelligence to master ourselves.
Bob Newhard
Recently Chris Hedges published his new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle in which he shares the same despair. With chapters titled the Illusion of Literacy, of Love, of Wisdom, of Happiness and of America, he unleashes a withering analysis of our extremely decadent society. He begins the book with a quote from James Baldwin as follows, "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." This is the consequence that people have to understand. Shallowness breeds violence
However, Hedges' remedy for this state of affairs is a return to God. He begins the first chapter with a quote from John Ralston Saul's book Voltaire's Bastards in part as follows, "Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence." As is so frequently the case, even with the Religious Right that Hedges despises, a litany of the ills of our society is followed with a prescription for a return to God. But is not God one of the most pervasive and destructive of our illusions? It is especially dangerous because it asserts an untreatable reality, inevitably imposes absolute values on a world of great variability and thereby leads humans to non-negotiable conflicts resolvable only by violence.
If humans are to achieve the peace they so deeply desire in a culturally shrinking world of increasing population, they will have to appeal to something other than their gods. One possibility I find useful is substituting humanity itself and the context of our development for a deity, not as an object of worship, but as a unifying reference point. Everything we value has arisen in the course of our development. The civilization we seek to preserve and enhance has arisen in the context of this long history of our development as humans. We need badly to understand this development and hence to understand ourselves. We need to understand as well what has propelled us so frequently to disaster and multiply that by our increasing capacity for self destruction. For those who find such an undertaking too mundane, who require something immensely larger than themselves, something mysterious, something spiritual, let them contemplate a natural universe whose immensity Carl Sagan tried to capture in his mantras of "billions and billions of galaxies" and "we are all stardust," which none the less is addressable by human reason. A shift of cultural focus of this sort will make our common humanity, our dependence upon this planet and our shared commonality with the other species of this planet the source for our values and inspiration for our further development. That human beings are capable of this species-wide commonality is evidenced by our response to huge natural disasters such as the Indonesian earthquake/tsunami which disregarded religious and cultural differences that in other contexts have bred enmity and violence. In brief, the remedy for the perils of illusion is not another illusion, but a much better understanding of our humanity and the natural roots from which it has evolved. We had the intelligence to master our environment, now let us use that intelligence to master ourselves.
Bob Newhard
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