The Octopus

In 1901 Frank Norris wrote a famous novel with this title about the many ways the railroads inserted their tentacles to control California. Today we have the Koch brothers doing the same on a national scale. Let us look at a few of those tentacles.

Global warming tentacle: The April 4, 2011 issue of the Los Angeles Times reports on a study funded by the Kochs to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. The scheme was to throw doubt on the statistics that support global warming. This, because they knew they could not refute the evidence. A team of physicists, including one Nobel Laureate, engineers, one statistician, a graduate student, and one climatologist was assembled. Unfortunately for the Kochs, at the end of their analysis the team found themselves in substantial agreement with the work they had set out to debunk. It is evident that the report was not done in the interest of science, but rather in the interest of the Kochs, because, unlike a genuine scientific report, it did not undergo peer review prior to publication. In this regard, the Koch's team was like the Utah scientists who asserted they had created cold atomic fusion. This was shown to be false once it was subject to review by competent scientists.

Science and the integrity it has introduced into human affairs in its relatively short time is one of mankind's most precious possessions. Traducing it is a fundamentally heinous act. The Kochs sought to corrupt it for their venal purposes, much as Stalin corrupted the science of genetics by imposing Lysenko's anti-Mendelian theories on Soviet agriculture because it agreed with Soviet political views. The evidence on global warming is there. It continues to accumulate. We can no longer avoid many of its consequences. In the face of this dire threat to our species we have the Kochs trying to delay even further any attempts to deal with the consequences. The enormity of what the Kochs are doing can be grasped by reading Lester Brown's new book "World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse" or "The Great Disruption" by Paul Gilding. Both authors make it clear we have passed the tipping point. The question is not can we avoid the consequences, but how can we deal with the consequences if we are to survive.

The Kochs need to be continuously vilified for what they are attempting to do. They are neither just mistaken business men nor are they ordinary crooks; they are political con men using the billions our laws allowed them to accumulate to the great harm of this nation and this world.

The attack on human well-being tentacle: The Kochs want no employer except the private sector and they want that sector unhindered by any laws stipulating how the workers should be treated or compensated. They are now bent on denying pensions to public employees. They want rampant insecurity to guarantee them the cheapest labor pool possible. This is evident from their funding of Wisconsin's Governor Walker and his immediate post-election attack on public unions even though this was not a feature of his campaign.

The war against the working class tentacle: Rick Santelli, a prominent commentator on CNBC, has a regular financial broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange. On one occasion he launched into a rant against President Obama's effort to provide some assistance to people at risk of losing their home through mortgage default. Santelli's rant about the unfairness of such use of taxpayer funds brought the trading to a halt as the assembled stock brokers took up the demand that there be no assistance for people they considered too dumb or negligent to have incurred mortgages they could not afford and that others, especially including themselves, should not be expected to bail them out through federal assistance. With the massive bailouts of the bankers who caused the recession in full view, Santelli and these stock brokers had the colossal gall to seek denial of any assistance to the victims. From this rant and this response of the financial community, the Tea Party was born with the quick fiscal support of the Kochs. One of the sickest signs of cultural corruption in this country is a populist political party born on the floor of a stock exchange able to elect senators and representatives on its first try.

The Supreme Court tentacle: With disastrous effect on our democracy the Supreme Court recently declared corporations to be persons with the right to directly fund political candidates without any acknowledgement of their doing so. Two of the Justices, Scalia and Thomas, have been regular attendees at the Koch's twice yearly conferences focused on furthering the Far Right agenda. This transparent effort to not just weaken government, but to make it an agent of the wealthy now has Grover Norquist, the anti-tax, anti-government lobbying powerhouse of the Far Right now declaring that any increase in government revenue should be considered a tax.

As Norris' novel led to the breakup of the railroad holding company and its monopoly, so we need to seek and vigorously promote suitable taxing of the obscene wealth that the Kochs represent so that it can no longer pose the threat to our democracy and to its people that it does.

A special note: Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the Koch brothers. It may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/kochmansions/ Interestingly, it uses the octopus as the video's logo.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the continuing efforts of the Koch brothers to destroy Social Security. The video may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/socialsecurity/

Bob Newhard

Beyond Good and Evil, With Apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche

The language of good and evil stops short of considering the facts. Long before the appearance of good and evil, mankind had to deal with survival. Because mankind has been successful in meeting the challenges of survival, at least for many people, we, using our brains and captive to our emotions, created cultural artifacts such as the morality of good and evil. However, with the prospect of irreversible damage to our species and much other life on this planet, we must again make survival a priority.

One need only contemplate the amount of human energy and natural resources consumed in our conflicts over cultural, religious and other value issues or the sheer will to dominate, to see the dissonance between values and the facts of survival. This is especially glaring when one compares them to the energy and resources expended on threats to our survival, e.g. global warming, massive food and water shortages and pandemics.

A paradigm for much of what is going on in this world because of the failure to look beyond values to reality may be found in the small country of Yemen. What began as a protest by the people for greater representation and a government focused on their needs has now been hijacked by the rivalry between two tribes that has now killed hundreds and continues to do so. This is happening in a country that UNESCO says is one of the poorest on the planet, with 40% living below the poverty line and suffering from severe water shortages, fuel shortages to deliver water by tanker trucks and by rapidly rising food prices.

This is not so different from Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recent trip around the world visiting many American military installations and foreign countries declaring that America must and will remain strong in Asia and elsewhere to protect its access to global resources and markets. Our well-being requires control of a substantial portion of the planet? Why? Sweden and other small Scandinavian countries have a higher standard of living than we do and have no such pretensions. Do I smell the odious stench of corporate profit demands in the pronouncements of Gates? His comments were intended to reassure America's allies and especially to warn China, which is now the focus of Pentagon war planning. Shall we now return to the "evil yellow peril" of the 19^th century? Will we again talk about evil empires while our planetary home suffers the ravages of our over population and over consumption? Will we now engage in an extremely wasteful global competition and perhaps a global conflict? Will we demand of our government a halt to this idiocy? Or once again will we be led down the path of good and evil, killing wantonly and understanding nothing?

If we are to think productively and act appropriately we will have to continually focus on human survival and what it requires of us, not on others and what they have done and are doing wrong. The language of good and evil is a linguistic trap that goes nowhere except to a polarized world. It cannot lead to insights or deal with the complexity of human nature. Additionally, it is easily manipulated because the terms are so emotionally loaded. Witness how Ronald Reagan used it to describe the Soviet State as an evil empire, despite the fact that it had transformed a quasi-feudal society into a major technical power, and was the major reason the Nazis were defeated and put the first satellite into orbit in a little over seventy years. Did not we try to kill it in its cradle with our invasion of 1918-1919? Was it a tyranny? Was it brutal in perusing its ends? Did its citizens, in the main, have a high regard for it? Yes, it was all of these and more, but Reagan, the ideologue, would sum it all up with the word "Evil." In this he differed not a bit from the Ayatollah Khomeini who called the United States "the Great Satan."

In all of this I am aware that, if carried too far, humans can peruse the facts at great harm to others as the Nazi human experimentation projects and the science practiced by Doctor Mengele demonstrate. Nothing was done here that humans have not done to other animals, which is why Sam Harris insists that the so-called value of human life, so easily dismissed in war and ideological differences, be extended to all sentient life. This observation points to the fact that while values are necessary to some extent they are usually prejudiced in the interest of those promoting them, e.g. the value of human life. This alone should be enough to keep us on our guard when we hear of the politics of values.

In any event, we live in a time when the values entertained by humans and their institutions pose a far greater threat to our continued existence than does a robust pursuit of the facts. T. S. Eliot supposed we would end with a whimper not a bang. I suggest we may end a badly confused species, never having understood itself sufficiently to distinguish between its own creations and those of thee plant it inhabits, unless by something unforeseen allows us to get a grip on our collective selves.

Bob Newhard

Meritocracy

Meritocracy, a society ruled by those possessing merit, is founded on the belief that merit is or should be the only measure of personal and social value. Meritocracy is a foundation belief of libertarians. The term first appeared in 1958, but the same notion was prevalent in the 19^th century when it was called social Darwinism. In the 21^st century it has again become a virulent doctrine heavily influencing every thing from economic policy to education.

There is much in our cultural history to suggest that merit has merit. If you look at the advances that human beings have made, especially in the last 400 years, they were discovered or initiated by a miniscule portion of the human beings that existed over that period. We, as a culture, express our belief that a person has a right to everything he or she creates or legally acquires, that is, he or she merits whatever they legally acquire. However, let us ask how merit functions as a social philosophy, which is what libertarians and their founder Ayn Rand intend.

Merit is one among a number of human virtues. One of the problems of any social philosophy founded on a human virtue is that the resulting society almost inevitably winds up as an authoritarian one, usually a dictatorship. Plato, for example, argued that knowledge was the primary human virtue. His proposed state, elucidated in his work entitled The Republic, eventuated in a monarchy ruled by a philosopher king. Merit, however, is but one among a number of human virtues such as empathy, generosity, etc. Additionally it can be found in some human beings combined with selfishness, a lust for power or incompetence in areas in which the meritorious person has no competence. In short merit, like many other human virtues, is a lousy criterion by which to allocate wealth and power. Yet merit along with a notion of unmitigated freedom is the rubric under which much of this nation's business and allocation of its resources are conducted. In these and other areas merit has replaced need and equality.

Let us now contrast what I shall call social virtues with these personal virtues. Among social virtues are equality, fairness and empathy. The libertarian and the massive political right wing condemn these virtues, often as socialism, as governing principles because, they say, they can lead to dictatorship. While this is true, it is also true of their free market capitalism, as witness Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Pinochet even had Milton Friedman, the father of free market capitalism, as an advisor. The point here is that any political economy can lead to dictatorship; hence, this criticism is irrelevant. The only way a democracy can avoid becoming a dictatorship is by constant citizen vigilance.

Among the insufficiencies of the libertarian view are the internal conflicts of an ethos predicated on notions as vague as "merit." Presumably, in the current libertarian view, the "merit" of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, George Soros and take your pick of Wall Street financiers, say Timothy Geither, is that they all made a bundle of money far in excess of what they could personally need. I included George Soros , even though he supports liberal causes, because he made his millions gambling on the continuously changing values of the world's different currencies. On the basis of human need and well being this is one of the most deleterious uses of money, differing little from the Wall Street casino mentality that produced our current finance-generated recession. In 1921 Thorstein Veblen, one of the more gifted thinkers this country has produced, wrote a book titled The Engineers and the Price System. In this book Veblen explored the conflicts between what he called "business" and "industry." Business was solely interested in making money. Industry, in which he included workers, was interested in making things. Veblen pointed out that industry was often hampered in its efforts to make things, especially new things, by the profit concerns of business. A current example would be the Koch brothers fighting clean energy technology in order to protect their fossil fuel business. Libertarians have no way to choose between the merit of money making and the merit of production without going outside their sacred merit-based ethos to social values such as human welfare. Of course, what Veblen called industry in his day has been largely taken over by what he called the price system. Major industries became more interested in making money than making things. Hence through exporting our "making" capability to the cheap labor of China et. al., the major segment of our economy moved from manufacturing to finance.

Perhaps more basic to the failings of libertarianism is its destructiveness. Libertarianism, like ideologies in general, suffers from focusing on one human virtue to the exclusion of any others thereby creating the basis of an authoritarianism, which now characterizes our society, although it is generally disguised as the rule of money. When the Supreme Court deemed corporations to be persons with all the rights of a person, including supporting the political candidates of their choice, it was clear that we no longer had a democracy, we now have a plutocracy, which is the arbitrary rule of the many by the wealthy few. At a deeper level we are witnessing what happens, as it so often does, when personal virtues (the merit of making one's fortune) are made public virtues (this is the way society should be run.)

The bottom line in all this is that converting private virtues into public virtues leads almost inevitably to arbitrary government and is a dangerous and often unrecognized enemy of democracy. The individual values of freedom and merit are the two most prominent examples of what happens when individual values are made into public values. We need to understand what is happening when Murdoch and the Koch brothers and their Cato think tank push merit and freedom. In view of the propaganda we daily and voluminously face it is imperative that people understand that there is no virtue in wealth otherwise Donald Trump would be a paragon of virtue. It must be equally realized that excessive wealth is destructive of democracy and is a constant threat to the social fabric. We need to ask whose merit and whose freedom. We need, in short, to return to our social values and find expression for our private values within that social context lest our species perish from this earth.

Bob Newhard

Reflections on the Killing of Osama bin Laden

As I thought about the killing of Osama bin Laden I wondered what has happened to this society in the last 60 years. At the end of World War II we sought to reestablish the rule of law on a war-shattered planet. We brought to justice the malefactors in a war that had killed millions, wounded many more, and massively displaced populations. As heinous as the crimes were we did not summarily kill these practitioners of terror. With bin Laden we made no attempt to capture him and bring him to a trial in which the world could hear the evidence and judge the verdict. Instead we summarily killed him, even though others in the building were handcuffed. He was unarmed. We dumped his body into the ocean, an act that Muslim clerics condemn as against their religion and which, they fear, will incite further violence against the United States. In short, we had become our enemy. This was an act of barbarity that the America of 1946 did not tolerate, although we did tolerate incinerating thousands of innocents with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When World War II was over President Roosevelt sought to eliminate colonialism by establishing the United Nations in which all nations would have a voice. He tried to create a mechanism for peace. This time, Bush, one of the worst presidents we have ever had and his imperialist buddies sought to dominate the rest of the world. How could we be so retrograde?

One answer is that we are now dealing with terrorism, not states with defined borders and their armies. While this is true it is, in my view, insufficient as an explanation. We knew we were dealing with terrorism from the beginning, yet we said we were going to war with them. The fact that terrorism made all the difference between our behavior at the end of World War II and our behavior in killing bin Laden should have called forth a different approach. The fact that it did not betrays the worst sort of societal manipulation to lead us into the bloody morass we have created. The fact that 80 well trained men carried out the mission makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan starkly irrelevant in necessity and tragically calamitous in their results. Prior to the attacks on the Taliban and the uncalled for invasion of Iraq many people drew attention to the fact that the responsible reaction to the 9-11 attack was a global police action, which would have resulted in an operation much like the one that located him and could easily have captured him had not the Bush and now Obama administrations had other goals in mind. The Obama administration has said that they did not want a trial during which bin Laden could stir up additional enmity. The same could have been said of the Nazi criminals, but we deemed preserving the rule of law was more important than not stimulating continuing Nazi propaganda. Nazism did not die and still has many adherents in Germany,France and the United States. Similarly the summary killing of bin Laden will not staunch the animosity of many of those of his persuasion toward this country. Keeping Chalmers Johnson's articulation of blowback in mind, we have done nothing to reduce terrorism, much less understand it and seek a way to defuse it. For those of good will, stopping this misuse of terrorism to justify our own terrorism, e.g. drone attacks, must be an ongoing and accelerated process.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and Human Well Being

At a recent group discussion of public employee pensions I noticed that the issues revolved around who deserves what and who pays for it, not what is good for society. This, in my judgment, is another manifestation of the "me generation," still hanging on. While I understand the above concerns, they are misconstrued. Had the focus been on society rather then the differing individual claims, it could have been seen that the real problem is a gross maldistribution of wealth that is a social cancer that will kill our democracy if it is not redressed. As I have noted before, wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power. In democracy, which is based on distributed power, i.e. the citizens, such accumulations of wealth are deadly. A democracy demands a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth to insure the independence of the citizen. Jefferson understood this when he argued for a nation of small farmers whose farms would provide them with a measure of independence that the factory worker did not have in the industrial society preferred by Hamilton. As our nation became a manufacturing-dependent one, we had to find a surrogate for the family farm to control wealth concentration to a degree that it would not threaten democracy. We did this with a graduated income tax. We have, however, largely destroyed the effectiveness of the graduated income tax by capping that tax at a ridiculously low level, i.e. a million dollars in an era of multibillionaires and by granting massive tax breaks to the wealthy. We have also allowed tax havens for the wealthy in which massive amounts of profit provide no tax revenue at all.

This effort to persevere democracy by preventing excessive wealth accumulation has the added economic benefit of making the society's wealth more productive by insuring that said wealth will be spent on actual human needs and not on the disruptive, often disastrous, speculations of the very rich. Again, this becomes axiomatic without any concern for equity between individuals. The motive is the preservation of democracy.

As evidence that the pursuit of democracy, requiring an equitable distribution of wealth, leads directly to a public ethos of citizen well being we need only look at the state of our democracy and citizen well being under FDR's New Deal. Income taxes on the wealthiest among us were high, reaching slightly over 90% for a time after World War II. It was 70% as late as the 1970s. As a result we were able to afford the GI Bill allowing millions to get a college degree and subsidize loans so that returning veterans could afford their own home. This era also saw an unprecedented rate of building public schools and libraries and a high level of job security. When Ronald Reagan came to power, and since, we have seen the reverse. Money locked up in the coffers of the rich and their corporations does not go to improve the society as evidenced by a level of college tuition that ordinary people cannot afford, the closing and privatizing of public schools and homes being torn from people because of the shenanigans of an unregulated financial market, to mention just a few.

It is, to me, politically axiomatic that a democracy will far more likely target its resources on the well being of its citizens than will any other form of government. It is also axiomatic that the increasing destruction of democracy that we have seen since Ronald Reagan will move increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer people, thereby weakening our society as a whole to the point of a dictatorship, known under George W. Bush as a unitary presidency. Having observed that wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power, I will add Lord Acton's observation that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Bob Newhard

A Bridge Over Troubled Waters?

We know that major disruptive trends are in the works. Global warming, overpopulation, food shortages, water shortages are the lot of humanity as it now exists. To these can be added the problems humanity causes itself, partly as it responds to these environmental pressures, e.g., war, racism, cultural antagonisms; and the multiple ways humans have of making these conflicts even worse. When one thinks of productively dealing with these matters, it is clear that we must start with those that humanity generates on its own. One of the greatest inhibitants to dealing effectively with our environmental problems lies in dealing with global human problems and fundamental to this is developing a global perspective, indeed a global mind set. Up to this point we have tried to deal with global environmental issue through our national and international institutions. However each of these has a primary interest in its particular national, economic, religious or cultural institutions. We keep preaching to ourselves that we must love diversity all the while rejecting it because we can find no effective functionality in it. What is needed is an overriding concern common to a large portion of humanity around which they can organize and exert their common energy.

I believe I may have seen the beginnings of such an effort in the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, especially in Egypt. First of all the youth of Cairo organized themselves into a major component of the protests. They are known as the April 6 movement. Second, they took full advantage of modern communication technology, especially Facebook and Twitter, as their vehicle of organizing. Third, they want a secular state. Fourth, a notable feature was that these young people were dressed in the ubiquitous blue jeans, not traditional or cultural apparel and there were far more women in their protests than those dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Finally, these young people reached beyond Egypt's border seeking solidarity. They e-mailed their support to the protesters in Madison Wisconsin. In short, here is a constituency capable of organizing on a global scale and with the energy to do so. All they need is a unifying global cause generated by a common fundamental issue.

A little investigation indicates that this issue may be jobs. A close examination of the cause of such vigorous youth protest in Egypt reveals that a want of jobs for youth was a fundamental driver for reform, especially among the well educated, yet unemployed. This issue also generated protest in the dockyards of Suez and in the steel and textile mills in other parts of Egypt. The issue of jobs is basic to youth throughout the world. In France Muslim youth rampaged burning cars and destroying storefronts a few years ago. In 2008 Greece experienced substantial youth riots for the same reason. In our own country rapidly increasing numbers of young people, even after they have married, are living at home because they cannot find jobs that would permit paying for their own home. In 2010 the United Nations issued a report on the global youth unemployment problem. Perhaps this quote from the report will indicate the enormity of the matter, "About 152 million young people, or a quarter of all the young workers in the world, are employed but remain in extreme poverty in households surviving on less than $1.25 a person a day in 2008, the report said" Because of automation, business consolidations and other factors, jobs can be expected to decrease on a per capita basis. This means the problem will be continuous and continuously worsening unless a solution is found, e.g. shortening the work period either in hours, days, or years, thereby consuming production efficiency in bettering human lives rather than making the rich richer.

Given the above factors and given the fact that people at this stage of life are at their most vigorous biological selves and given that they are more at home in today's electronic communications, it would not be surprising if the multitude of young people will find global common cause in their quest for jobs. If this were to eventuate there would globally be several hundred million people with a common bread and butter issue for the first time in human history. The youth of Egypt demonstrated the ability, the political perception, and the willingness to reach out to others undertaking protest despite the fact that they shared little in common culturally. Whether this eventuates or not, it demonstrates that humans comprising very diverse cultural backgrounds can reach out to others in an effort to resolve shared problems. In this the youth of this world may build the first span over the cultural, religious and national turbulence that roils and will continue to roil the earth's human population. In this the young may be demonstrating a way for humans to get past their cultural barriers to peace and on to an economically decent, personally rewarding life.

Bob Newhard

The Future as a Guide to the Present

Traditionally, we try to understand our situation by examining the past for cognates otherwise known as lessons of the past. However, as our future as a species becomes clearer, e.g. global warming, water and food shortage, etc. we may, I believe, profitably use the future that is increasingly being laid out before us, to understand the present. We can determine what our options are, what humans are likely to do if an option is exercised (history as well as our psychological and sociological knowledge can be helpful here) and therefore what we should do.

I ended my last column with the question " What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?" Both of these novels are depictions of how society may end up. 1984 describes a world in constant conflict and in particular a dictatorial society controlled by pervasive fear and lack of privacy.
Brave New World depicts a society in which citizens are biologically bred from selected embryos to optimally perform the tasks for which they are intended and therefore to be perfectly happy in carrying out their tasks. In the event they become overstressed and perhaps a source of societal discontent they may take a drug soma to induce pleasure and restore satisfaction.

In 1962 Huxley delivered an address titled The Ultimate Revolution at the University of California, Berkeley. A transcript of the talk may be found at http://www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/huxley_ultimate_revolution_032062.htmh/ In this lecture Huxley argued that the ultimate fate of human social/political organization favors the Brave New World scenario. While he greatly admired Orwell's work, he nonetheless believed that the cost of continuous control by the threat, fear and violence of 1984, when comared with that of breeding compliant humans in the first place, will eventually be too high for continued social survival. In either case, as I see it, the result would be dehumanizing as we now consider that term.

Both these scenarios of the future may appear far-fetched, although Orwell's may be much less so. However,they may be instructive as we attempt to gage our future as a species, assuming following blind emotion does not end us first. We have a plethora of precursors of Orwell's 1984. Its basic mode of operation is control through fear of violence and the intense surveillance of individual lives. The Stasi in East Germany, prior to the fall of its master the Soviet Union, was notorious for the pervasive spying on citizens by citizens, indeed parent by child. The autocratic regimes of North Africa and the Middle East practice this kind of domestic control. However, as we now see in those countries, people eventually rebel against such anti-social practices and, at the risk of death, rise in protest. The lesson here, I believe, is that humans can endure the internal stress of fear only so long before they erupt. In his lecture Huxley, citing Pavlov's experiments, notes that periodic release of this stress sinks deep into the human psyche and that doing this is why some dictatorships can be made to last longer than others.

In support of his own thesis Huxley notes the advances that had been made at the time of his lecture over 45 years ago, in both biological and psychological understanding of human beings. Today, especially with the advent of DNA understanding, people now talk of designer children, that is human beings bred to the parent's specifications by manipulating human cells at the DNA level. The lesson here is that we are at the point in which we are about to take charge of our own biological destiny. This, given what we know of the human tendency to self-aggrandizement and our socio/economic tendency to let that self-aggrandizement rise to power through our free enterprise system, is scary indeed.

While there is currently substantial resistance to modifying the human genome, as population wars continue, (for example, Catholics and Muslims trying to dominate through population majorities) some form of genetic or psychological modification may be necessary to eliminate this ancient form of rivalry and keep human population within earth's carrying capacity. In any event, if humans can do it, history demonstrates they will do it.

My last column was concerned substantially with modifying the human mind through psychology. That process will, in my judgment, favor Huxley's scenario for the same reason that his biologically managed society will prevail in the long run, namely, it is more economical to target the human brain than the human body.

With all the evidence that the world prefigured by Huxley is well underway in fact and even more so in potential and taking note of the abundant occasions for conflict latent in major global trends, it becomes relatively clear that human social organization is in its most perilous state since the last ice age.

Having seen in these last two posts how unprepared human emotions are for dealing with the huge, unprecedented, problems we face, the importance of our thinking ability becomes clear. If we are to survive the future with any semblance of what we now regard as human, we must think our way through. We have several hundred years of applied reason in science. We know the power of the reasoning brain. The current tragedy, however, is that when we most need to apply our powers of thought and investigation, we are rejecting thinking for feeling. We willingly substitute the fantasy of creationism for evolution. Our energy corporations, their political henchmen, and media servants, convince millions of our citizens that multiple and well-documented evidence of global warming due to our continuing uses of fossil fuels is a fable concocted to scare people into doing with less. This rejection of the most reliable source of information mankind has ever devised in favor of feel-good fantasy is, to my mind, the ultimate tragedy of the scientific revolution.

In this dire situation all that our species has going for it is its intellect. Those who care for the continued existence of our species have to make science and critical thinking the focus of a vigorous political effort because, unfortunately, truth itself cam no longer prevail against the massive self-deception that pervades this society and the massive amounts of wealth and power determined to keep it that way.

At a personal level we can exercise this faculty with the discipline it requires to take evidence seriously and revise our beliefs and actions as intelligence and evidence requires.

In what I have written in this and my previous column I have been hard on the emotions. The emotions obviously play a large role in what it means to be human. They provide us with some of the most fulfilling experiences of our lives. They make society possible. But we must always remember a basic prerequisite for mankind's continuing survival, namely, that thought validates emotion, not the other way around.

Bob Newhard