On Honoring the Troops

In my last post I offered some comments on the problem of honoring soldiers who voluntarily fight in a bad war such as the invasion of Iraq. I want now to consider honor itself, which leads to such delusions as honoring the troops.

Honor, like patriotism can be the refuge of scoundrels, which indicates that honor is not self justifying. In the name of honor people kill others in duels. In the name of family honor some Muslims kill their daughters who have been raped. Nations have gone to war over slighted honor.

The notion of honor is a human creation and applies only to humans. It is therefore independent of the issue of human survival itself, although survival can be made a matter of honor if humans so choose as in the gallantry displayed on the sinking Titanic. Notice, however, honor is here reserved for specific acts. When honor is applied to a class of humans, unless they each have demonstrated the kind of self sacrifice mentioned above, the term becomes vacuous and misused, which is what is happening in the phrase “Honor the Troops.”

This is what we do when we institutionalize personal virtues and in so doing we mislead and deceive as is so common in the advertising that so permeates the American mind that it can no longer distinguish between hero and celebrity.

Let us take as an example of how egregiously we can be led astray by the notion of honoring the troops, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Vietnam War was instituted by a patent and known fallacy, namely, the Domino Theory of Communist Expansion in Southeast Asia. China had become communist and it was argued that Vietnam would in due course become Communist. This theory, supported by President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, completely disregarded the long-standing enmity between Vietnam and China. What was a colonial war between France and the Vietnamese became our Vietnam War in which the might of the most powerful nation on the planet was unleashed against a small, mainly agrarian, country in Asia. We poisoned the land with Agent Orange and to this day people step on land mines in their fields and their children die playing with cluster bombs we dropped. What honor can be found in an unprovoked war with these kinds of results? Obviously humanity requires a new kind of national monument, a testament to a nation's remorse. In my judgment one of the healthiest commemorations would be a global day of remorse, in which nations would acknowledge, as the Germans have, that they have caused grievous death and suffering and in so doing restore lost value to truth and provide a sobering reminder to counter the jingoism that so easily influences people. The United States would acknowledge that there was no need for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This destruction was undertaken to impress Russia. Japan would express its remorse for the invasion of China and the murderous rape of Nanking. Britain, France and Belgium for the horrors they unleashed on their colonies. Such a Day of Remorse would point up the dire need for a global ethic in which the well-being of our species, and by extension the planet we inhabit, is the foundation of our moral system. With the technology of destruction we have and continue to develop and the increasing sources of conflict as we exhaust the world's resources, such a global moral system is an imperative for the survival of humanity. All efforts to create peace should be founded on this need.

Instead of the monument to shame that should have been erected we built the Vietnam Memorial Wall to honor the soldiers who died carrying out this heinous war. That monument has become a grieving place for many Americans who lost loved ones in that disastrous military exploit. Where is the memorial to the millions we slaughtered or to the little girl fleeing her napalmed village with her body on fire from the onslaught? Howard Zinn had the courage and humanity to go back to the German town he had been ordered to bomb at the very end of World War 2, after he found out there was no need for the mission. Where is the country that will do likewise and thereby begin one of the processes necessary to stimulate a social consciousness of one people on this lonely planet?

The only country, at least in recent times, that has faced up to its crimes is Germany, which has accepted responsibility for its actions under the NAZI regime. Unlike its response to the defeat of its aggression in World War 1, which was to blame and slaughter Jews, the German nation and people accepted responsibility, expressed regret, maintained the concentration camps as testament to the barbarity they permitted and recompensed those who survived.

It will be said that expecting nations and their people to acknowledge their barbarities is expecting too much of human beings. In reply I say that if we are to create the global society our survival as a species requires, we must undertake new paradigms of self and group identity; nation, religion, ethnic group will no longer suffice. The honest dealing with honor by making it responsive to the crimes it is used to cover and to those crimes it would cover in the future is imperative for a just society.

Bob Newhard

Creating Perpetual War

You may be aware of the current outrage over NBC's new “reality” show Stars Earn Stripes in which so-called celebrities are paired with combat veterans, mostly from special forces like the Army's Green Berets and the Navy's SEALS, to undertake simulated military attacks. General Wesley Clark has been hired to host the series, presumably to give it additional credibility. On its web site devoted to promoting this series, NBC would have you believe that this series is devoted to honoring all those who have served in the military. They are called heroes. No mention is made of that emotional kickback from combat called PTSD and the high rate of suicides resulting from it. No mention is made of the thousands of civilian casualties in these operations dehumanized to the level of “collateral damage.”

Nine Nobel Peace Laureates have sent an open letter to NBC and Clark condemning the series as glorifying war, creating entertainment out of war, and sanitizing the profound horrors of war and the aftermath of suffering it leaves.

To the charge of glorifying war leveled by the Nobel Peace Laureates NBC responded “This show is not a glorification of war, but a glorification of service.” This is an old ploy used by war mongers to emotionally trap people into war, namely, the self-sacrifice of the soldiers is among the honorable acts a human can perform, therefore the war that produces these acts of self sacrifice must be good. Emotionally, you cannot honor the soldier without honoring the war. Among the services progressives can provide to a people in the process of losing their democracy to militarism is to carefully and thoroughly lay bare the deviousness of this deception. If, for example, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were undertaken to control Middle East oil, as is patently evident, especially in Iraq, then those prosecuting these wars cannot be doing a good and honorable thing. The soldiers fighting this war are all volunteers and whatever their motives they are willing to kill others in the prosecution of such wars. They are responsible for their actions just as a Mafia hit man, loyal to his “family,” is nonetheless regarded as a criminal because the Mafia is engaged in a vicious, self-serving enterprise. Personally, I believe this confusion of means and ends contributes to the high rate of suicides among veterans of these wars as they realize the horror of the acts they have committed in a callous war of conquest. I believe progressives can provide a real service, especially to the young who are lured into these wars by the most reprehensible of deceptions that bad wars can produce honorable soldiers that we all too easily call heroes.

Beneath the calloused inhumanity and perpetual-war mongering of this TV series, provided by a subsidiary of a major arms manufacturer (General Electric is a 49% owner of NBC) lies the continuing and largely successful effort to militarize the American nation. Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex pales in comparison to what has actually happened and continues to happen.

I think this latest effort to make militarism palatable to the American people by presenting it as normal entertainment, promoted during the Olympics by NBC ads, is ample evidence of what is behind this continuing effort to miltarize the American mind and the American society.

Consider the following:

• Americans have been subject to a war mentality since the beginning of World War 2. Over 70 years of relentless concern with enemies. This makes them prime candidates for war propaganda.

• Projections are that America will no longer dominate the world economy and thus secure what it wants through economic means. It will increasingly have to share economic power with China and other rising economic powers.

• Lacking the economic dominance it has enjoyed for so long it must rely on military dominance to maintain as much of its power as possible. This, I believe, is the corporate agenda for America in a global economy. I believe the major decisions have been made and we are seeing in such morally and intellectually repulsive propaganda as the Stars Earn Stripes “reality” program the unfolding of this agenda.

The final result of this agenda will be a garrison state now being prepared for by the Homeland Security Department as it deploys its drones and increasingly incorporates combat-equipped local police into its operations. Notice protesters at political and corporate events are now put behind fences. The police are trained to treat the citizen as the enemy. Their mission is no longer to serve and protect, but to dominate and subdue.

This garrison state—think ancient Sparta—is the vehicle for insuring continued American global dominance as it loses its economic clout. It is totally antithetical to democracy, but Americans seem to be having little trouble giving that up. Do we progressives thoroughly understand what we are losing? I don't think so, otherwise there would be mass protests in the streets. “Freedom” is a mantra of the far right as they pursue an agenda that is destroying it. We must make it very clear that war is so dangerous to freedom that until Would War 2 this country had rapidly demobilized after every war.

We live in a time of cruel, highly destructive deceptions of which Stars Earn Stripes is but the latest, and more than usually blatant, instance.

We must vigorously unmask these deceptions and castigate those who practice them for the moral degenerates they are.

Bob Newhard

The Public Intellectual

Gore Vidal died Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at age 86. The passing of this great novelist, playwright, essayist and cultural and political commentator reminded me of the importance of the public intellectual to society, especially a democratic society.

The public intellectual is not a formal career. Universities do not offer curricula for it nor can it be found on any job listing. It is a function taken on by thinkers voluntarily out of a concern for society and a deep passion to understand. The breadth of Vidal's interests is astounding, running from issues like the America First movement to the Byzantine emperor Julian who attempted to restore the Roman gods that had been replaced by Christianity.

Other public intellectuals such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre have been key figures in helping people understand their cultures, both the good and the bad. This species of humanity is as ancient as Socrates walking the Agora debating the nature of goodness. That the public intellectual as a recognized undertaking is still suspect is evidenced by Wikipedia's expressed reservations on the legitimacy of the “topic” even though it is merely reporting the 100 most significant contemporary public intellectuals as determined by polls conducted by two reputable magazines, the Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US).

A significant number of these people have been novelists, which indicates the role the novel can play in understanding and evaluating a culture. My own sense is that the complexity and immediacy of human life hides the more general characteristics, trends and forces of a culture and it is these that the public intellectual brings to the surface in a way consonant with the lives of those who read them. Public intellectuals are not social scientists concerned with demographic percentiles or specific tendencies quantified for use by others in decision making. Nor are they journalists, as important as these can be, who report immediate conditions and events.

This country began with a plethora of public intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine and it shows in our founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. With this range of intelligence and concern it has seemed a tragedy to me that this country has so firmly rejected the role of the intellectual in influencing the decisions it makes and the courses it takes. Evidence that intellectualism has become a political liability was blatantly displayed when Adlai Stevenson ran for President and was attacked for being an “egghead.” Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in America details the depth of this sentiment in the American psyche. My own judgment is that intellectualism got lost in the immediacy of survival needs as the population in increasing numbers continuously dealt with the demands of the western frontier. The longer view or the search for underlying influences seemed to have little value in this environment, indeed intellectualism came to be seen as a kind of pretension. A very interesting and challenging question to ask oneself is “What would Jefferson or Madison say or do once they saw that their cherished individualism had spawned a corporation-dominated society deaf to the needs of all except the wealthy?” Would they, for example, be found on Wall Street with the rest of their rich brethren? Would they feather their economic bed like Bill Clinton has done or would they make the transition to the concerns of ordinary people in a mass society? Would they be Libertarians with their freedom uber alles view and the law of the jungle it entails or would they see freedom as dependent upon human well-being as did Franklin Roosevelt?

As Peter Scheer wrote in TruthDig's Vidal obituary “A student of history, he struggled to tolerate America’s strange regression in the new millennium.” Vidal was caught between America's promise and America's rejection of that promise.

Bob Newhard

Reason, Sentiment and Human Survival

July 14^th was Woody Guthrie's posthumous 100^th birthday. Listening to his songs of social injustice, especially Deportee and its lament at the careless anonymity with which we regard migrant workers, recalls an earlier age of American humanity. It elicits the pathos of so much of the world's poor and anger at the rank contrast between them and the waste and greed of excessive wealth. The fundamental human compassion of Guthrie's songs strongly suggests the missing element in so much of our efforts to deal with humanity's major and increasing problems ranging from famine to war for the world's remaining resources.

But compassion is not the only missing element and it often cuts short our attention to the realities, often overlooked, that underlie the situations that move us to compassion. Guthrie's song Deportee, lamenting the callous indifference of a report on a plane crash, which killed the deported immigrants, has behind it the fact of gross human overpopulation. Where is the lament over that gross tragedy? Why can we not bring our compassion to bear on the fate of children born into an overpopulated world that makes their lives even more desperate than that of their parents? Why can we not bring our anger to bear on the Catholic Church and the Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian fundamentalist Quiverfull movement which promote increased birth rates knowing full well the fate that awaits those born to a world having little use for them?

There is an old gospel song titled This World is Not My Home. The fact is this world is our only home. Yet the former elicits a feeling of longing for a non-existent place and the latter elicits little emotion at best.

The central concern in all this is to begin a process of engaging human emotions, especially those surrounding the concept of home. Carl Sagan in his brief Pale Blue Dot homage to Earth as the birthplace and only home mankind has ever had, made a poignant effort in this direction. It should be as ongoing a theme in human discourse as any religion. I have appended it at the end of this article.

Until humanity can or will devote its compassion to these fundamental causes of human suffering, remote though they may seem, we will make little progress in ameliorating that suffering.

Additionally, it is imperative that we divorce morality from religion. We need to return to that good old 18^th century notion of a moral sentiment inherent in all people. As our world continues its global integration it is equally imperative that that sentiment is guided by reason applied to the facts of human existence. Morality can be taught. Compassion is an imperative element in that education. We must do this before the bigotries now extant in society destroy us all. An example of the moral sentiment is the refrain from Pete Seeger's My Rainbow Race. This song was sung by 40,000 Norwegians, standing in pouring rain, in, as they said, Love and Defiance. This was a unifying protest against those who would pit Christians against Muslims and to that end murdered 77 members of Norway's socialist Labor Party, which promotes multiculturalism. The majority of those killed were teenagers at a summer camp. The singing event can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q7CPNNWfME. For the meaning of moral sentiment I strongly suggest viewing this event and letting it fully sink in. You may want to view it several times to let its full dimensions sink in.

The refrain:

One blue sky above us, one ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round, who could ask for more?
And because I love you I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race, it's too soon to die

Bob Newhard

aken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, lion miles in the dista

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Go Small. Go Big. Go to Hell?

That mankind has a future, tenuous though it may be, is a given. What that future should (must?) be is currently being contested primarily by those who insist we must go small, such as Bill McKibben on the one hand and those who insist we must go big, albeit with greater concern for humanity than current globalization has afforded, such as Joseph Stiglitz. Both are good people concerned for what is best for humanity, which allows us to focus on the evidence offered rather than the motivations behind both positions.

Those who would have us go small propose economic and political localism. Goods should be produced as close to the areas of consumption and use as possible to minimize the energy and environmental costs of transportation. Currently the average distance food travels to the United States consumer is 1,500 miles. The economy as a whole should also be localized to minimize the excessive accumulations of capital that underlie the ruinous speculation that occurs when capital is increasingly detached from production. Localism in politics brings the political process closer to the citizen and makes participation in the political process more relevant to citizen concerns.

Among the downsides of localism is provincialism with its attendant narrow mindedness that can lead to violence when the differences between local groups are unmitigated by a cultural consciousness of our commonality. One of the virtues of large cities is the cosmopolitanism they can produce. McKibben sees the Internet, with its plethora of cultural and informational content as a major offset to localism’s potential for provincialism. Localism also fails to take into account that the earth’s resources are not equally distributed. Those humans living in the Sahel aridity of northern Africa, subject to frequent drought, have far less in natural resources than those living in temperate zones in Europe and the United States. Interestingly, South Korea seems to understand this. They are currently developing prefabricated, enclosed farms growing produce hydroponically. These immense enclosures could be placed anywhere and powered by locally-generated electricity. As population continues to grow, humans will have to live on less productive land. Even in the so-called developed world agricultural resources are being depleted. In some parts of the American Midwest top soil that was initially 2 feet thick is now down to 6 inches and has to be intensively fertilized with fossil fuel-produced fertilizers to maintain its productivity.

Proponents of globalism point out that humans are one species. That the planet is our only home and that we have to manage ourselves and our resources in global terms to even begin to effectively address the problems we have created. If we do not do this we risk perishing as a species as we quibble and kill over our differences. It can be argued that globalization has not been the problem. Globalization in the hands of immense profit-driven financial institutions has been the problem.

But let us look at a third alternative. Not what we ought to do, but what are we likely to do. The global economy and hence global power is in the hands of those who are focused on immediate financial and/or political objectives. As an example, the recent meeting of the G20 on global warming took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first such meeting took place 20 years ago. Currently about 25% of the Amazon rainforest, sometimes referred to as the lungs of the planet, has been lost. Yet this enclave of global power meeting in the very country that contains most of that forest could come to no firm plan of action. Brazil, one of the larger economies of the world, pleaded that it did not have the resources to stop the steady encroachment on the forest. There was no attempt by these world leaders to bring together the world’s resources to stop the destruction and begin restoring this essential feature of global geography. We can globalize financial speculation to a 24/7 world-wide operation, but we cannot find the resources to protect life on this planet. That is but one of many instances that illustrate mankind’s inability to deal effectively with problems of this magnitude. It is, in my judgment, more likely that this incapacity to take seriously problems that will take more than one human generation to eventuate, compounded by the inability to overcome the relatively petty issues that have always divided us, that will spell the end of our species or at least spell the end of civilization and send us back to the tribal cultures of our forebears. We know how to obliterate our species. The idiocy of scientists' creating a much more virulent version of the pandemically deadly avian flu virus is testament to that.

Evolution produced an animal with a brain that has done absolutely amazing things, but encased it in the usual emotion-driven, narrow focus of the rest of the animal kingdom. This brain, that with its discovery of the Higgs boson is now in a position to understand the universe it inhabits, that sees inadequacies in its thinking as opportunities for further understanding and because of that does not war and kill over major differences such as Newtonian or Einsteinian cosmology as religion does over its differences, was unfortunately encapsulated in the same emotion-driven body as the rest of the animal kingdom. Our curse is knowing more than we can ever be and the inability to control that small portion we can be.

Bob Newhard

The Drone as Symptom

The first thing the drone should call to our attention is the issue of unintended consequences. This is often a euphemism for a failure to think about or take seriously the longer term impact of the technology on society. This is notoriously true of military technology.

The machine gun is an example. Invented in the mid-19^th century, its earliest use was by colonial European powers to quell the mass attacks of indigenous warriors. Subsequently, when applied in the intra-European World War 1, it horrified Europeans who saw factory productivity applied to killing on the battlefield. The startling losses in just one battle, that of Verdun, produced 714,231 casualties of which 262,308 were dead or missing, were substantially attributable to the machine gun. Eventually this weapon was reduced in size from the initial horse-drawn carriage to the submachine gun used in the gang wars of Prohibition in the 1920s. If the larger ramifications of this weapon are of interest to you I would suggest reading The Social History of the Machine Gun by John Ellis.

Again, we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We killed between 150,000 and 240,000 people to demonstrate our new awesome power to the Russians. This time we had a very knowledgeable prophet in J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of developing the atom bomb, upon witnessing the first test uttered these fateful words from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  He resisted subsequent development of a nuclear bomb. For this he was pilloried by this nation’s leaders, especially that citadel of the short view we call Congress. Here, in the glow of our atomic dominance of the moment, there was little consideration of the bomb’s employment by small countries like Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, not to mention the small “dirty” bomb that can be carried in a suitcase.

During the resistance to our invasions in the Middle East the first roadside bombs have now passed to suicide explosive vests and the explosive carried in a shoe to destroy an airliner loaded with people. One of the pronounced tendencies of modern technology is to go small.

With this evidence of our profound inability to learn, what are we to expect of the drone? Already it has passed from large missile-carrying aircraft to a small, model-airplane sized device called the Switchblade. It is launched from a mortar-sized tube carried, launched, and flown by one person. It kills by crashing into the victim. Wired Magazine reports that drones the size of insects are being tested in England in networked swarms. Surveillance of cities is an intended application.

All this technology dumped on an unaccustomed population that has problems with red light surveillance at traffic intersections, requires a deep understanding of the human psyche and how it functions in a social context. What, for example, does it mean to abandon privacy? Do we know enough about the relationship of privacy to self-identity to subject large populations to mass surveillance unannounced?  People in Southern Yemen have become accustomed to seeing drones overhead. When there is an exceptional number of them they know the Americans are looking for somebody.

 In short, they know danger lurks, but they know not where. What happens to the human psyche living in an environment such as this?

George Orwell dealt with this kind of world in his novel 1984.  A technology that undoubtedly will be promoted to the public as a provider of safety can easily, and probably will, turn into the all-encompassing dictatorship Orwell describes. We simply do not know enough about human beings that have evolved over many millennia in a context of disparate tribal groups, the psychology of which is on constant display in everything from the tribal violence of the Middle East to the tribal violence following a European soccer game.

Where are the sociologists and social psychologists that could lead a well-publicized effort to warn the citizenry of what their corporate-driven government is doing? Where is the Green Peace of military technology?

Bob Newhard

Two Types of Morality: What Happens When One is Mistaken for the Other

There is a personal morality in which values such as honesty function. There is also a social morality in which values such as justice function. When personal morality takes the place of social morality, dictatorship or some other form of authoritarianism usually results. As an example, Plato does this when articulating his ideal state in the Republic. For Plato the highest good or value is knowledge. This is a personal value. States or other groups do not have knowledge; only individual humans do. As a result, when Socrates in this dialogue is asked who will guard the citizens from the guardians of the Republic , Socrates introduces the philosopher king, a wise dictator. Plato had no use for democracy so this result did not bother him. Because we use language so sloppily (and often pay the price) we sometimes attribute knowledge to society as when we talk about a "knowledge-based economy."

A second feature of personal morality is that its values in and of themselves are absolute. The problem with absolute values is that when they are applied to the real world, which is highly variable in its content, this results in either awkward modification of the absolute value or denial of the facts. This latter consequence is illustrated by the Catholic Church's banishment of Galileo for asserting that the Earth revolved around the sun and hence mankind was not the center of their deity's universe. Again, the value expressed in the imperative "Thou shalt not kill" is quickly modified when applied to the real world. Some forms of killing are less heinous than others, e.g. murder versus manslaughter or perfectly moral, e.g. self defense or killing in military combat. The fact that this value so quickly becomes inoperative unless its moral injunction is modified should teach humanity something about personal moral values, namely, they need to be thoroughly evaluated before being applied to the real world. The current conflict over abortion is another case in point. Despite the factual evidence that the fetus, at least in its earlier embryonic stages, is not human, e.g. it does not have the nervous system to be human, many people are prepared to assert that a woman must carry that fetus to term unless her life is threatened no matter what the consequences for the rest of her life. The same argument is made even when there is no fetus. Moral injunctions against birth control are premised on the wrongful interference with their deity's desire to create a new soul. Cases such as these show how morality, given free reign, can be so damaging because it is not subject to the same level of initial and ongoing evaluation that people often exercise in buying a home or a car.  

Social morality is concerned with what a society ought to be and do. Social morality appeared in the 18^th century as part of the Enlightenment. For instance, Immanuel Kant justified the moral injunction against lying not as a violation of God's law or a moral code, but as deleterious to society. His argument against lying was that if everybody did it society could not function. Again, Jeremy Bentham's measure of morality was "the greatest good for the greatest number."

Several things follow from Bentham's definition:

1) It leaves the "good" undefined thus giving it maximum applicability to many cultures and promoting a global ethic.

2) It is open to investigation and modifications as the human condition changes. In this it is much closer to the scientific method than the arbitrary injunctions of previous moral systems, which sometimes tried to apply millennia old tribal moral values to modern society.

3) This reality-based moral system is founded on intelligent inquiry not on the intellectual vacuity and untestability of faith. Unlike faith, testability is less manipulable by those who use "faith" for devious political and social purposes.

Finally, this approach to morality avoids the "dumbing down" of humanity at a time when its intelligence is most needed.

Our current value systems are killing large numbers of our species. They are endangering the future of our species and promoting increasing violence. They are doing this because they deal in absolutes rather than with the facts of human existence. As an example, the Catholic Church has long held that contraception is an evil because it interferes with God's will in procreation. In Genesis, an ancient tribal text, their deity commands them to "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…"  On a planet that now has 7 billion people and counting and is faced with rapidly diminishing resources, this injunction to an ancient small tribe seeking to insure its growth is creating havoc in the modern world. They also vigorously pursue an anti-abortion agenda even at the point of first cell division because they believe a soul is created at that point. Again, with no regard for future humans and the chaos and suffering they will experience. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. At the social level the unexamined value is not worth having and can be very dangerous.

Bob Newhard