Here We Go Again: Technological Paradigm Shift with no Planning for Social Consequences

Humans have yet to find a way to live in harmony with their technology. Their heads create what the rest of their being often finds disruptive, dangerous and destructive. Picture the Industrial Revolution accompanied by a Hogarth-depicted London slum.

We know from bitter experience what disastrous impacts technological innovation can have on social structures and human well-being, yet despite repeated episodes we do little or nothing to prepare ourselves and our societies for what we can see coming down the road. This, in my judgment, is one of the more massive failures of so-called advanced societies.

We now have sitting at our collective doorstep yet another technology that may have the power to dramatically change our means of production and the personal and social structures that depend on that structure. This technology is referred to as 3D Printing or Additive Manufacturing and is promising enough to have been mentioned in President Obama’s State of the Union address. In essence, it is a simple production process of depositing successive layers of material on top of each other, as dictated by a computer model, to produce three dimensional objects. The layers can be of varying thickness, down to the micron level, and be made of a variety of plastics and metal.  

This process can create items from pharmaceuticals, to clothing, to fully functioning hypoid gear sets that are created in a single process with no assembly required. The following website will amaze you with objects made by this essentially simple process of layering. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xaj9jx7648.

Because the object is created from a software program production can take place anywhere, even the home. Additionally, production costs are so low that it can be profitable to produce only one item and it can be specific to that individual’s need. There is no need for mass production, warehousing, inventory, and shipping for these products. When all the advantages are added up, especially those affecting labor costs, we are looking at a technology that has the potential to eliminate a very large number of jobs.

Manufacturers call this process, whether using plastic or metal, additive manufacturing to distinguish it from conventional manufacturing, which removes material, e.g. grinding, cutting, milling, etc. to create the manufactured object. One of the great efficiencies of additive manufacturing is that what are multiple-piece assembled products in conventional manufacturing can be a single process with no assembly using additive manufacturing. Up to this point additive manufacturing has been used mainly for quick and inexpensive prototyping of products in their development process. It is beginning to find a role in production itself.

This process as used by individuals to create 3D objects, e.g. plastic jewelry, miniature statuary, etc., using printers costing as little as $139, is generally referred to as 3D printing. Some people are concerned that this could become a major source of junk as producing trinkets becomes as easy as printing paper.

This technology has the potential to deliver products to the consumer, tailored to the individual’s need or desire without the need for mass production, warehousing and distribution. Basically electrons move rather than things. There would be a decreasing need for factories, assembly lines, shipping, warehousing and other materials handling services.

The scope of the potential impacts of this technology can be glimpsed in the following list that can be found on the website of the Atlantic Council.

• Assembly lines and supply chains could be reduced or eliminated for many products. AM can produce the final product—or large pieces of a final product— in one process.
• Designs, not products, would move around the world as digital files are printed anywhere with any printer to meet design parameters.  A “STL” design file can be sent via the Internet and printed in 3D.
• Products could be printed on demand without the need for inventories.
• A given manufacturing facility would be capable of printing a huge range of products without retooling—and each printing could be customized without additional cost. 
• Production and distribution of material products could become de-globalized as production is brought closer to the consumer.
• Manufacturing could be pulled away from “manufacturing platforms” like China back to the countries where the products are consumed, reducing global economic imbalances as export countries’ surpluses are reduced and importing countries’ reliance on imports shrink. 
• The carbon footprint of manufacturing and transport as well as overall energy use in manufacturing could be reduced substantially and thus global “resource productivity” greatly enhanced and carbon emissions reduced.
• Reduced need for labor in manufacturing could be politically destabilizing in some economies while others, especially aging societies, might benefit from the ability to produce more goods with fewer people while reducing reliance on imports.

The United States, the current leader in AM technology, could experience a renaissance in innovation, design, IP exports, and manufacturing, enhancing its relative economic strength and geopolitical influence.

As you can see the potential impact on society is enormous, ranging from massive unemployment to a radical reduction in the human interaction and commonality of the workplace as well as the benefits of massive pollution and waste reduction. What I did not see after a fairly extensive investigation, was any thought or planning for the personal and social impacts of this revolutionary technology.

It appears that this technology will impact society and individuals with the same lack of planning and preparedness as our capitalist system has displayed in the recent past.

The United States used to have the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to advise Congress on developing technologies as well as existing technological issues. This agency existed from 1972 to 1995. It found disfavor with Ronald Reagan and was terminated by defunding in Newt Gingrich’s infamous Contract With America. Everybody agrees that technology is a, if not the, major influence on societal concerns. That this country has no agency like, say, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is a fabulous failure of governmental responsibility. In the halls of government we need the greatest cognizance of technological development and its impacts we can get. This agency should also have the mission to inform the public on what technology does and how it will condition their lives. A counterweight to the hype to which the public is so often subjected in these matters is badly needed. To get a feel for what could be done, the publications of the OTA may be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/. From what I have read of them, I think they could have been somewhat more informative both in detail and in the implications for the public. But at least the effort was being made and should have been retained and improved. Gingrich declared the agency a waste when he eliminated it. I don’t know whether this was a reflection of Republican anti-intellectualism or that the business powers that be did not want the Congress and the public to have objective assessments. Its reports should clearly indicate the potential impacts, especially the social impacts, of a significant new technology and recommend the level of oversight necessary to mitigate any significant adverse impacts. We live in an era of increasing rates of change. It is irresponsible not to assess, monitor and, where necessary, influence the rate and direction of change. The Obama administration should be encouraged to reestablish the agency to keep itself, Congress and the public aware of our technological environment as we are made aware (or should be) of our economic environment.

Aside from all the above 3D printing issues, Rachel Maddow reports as I write this piece that 3D Printing is being used to produce “receivers”, which are the only part of a an assault rifle that carries the weapon’s serial number and hence destroys the identity and control of the weapon. Another lesson in understanding that technology can, and often does, cut more than one way.

Bob Newhard

On dealing with a future of impending chaos

As people search for ways that humanity can deal with the many impending ecological and social threats it faces, they try to discern human capacities that, if enhanced, might see humanity through the future it faces.

 Some, the transhumanists, argue that humans will have to transform themselves into beings that can survive the future we have created. They propose essentially a technological solution. We may, for example, incorporate increasing amounts of computerized capabilities into our organism, much as we are now developing artificial hearts. Others of this persuasion focus on DNA manipulation to create humans that are more suitable to the ecological and social  conditions of the future.

Both of these approaches are intellectual in that they rely on our ability to think our way out of our dilemmas. There is however another use of our intelligence that seeks solutions without artificially modifying the human being. One of these is to examine human nature for widely shared characteristics. Those that are promising for the purpose of human species survival would be heavily emphasized in educating the young and featured prominently in societal communications in general. Campaigns of persuasion launched against tobacco smoking and now obesity are examples of emphasizing inherent human survival characteristics.

There is a substantial movement that recognized the human capacity for empathy as a candidate for this kind of social enhancement. Studies by primatologists and psychologists indicate that our simian ancestors have this capacity to a limited extent. Primates can “spontaneously” share goodies, even when paired with strangers. There was an experiment with macaques in which the monkeys were subject to a mild electrical shock in their cages. Their reactions elicited agitation in macaques which were in cages some distance away, but visually and audibly able to witness what was happening. Whether empathy can be generalized to the extent future calamities will require is highly debatable although there is a substantial movement to encourage the practice of empathy. David Brooks, in an article in the New York Times, expresses his doubts by noting an incident in World War II in which Germans soldiers were ordered to machine gun Jewish men, women and children. They did so, but some of them wept while doing so. Brooks argues that this kind of behavior demonstrates that empathy cannot replace morality. What Brooks fails to mention is that morality cannot withstand military training. Military training is specifically designed to break down the common human morality, which can and has interfered with the soldiers’ ability to kill on command. Having broken the civilian  notion of morality down, those emotions are either replaced by loyalty to military and one’s service unit, or, as in the case of the American military, it was made more personal by encouraging the “buddy system” in which soldiers were paired in training and in combat. This had the added advantage of increasing rage against the enemy if one’s buddy was killed or injured by the enemy. Even in matters of life and death humans are still being manipulated by the organizations to which they belong.

My own view remains that humans will have to rely on their ability to think if they are to survive the future they have created. However, rather than seeking to transform humans into more survivable forms, I think we need to seek survivability in the context of the natural world in which we evolved. To do this, we must acquire the knowledge of how large masses of people behave when confronted with the kinds of pressures that we can expect from the natural and social world of the future.

When science sets out to understand an amorphous collection of entities analogous to the masses of humans envisioned here, it does so by modeling behavior and then progressively refining that model as experience dictates, until the model becomes more and more accurate in predicting outcomes form specific kinds of events. Weather forecasting, for example, has been developed in this manner.

A model that has suggested itself to me is that of fault lines in the earth’s surface and the kind of analysis seismologists have adopted. Suppose we regard the major differences in the human population today as fault lines in global society. Some of these are race, ethnicity, gender, wealth, and ancient enmity. Let us take race as an example.

First we should examine existing and recent areas in society where race has been the source of conflict. As a first step we have to find a means of distinguishing racism from other motives that may accompany it. Currently in this country purging of voter lists is taking place under the rubric of confirming voter qualification. That a substantial portion of those being purged are black evidences racism. How do we know this? As with any other natural phenomenon we examine the data and look for correlations or the lack thereof. In this case the purging is predominantly or totally in the South with its ongoing racism identified in other areas of human behavior in that area of the country. Using this evidence we look for a similar pattern of camouflaged racism in other areas such as employment and housing.

Having identified some of the eruption points on this fault we examine the conditions which cause this fault to erupt violently. Gradually we build a social map of the various fault lines, their frequency and violence of eruptions, intersections with other fault lines and lesser or tangential fault lines. As the characteristics of a fault line begin to take shape we get an increasingly clearer picture of the relations that obtain in the fault line. We look for the kinds of things that have triggered eruptions. We determine the various costs to society that these eruptions have caused.

Having made these determinations to the point of functional clarity we set out to find and develop remedies. Can, for example, an adequate jobs program quell racial tensions that may be heightened to a dangerous degree by unemployment? Every city and community should know itself in these objective terms.

As seismology is less than an exact science, so will be a thinking approach to social unrest. But as weather prediction is more accurate than seismology in its predictions so we could continue to make our understanding of social unrest increasingly accurate as we improve it with additional evidence from its use.

The point of this hypothesis, whether it has merit or not, is that we must begin to rationalize our understanding of society and incorporate that understanding into our political and social decisions. The only way humans have managed to improve their existence is through thought and understanding and the application of that understanding in our decision making. If our species is to survive, such understanding will be essential to that survival. In an essay titled Future Peace: Breaking Cycles of Violence

Through Futures Thinking, Tessa Finlev of The Institute for the Future argues that thinking about the future can itself have a calming effect on conflicting groups. This article can be found at http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/16-3/A03.pdf. This effort to think out and plan for a future highly prone to violence, is the kind of response that I am proposing in this post. Let us employ our reason before we are so engaged in the immanent resource-based conflicts we are already seeing as oil reserves diminish that we cannot do the required planning.

It takes time and great effort to create the understandings and their best application in a complex and large society. It is, in my judgment, high time this effort be taken seriously to avoid or mitigate the violence that will befall us if the trends that threaten our future continue to coalesce in increasingly perfect storms.

Bob Newhard 

On ‘Something Is Better Than Nothing’

I recently expressed my disappointment at her vote on Senate filibusters to Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren ran for the Senate and I supported her as a self-declared progressive. She voted for the anemic Reid proposal. In her response to my letter Warren expressed her deep disappointment with the result of the effort to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule, but she voted for Reid’s bill “because it is better to get something than nothing.”

This is, in effect, the mantra we have been getting from Democrats from Bill Clinton on. It reflects, in my judgment, a very narrow view of “something,” namely, what goes on in the legislature, not what goes on in the country.

Bernie Sanders, alone as usual, voted against Reid’s bill. That is because Bernie has a far larger view of progressive politics than most of the Progressives in Congress. Bernie understands the responsibility of progressive legislators to educate the public about the importance of issues facing the country’s legislature. His way of doing politics is to make his decisions in terms of the people, not his fellow legislators. He knows that Progressives will never effectively make their case unless they are known for their integrity and thoughtfulness. A pallid vote for Reid’s bill did little, if not nothing, to let the people know the extent of Progressive opposition to it and the reasons for that opposition.

Warren, along with some other of today’s Progressives, needs to take a serious look at what “Progressive” meant in the 1930’s. It might be helpful if these people read the article Eleanor: the Radical Roosevelt, which can be found on the Yes magazine web site at

http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/eleanor-the-radical-roosevelt.

The Progressive agenda of FDR’s Work Projects Administration (WPA) did not merely set out to put people to work, but also to put them to work for which they could make the greatest contribution. Thus the WPA not only had administrations for building dams, schools, roads and libraries, it also had the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writer’s Project. The latter produced a series of superb state histories that were noted for their thoroughness and readability. These became staples in public libraries. Dorothea Lange’s photographs for the Resettlement Administration became American icons and are still some of the best vehicles for understanding human despair and grief. The point is that government relief programs were aimed at keeping the society whole in its many dimensions. These survival programs made room for laborers and engineers, but also for artists and intellectuals. All this and much more was accomplished by government responsive to people’s needs.

This was progressivism in action. This is what was lost with the arrival of Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council and “Dynamic Middle” concept through which he continued Ronald Reagan’s practice of privatizing everything in sight. Today’s problems are different from those of the 1930s in that we have allowed the manufacturing base of that economy to be exported to other countries. Because of the continued replacement of human labor, mental as well as physical, by computers, jobs in the conventional sense can be expected to diminish and those that remain will become fewer and fewer. The threat from witless technological development to social development can have effects as disastrous as those of the Great Depression. Today’s Progressives should be devising and promoting the social programs to meet the needs of this anticipated future in order to mitigate adverse impacts, provide opportunities for human development and bring human population, consumption and industry into harmony with the capacities of our planet. To do this we must begin by reintroducing the fundamental role of government in achieving those goals. This cannot be left to the caprice of the profit-chasing private sector.

To do the above we also need to shift our primary focus from getting progressives elected, as exemplified by the Progressive Democrats of America and Democracy for America, to developing a progressive response to the issues of our future as well as the issues of our time.

I have looked rather assiduously for organizations or web sites that are focused on articulating a progressive futurism. I have not had much luck. In the course of this search I went to the Congressional Progressive Caucus web site at http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/. I found a lot of thinking and work going on, especially a 2012 ‘People’s Budget and the 2013 ‘Budget For All’ progressive budgets as rivals of Paul Ryan’s Republican budgets and President Obama’s Democratic Party budgets. These budgets evidence a high level of critical and comprehensive thinking. However, nowhere on the CPC site nor elsewhere, have I been able to find Progressives articulating a comprehensive and coherent progressive perspective to offer people and to compete with other perspectives for humanity’s future.

For instance, in these well-regarded Progressive budgets there is a massive effort to create jobs, but nowhere on this site or elsewhere have I found progressives trying to think out the consequences of a continuing job loss due to technology and increasing population. We will need an alternative to the job as we know it or we will have to create pointless surrogates though their only role is to distribute income, e.g. store greeters are common in Japan and becoming increasingly so in this country. As society’s productivity is increasingly turned over to machines, the results of that productivity will have to be turned over to human beings, either the wealthier few as in this country or the average many, as the preservation of democracy will require. Again, if our planet’s resources demand a sustainable future, where is the progressive planning for such a future? I ask myself why a society that had converted the working class into the middle class through an improved level of economic equality would buy Ronald Reagan’s  ‘Morning in America.’ Granted there had been a continuing period of “stagflation.” But if we could pull ourselves out of the worst depression we had ever seen, could we not deal with a period of little or no growth? What does this episode, with all of the continuing economic and social adversity it has created tell us about a society based on a sustainable economy? Where are progressives wrestling with this aspect of our future?

We must THINK deeply and hard in order to articulate the solutions to the complex problems that face us and the rest of mankind if we are to survive in any civilized fashion. That this call to thought is not too precipitous is indicated by observing that the progressive budgets would balance the budget by 2021 and a few decades after that humans will be living with the compound consequences of global warming. Let us work hard to bring reality into focus in the politics, economics and social consciousness of this country.

Bob Newhard

The Mind-Body Problem, Restated

Human beings have long been fascinated b the strange bifurcation that they find in themselves. Their bodies have immediate sensations, pleasures, pains, tfears, limitations of space and time. At the same time their minds may be re-experiencing memories of past place and events or imagining future places and events, or those that never existed. Philosophers have called this the mind-body problem and have compiled a large body of thought about it. In what follows I want to consider a societal expression of this bifurcation, especially with regard to one rapidly developing technology.

It has been a phenomenon of societal development since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. At that point the power of human thought began to be felt. What Francis Bacon observed in the 17^th century, namely, that “knowledge is power,” evidenced its transforming impact in the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th century. Ever since, mam’s mind has increasingly outpaced the rest of its organism. We have, unfortunately, behaved as though this increasing gap between what our minds created and what our bodies could deal with, did not matter. Of late, more and more people are pointing out that little matters more than this fault line in us and in out societies.

We now see that our minds have developed and implemented technologies that threaten our existence as a species. Using our technologies we have altered the planet’s climate system and we have unleashed the power of nuclear fission and we do not know how to put it back in the bottle.

The latest and perhaps the most threatening of these technologies is known as synthetic biology.

In his book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, George Church describes and discusses the relatively new and rapidly developing field of synthetic biology. Generally this refers to the process of removing parts of DNA and combining them with other DNA to produce a different form of life.

Church equates synthetic biology with other foundational shifts in human evolution such as the discovery of fire and the movement from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. If he is right, and he presents considerable evidence that he is, then humanity is faced with a monumental opportunity to improve itself and an equally monumental opportunity to destroy itself in a multidimensional chaos that boggles the mind because this technology will eventually offer human beings the ability to restructure themselves. We will increasingly become the subjects of technology, not just the applicators of technology.

A few examples that come to mind: What happens when the demand for designer children takes hold? We have already seen the phenomenon of selling the semen of very intelligent men to those seeking artificial insemination. Will an existing generation seek to fashion the subsequent generation to its desires?  Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New world describes a society that breeds its  citizens to meet the society’s requirements for the skills it needs thereby avoiding unsatisfied desires and the social disruptions and violence prevalent in today’s violence ridden societies. Conversely, will existing societies use this technology to breed future generations to pursue existing antagonisms or megalomania as currently powerful segments of the Christian and Muslim religions vie to outbreed each other and thereby make their religion dominant?

As Church points out in some detail, synthetic biology is spreading rapidly beyond the laboratories of government, academia, and corporations. It has entered a phase similar to that of the Home Brew Club and garages s of the early phases of the semiconductor-microcomputer revolution of Silicon Valley. In gatherings in Cambridge Massachusetts, students and others from Harvard and MIT are using startup labs that charge fees such as $200 a month to use the lab and its equipment and get a discount on the reagents used in DNA manipulation. The same thing is happening in Silicon Valley itself. This means the technology to manipulate life itself is spreading under all the motivations and interests of human beings with little or no oversight or control. We may be witnessing yet another wave of fundamental change and a problematic future.

The bottom line to all of this is that mankind will make itself the subject of the same experimental and technological development that it has made of the rest of the natural world. Do we have the faintest notion of what that mindset will mean for the future of our species?

Dilemmas of this kind and this magnitude, i.e.  multidimensional in extremis, effecting every life form including its present and its future generations, should give humanity great pause.

We badly need an early warning system for technological development and it’s potential. The United Nations has produced a document titled Early Warning Systems: A State of the Art Analysis and Future Directions aimed at identifying existing advance warning systems and identifying areas of need for such systems. This document can be found at http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/siouxfalls/publications/Early_Warning.pdf. The document deals with shorter term disasters such as oil spills and earthquakes and long-term “creeping” disasters such as global warming, soil erosion and other forms of environmental degradation. Imperative though development of technological early warning systems are, I was unable to find any reference to this need in the platforms of the National Democratic Party, Green Party or the Socialist Party USA.  This want of concern speaks volumes about the mind set of American politics, especially its unwillingness to take the lead in using government and law to make the human predicament clear enough to permit society to deal with faster rates of change than mankind has previously had to deal with.

Technology as the product of the human brain is, if left to the capacious greed and lust for power all too common to mankind, the societal mind-body problem that must be solved or at least greatly ameliorated if our species is to survive.

Bob Newhard

Privatization: Implications That Are Less Often Considered

In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander comments on the problems facing prison reform. Among them is the well-financed resistance of private prison corporations. She quotes from the 2005 annual report for the Corrections Corporation of America, which explained the vested interests of private prisons matter-of-factly in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

“Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. This possible growth depends on a number of factors we cannot control, including crime rates and sentencing patterns in various jurisdictions and acceptance of privatization. The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our

criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

This list of prospective growth areas presents a number of them that are in flat opposition to public objectives, e.g. public policy seeks to reduce recidivism as opposed to the corporate concern to increase it. It takes little imagination to see the politics of private prison corporations, e.g. criminalizing every human activity they can, lengthening sentences, etc. The sources of increased profit could play out in political payola and/or well-funded referenda.

Let me pause here and discuss capitalism’s demand for growth.  One can imagine company content with making a certain level of profit. It does not need to seek funds beyond those supplied by its revenue. However, should such a company meet circumstances requiring additional funds or merely indulge in the lust to be bigger, it must borrow that money. Typically this is done by a public stock offering of shares in the company. The stock holders become part owners of the company and are entitled to their share of the profits. Even this level of complexity is understandable. In the early phases of capitalism people would often invest in a ship going to pick up spice, silks and other valuables from the Far East. If the enterprise was a success each investor shared the profits to the extent of their investment. Today, however, once the modern day corporation issues stock that stock becomes a commodity to be sold. It takes on a life of its own; a life of speculation and of whatever processes the financial markets can dream up. It is primarily this phase of capitalism that drives modern day capitalism. This type of capitalism may have only modest concern for corporate earnings. It is interested in the trading value of the stock, which may vary with anything from speculation about the company’s possible future development to the hiring of a new CEO. To meet the demands of many of today’s investors it is necessary to show a profit, often over only the last quarter, above the profit of the previous quarter, no matter how profitable the previous quarter may have been. Thus a demand for growth can and often is, unrelated to the production of the company. It has become a financial figment in a casino of speculation, concerned with value as established on the trading floor.

Public services have no inherent need for growth. The demand for growth distorts public services grotesquely. Any effort to privatize a public service should be evaluated from the growth perspective.  Public officials must require a “growth report,” not unlike an Environmental Impact Report (EIR), that would detail the corporation’s opportunities and requirement for growth from the privatized public service. The rather candid statement quoted above might be a good place to start.

Bob Newhard

Newtown and Cultural Insanity

The Los Angeles Times carried an article in which the reporter queried people in and about Newtown regarding the mass killing of school children and adults at the Newtown public school. He found a community long given to guns with a plethora of gun shops, gun repair shops and shooting ranges. Indeed, the small state of Connecticut is the birthplace of the iconic Colt and Winchester guns, the Colt being established in 1830 and still manufactured in Hartford. Newtown citizenry is split between multigenerational families and, beginning about 15 years ago, wealthy newcomers from New York who found a quiet haven 70 miles from New York City from which they commute for work. Last fall Newtown’s police commission put an item on the ballot proposing limited hours for firing ranges and police permission to fire guns on private property. This was done primarily in response to complaints of noise from firing ranges. The proposed ordinance was defeated by local gun shops and their trade association supporters.

The mother of the 20 year old shooter was a wealthy divorcee living in a colonial style home. She liked guns, beer and volunteering at the local public school. She had an arsenal of five weapons, including an assault semi-automatic rifle, which the Times reporter found not to be all that unusual in Newtown and environs. The shooter’s mother had said she needed this arsenal for protection, a reason others gave for their own arsenal.

With funeral services still being held for those killed in the shooting, the Times reporter queried gun retailers and members of gun clubs and failed to get any rethinking of guns and mass slaughter, other than that schools needed to hire police personnel or arm teachers and principals. The remedy was more guns. The good people had to arm themselves against the bad people. This is the position the National Rifle Association has taken. Their leader publicly declared that the only remedy for a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. This profoundly simple-minded response to the mass killing of young children with a high capacity automatic weapon betrays either a high level of cultural callousness or a society that has lost its connection to reality. In either case this response from a multibillion dollar organization that expects it to fly raises so many questions as to the state of American society and American culture that the depth and complexity of our social sickness and its causes await an urgent analysis and the beginning of an era of remaking America as a society focused on human well-being.

I am personally of the opinion that there are many contributing causes to tragedies such as Newtown.  Among them are gross overpopulation, which cheapens human life; massive movement of wealth to a very few and the consequent decrease in the wealth distributed among the rest of American society; a narrow-minded moral meanness that has spread in our society with the political rise of the South; the loss of a sense of reality occasioned in no small part by 24/7 advertising, which replaces truth and fact with emotional fantasy; the effects of a communications and an entertainment technology that increasingly isolates Americans from the human presence of each other. So called social networking is often little more than self-advertisement by the millions seeking to be somebody in a very homogenized society. This litany of contributing causes is neither complete nor may not even mention those most important, but it does provide a sense of the complexity of the problems we face as our world begins to unravel around us. We are at the point where Americans will reject the path of self- indulgence, cultural arrogance and global imperialism and begin to seek remedies for our many shortcomings, including seeking them from other developed societies or we will continue down the path of self-delusion, decline and demise. I am not that hopeful, given what history tells me about human behavior, but if we have the capacity to put exploratory hardware on Mars and understand our evolutionary roots, we may find a way to avoid the extinction that most certainly awaits us if we do not. It would be a startling and valuable precedent to see a society as large and complex as ours recover its sanity.

Bob Newhard

The Rich Are Always With Us or How Wealth Distorts Society

I believe it is time that we stop moralizing about the unfairness of wealth and the opportunities it affords that are not available to those lacking wealth. Wealth has social consequences inimical to society and the stability it requires.

In his book The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future Joe Stiglitz remarks the role of inequality in the major social revolutions of 1848 and 1958 and speculates that 2011 may turn out to be another such seminal period because of the pervasive inequality.

But how does wealth distort society? Let me count the ways.

Wealth is power and as it is much more likely to attract additional wealth than is non-wealth (the poor are a notoriously lousy investment for the money-focused wealthy), it increasingly concentrates wealth and the power it generates into fewer and fewer hands. To paraphrase Lord Acton Power corrupts and increasing power increasingly corrupts. This power has distorted our political process so thoroughly that our democracy is now a hollow version of its former self. This power now permeates every aspect of our society including economics, law, media, war, education both general and academic, etc.

Wealth as a goal badly distorts our ability to deal with the major threats our species faces. It replaces a concern for our planet and our species with a concern for money and profit. Neither of these meets any fundamental human need.

Wealth replaces human value with monetary value and makes of human beings factotums in the market place with money equivalents not unlike the machines used to produce our goods. Indeed, we are often more concerned for the machine than the human. We allow businesses to amortize the value of a machine over time thereby reducing taxes on it, but do not allow the worker to amortize her/his body as it wears out. They are just fired.

Even if wealth did not result in excessive power it would still be distorting to society. If it could only be used to denote status as Thorstein Veblen describes in his Theory of the Leisure Class or as in Samuel Butler’s Erewon in which the Musical Bank issued non-negotiable money that represented prestige only, wealth would still have the pernicious influence of dividing society along artificial lines that would take its focus off valuing human wellbeing.

All of this criticism is based on the social evil of creating distinctions that generate asocial grouping based on the assumption of some groups that they are superior to other groups and that superiority per se is of fundamental importance.

Aldous Huxley was sensitive to the human proclivity to place undue value on difference in his novel Brave New World in which human beings were bred from the embryo on up to do certain jobs so that there would be no social crises due to unrealized expectations or sense of inferiority or superiority. In the rare event this discontent did arise a soma pill would alleviate any undue stress.

We must begin to view wealth as at least a threat, if not an enemy of, a stable democratic society and mitigate its accumulation out of that concern. Children should not be encouraged to go forth and seek their fortune as has been a centuries-long mantra in American society, now commonly called “success.”

But, it is said by the wealth-instilled conventional wisdom that without great wealth as a stimulant we will not get the innovation that a vibrant economy requires. In this regard a recently read article comes to mind.

The federal government has a new program to make the country a leader in battery technology. The plan calls for the  Argonne National Laboratory, which has considerable experience developing the lithium-ion battery that now powers everything from cell phones to the Tesla all-electric very fast luxury automobile, to lead this project. A number of university laboratories will work in cooperation with Argonne and the results of their development will be turned over to corporations to develop and market  products. The major innovation here is to be found in the government and other non-profit institutions. The private sector contributes a secondary level of innovation in developing products for the market and in the process these for-profit companies create excessive wealth that plays havoc with everything from financial stability to environmental destruction to social stability. Obviously highly qualified people work for the Argonne Laboratory, as they do in university research laboratories. They are well paid, but rather than being motivated by aspirations to become billionaires they find satisfaction in the knowledge they create. Another example is the Internet developed totally at government expense to mitigate damage to the nation’s communications system in the event of a nuclear attack. The private sector was allowed to use this system thereby generating behemoths of the Google and Amazon size, which avoided paying sales taxes for years until states began forcing them to do so. Again, this was billions in revenues that could have been used for society’s betterment.  My point here is that contrary to the constantly-pushed claptrap from the business community, we do not need free market capitalism to generate innovation. Additionally, we can no longer afford the liabilities free market capitalism introduces into a democratic society.

So, what should replace it? If you talk to people in the professions and sciences you will find that interest in the subject was and continues to be a prime motivator. Of course they want a reasonable income, but dreams of great wealth are seldom what inspire them.

What if the corrupting wealth that now flows to the ever fewer was taxed at 90% as it was under Franklin Roosevelt and what if those moneys were invested in creating clean energy solutions, massive rebuilding and improving of the nation’s infrastructure and to help people through adequate funding of public education and affordable academic education? These societal needs and desires are, after all, the price we pay for tolerating excessive wealth.

Finally, as technology continues to erode the role of the job as a means of distributing society’s wealth-generating productivity, it will be necessary to create a job-sharing labor market if we are to continue to use the job as the means of maintaining a fair distribution of wealth.  

 The standard argument from the likes of the National Chamber of Commerce that increasing the cost of products by using more people to produce them would price American products out of the market, would be dealt the death blow it so richly deserves because the excess wealth now going to those who have no need for it would be used to keep the price of American products reasonable. It is high time we added up the cost of excessive wealth and used the power of taxation to mitigate its adverse impacts and redirect the flow of wealth to society as a whole. We have done it before. It is high time we did it again.

Bob Newhard