Public Schools, Religion and Deception

One of society’s most fundamental responsibilities is the education of the young. One of the primary goals of that education is to prepare the young to live effectively in the world in which they will have to function. There was a time when society changed very little from generation to generation. Education of the young could rely heavily on a tradition that had sufficed for previous generations. As the world changed for economics and politics with the rise of the industrial revolution and its introduction of an ever-increasing rate of change, so it did for education. Education today must prepare students to live in a world their parents can hardly glimpse. Ironically, this awareness is a powerful stimulant for parents to flee to the perceived verities of an earlier age and to impose an education, based on that earlier age, upon their children. Nothing could be of less value to their children or to the democratic society in which they, possibly, will live.

We see this scenario being played out in our local schools. Two Board members of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District (MVUSD) initially proposed teaching a course on the Bible in literature, art and history. The Board was split with a majority favoring a course on world religions. The result has been a staff proposal to teach a one year course on the Bible in literature and a one semester course on world religions. These options are to be considered by the Board as a whole and voted on at their April, 26, 2007 meeting.

In my judgment a course focused on one religious book does little to prepare students for the world in which they will live and is in fact damaging to that goal. The text for this course is An Illustrated Guide to the Bible by J. A. Porter. Conversely a course presenting the world’s religions objectively would obviously be a benefit. The texts for these two courses are available for inspection through April 25^th at the school distinct administrative offices. There are two books used for this course, namely, Scriptures of the World’s Religions by James Fraser and Experiencing the World’s Religions by Michael Molloy. I have examined the books and the text on the Bible is, in my judgment, substantially a gloss using art and literature as a way to talk about one religious book. The texts on world religions are not the worst. However there is negligible attention paid to the large variety of religious wars and the consequences of religious prejudices. This lack of objectivity is a violation of the fundamental value of education, i.e. to learn how things really are and how things really work. There is a subtle assumption that religion is basically good even though particular religions differ radically in the way they regard human beings and in their belief systems and behavioral injunctions.

A similar lack of objectivity is the absence of the voluminous literature of religious skepticism. There are five pages concerned with secularism in one of the books, but even here it is in a very muted form of secularism, e.g. suggesting that their might be an accommodation between religion and science, indeed, that environmentalism may become a religion. Students need to know the long history of religious skepticism if they are to understand the history of religion. They should know that Socrates was forced to commit suicide for "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state" and "of corrupting the youth.” They should know of Lucretius’ atomistic account of the natural world. They should know that the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for the last years of his life for declaring that Copernicus was right. They should know that the Church burned Bruno at the stake for his support of science. They should know of the religious skepticism of David Hume, and the Deism of Tom Paine, Washington, Jefferson and Madison. They should know of a similar skepticism among American personages of literature, e.g. Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and our own recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut.

Students should know of the horrors of religious conflict and prejudice and why religion is so often a basis for prejudice, namely, its absolutism permits no way to negotiate differences. They should know of the deadliness of religious warfare from the Crusades and the sacking of Constantinople, and the disasters of the Children’s Crusade to the religious wars of Europe, including the slaughter of the Huguenots, which so profoundly affected the thinking of the founders in formulating the Establishment clause of the Constitution prohibiting a state religion. They should be aware of the Inquisition and the torture and barbarity visited on those who did not confess their Christianity.

Additionally, in my judgment, there should be extensive material on the nature of belief and the difference between belief and evidence.

Finally, it is important to know that of the two Board members initially proposing the Bible course, one is a pro bono lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a fundamentalist Christian group of lawyers seeking to establish a Christian theocracy in place of our non-theistic democracy, notice I did not say anti-theistic. The segue from non-theistic to anti-theistic has been a favorite method of the Religious Right in attacking secularism. They demonize agnostics, atheists and secularism in general as being opposed to religious freedom. That freedom is the freedom to express not to dominate. Prominent among ADF’s specters are gays. Ken Dickson, an ADF lawyer on the MVUSD Board, has defended a Poway student who wore a T-shirt to school emblazoned with anti-gay statements. The student was sent home for an acceptable shirt. Dickson argues that the boy’s freedom of speech was denied. Hate as free speech in an environment which children are required to be in? On that basis, as my wife Eleanor notes, students should be allowed to bring guns to school by way of the right to bear arms clause as interpreted by the National Rifle Association. Among the funders of the ADF is Eric Prince of the Amway-Prince automotive empire and founder of the private army Blackwater USA. The ADF legally fights against gays, atheists, secularism and for the legal imposition of Christian values, often called family values. They would prefer no public schools, but failing that seek to make public schools Christian in their orientation.

Bob Newhard

G. W. Bush and the Banality of Evil

George W. Bush has made much of “evil” including it as a cause justifying war. Having been assigned such an important role, it merits examination.

Hannah Arendt, whose main concern after World War II was to understand totalitarianism, was sent by the New York Times to report on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She discovered in Eichmann a well-educated person demonstrating no hatred for the Jews, in fact working with Zionists to find a place for them to migrate to. However, when the Nazis decided that the final solution was to be extermination Eichmann found no trouble in carrying out his assignment to round up and send to concentration camps some 400,000 Jews. Puzzled by Eichmann’s ordinariness in light of the horrors he had committed, Arendt reflected on evil as she had totalitarianism in her earlier books. She offered her thoughts in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of the Eichmann trial. In this study she coined her now famous phrase the “banality of evil.” That which is banal lacks originality, it is ordinary, routine and, I suggest, intellectually dull. As one commentator put it, there is no interior dialogue, no asking and answering questions, just the focus on doing the routine well. This notion of evil contrasts with that of many people, including G. W. Bush, that evil is focused on creating as much pain, suffering and death as it can.

But if evil can flow from the banality of Eichmann’s sense of duty might it not flow from other states of mind focused on the banal for different reasons?

One of the things that has puzzled me about G. W. Bush is how an individual can look at all the death and destruction he has caused and is causing and yet persist in the effort and all this in the face of no threat. What level of callousness does this take? Bush gives no evidence of creative thinking. No evidence of any significant educational impact. No appreciation for the complexity of human existence. In brief there is every evidence that Bush’s interior life is awash in banality. Some have seen in him the Dry Drunk phenomenon in which the reformed alcoholic must so continually focus on avoiding a relapse that no questioning or entertaining doubt can be permitted lest he loose his grip. This too is a form of the banal.

The point of the banality of evil is that otherwise ordinary people can create the most horrible of crimes because of the intensity of their focus on a single justifying principle. Perhaps the terrorist and religious fanatic can be understood as extreme cases of banality. If so, the importance of thinking takes on a new dimension.

Bob Newhard

Religion, Dictatorship and American Ambivalence

Americans have, in my judgment, a somewhat unique, naïve and increasingly dangerous view of religion. It is founded on the distinction between church and state as reflected in our Constitution. Because that distinction is so imbedded in our consciousness we assume that religion is politically innocent. Unlike our European forbears, we have little experience with religion as a major property owner, of prelates as major business operators and masters of serfs or religion as highly integrated into the politics and law of our country. As a result we are at best ambivalent about any attack on religion viewing religion as a private matter. Get over it. Religious fundamentalism has been a profound enemy of democracy and in this country has become the single largest threat to our democracy; larger in point of power than any terrorist group. One of the functions of the “war on terror” has been to distract Americans from the insidious efforts of fundamentalist Christian religions to carry out this destructive enterprise.

Chris Hedges is a war reporter, one time head of the New York Times’ Middle East bureau and author of a seminal book on the attractiveness of war for humans titled War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He has a new book out titled American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Hedges, a divinity student at Yale, where he had a professor who observed the rise of Nazism in the German church, documents a similar rise in political power of the Religious Right. He details with direct quotes their ongoing strategy to use our Constitutional freedom of religion to establish an American theocracy not unlike John Calvin’s rule of Geneva. Democracy will be destroyed in the interest of Christian dogma and the military and economic power of the United States will be used to make Christianity the dominant religion world wide. As Hedges documents, the Nazi attack on the Weimar Republic was “values” based. Their initial scapegoats included homosexuals as does the Religious Right in this country. If this were a political movement a majority of Americans would be in vigorous opposition to the Religious Right, but this movement, using the gloss of religion, confuses people as to how to deal with it. This, as in Germany, is the purpose of using religion to gain political ends.

In the matter of tolerance, which religious differences raise in a democracy, Hedges quotes the philosopher Karl Popper “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

We are, in my judgment, faced with a serious threat of fascism in this country. We see it in the usurpation of authority by the Bush administration. We see it in the USA Patriot Act. We see it in the loss of habeus corpus. We see it in the way that an act of terrorism was converted into an act of war so that our democratic freedoms could be more easily abridged. We see it in the unconstitutional gifts of millions of dollars to religious groups in the name of service to the needy. We see it when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest military officer, publicly expresses his disdain for gays in the military. We see it in the incorporation of private armies into the American military. This was done by edict of Donald Rumsfeld thus making armies such as Blackwater and its Right Wing Christian owner immune from civilian courts for their crimes and yet as private companies they are not subject to military law. An armed camp of government subsidized freebooters was thus created. We see it locally when a religious group takes over the flagpole at our local high schools for daily prayer meetings thereby declaring ownership of that national symbol. We see it when the family is made the center of political and cultural concern, not the individual as the Constitution declares. We see it in the gross distortions of American history promulgated by the religious Right. We see it in their gross distortions of ordinary language in which, for example, the word freedom means freedom in Christ and from secular humanism. We see it in their exceptionally egregious claim to be a moral majority. In short we see it in every dimension of our cultural and political life. It is high time we recognize it for what it is and, lest this country follow the path exemplified by Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile and Spain’s Francisco Franco, we need to energetically defend our democracy against it. A fascist military superpower on this planet would be disastrous for humanity.

Bob Newhard

Reality as a Moral Arbiter

As of February 2, 2007 we have been informed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we have passed the tipping point in global warming. The planet will continue to get warmer for centuries and at an accelerating pace. This means rising sea level, massive desertification, water shortage, more frequent violent storms, etc. For western man, especially Americans, who have predicated the meaning of their lives on the prospect of the world getting better, especially for their children, we now have to face the prospect of an increasingly hostile environment. This will, I believe, give occasion for more people than usual to query what it means to be human in a world without hope.

Progressivism is especially vulnerable in such a world. It has had a “better future” at its core. Will it be able to translate its values into a world of less-and-less? If so, what will it look like at that point? There are already progressive strategies being offered to reduce the impact of global warming on the poor of the planet. Could for example, the poor areas of the world, which pollute less than the developed areas be paid for a “right to pollute” by the developed countries with a diminishing cap on total planetary pollution? This could see a long sought significant transfer of wealth to the poor of the planet. However, this whole process is shot through with profound uncertainty.

Hope is sometimes contrasted with despair. I think this is a mistake. Meaning remains.

It is rather commonly agreed that the most significant difference between humans and the other animals that have evolved on this planet is the human ability to reason. By reason I mean the ability to abstract and draw relationships between those abstractions and to apply these logically related abstractions to the real world in order to produce understanding. This process obviously involves more than reason, notably honesty about the facts, but at root it is reason that is unique to the human species.

We will in the coming centuries, for that is how long global warming will last, have ample opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be human as mankind experiences century after century of increasing global warming. There will also be ample opportunity for mankind’s other response mechanisms to calamity, e.g. increasing social fragmentation and the accompanying hostility and violence, superstition raised to a high level of mass delusion, etc. Much of human experience suggests that consequences such as these will be predominant, despite being destructive of the best in humans. In all this there will be those who persist in the exercise of hope, no matter how fantastic it has to get, as the enormity of man’s predicament becomes more evident.

I suggest for those who wish to live responsibly that this is a unique period in human experience in which our intelligence is telling us what our future is and that knowing this we can use it to vastly improve our ability to optimize the best in human nature. This is not unlike a person knowing he has a limited time to live seeking to optimize that time. This will require as much honesty as we can muster in facing the future and based on the facts that honesty uncovers seek to deepen our understanding of the real world and how humans relate to it.

Some people, especially those of an entrepreneurial bent, are already getting hyped by the potential for bringing technology to bear on these problems. Many will find refuge in these undertakings and insist that we can technologize our way out of this. The response I am suggesting would vigorously question such assumptions in the interest of honesty and the continuing preservation of what is best in humanity, namely, understanding. This is a time that will require an uncommon level of earnestness of those who seek to retain their judgment and exercise their thought. This is not to say that this is a period to look forward to, it will be fraught with calamity and violence, but as long as we have our ephemeral lives we can exercise our understanding and learn who we are as humans. Unfortunately humans have the additional problem of institutionalizing their emotions. Religion is the institutionalized form of hope and we see what its disregard for reality can lead to. Let us not trade on the vagaries and distractions of hope in which the mind is directed to, and obfuscated by, our desires rather than our understanding. Let us substitute purpose for hope as we seek to exemplify what is most uniquely human.

For those who are interested, Barbara Ehrenreich has an article, The Pathologies of Hope, in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine. While she is dealing with her bout with breast cancer rather than mankind’s future under global warming, she finds that hope has perversely invaded even academia in the form of Positive Psychology. She ends her article with reference to Albert Camus and the need for honesty in living our lives.

Finally, I would point out that hope rather than understanding is already being made a political issue. Barak Obama is obviously going to make hope a centerpiece of his presidential campaign as is evidenced by the 3-20-07 publication of his book The Audacity of Hope. Here is a senator with at best modest achievements as a senator. He evidences less than a comprehensive appreciation for the global issues that reality presents to mankind. Hence, he will appeal not to understanding and thought but to mankind’s emotions and the delusion that accompanies them. To do this knowingly is, in my judgment, despicable. The spin doctors of the left and undoubtedly the media will turn the 2008 election into a contest of which will be the first minority president a black or a woman. As important as racial accommodation and women’s equality are, they do not compare with global warming and the immediate strategies and negotiations that this world-wide phenomenon demands of us. We should find our racial and gender commonalities in our common and dire predicament, not in personal charisma or an appeal to the “American Way.” The question is not do “We worship an ‘awesome God’ in the Blue States” or whether the “audacity of hope ...is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.” as Barak Obama would have it. This is rhetoric directed at people’s feelings which are highly manipulable. The question is do we humans have the intelligence, will and ability to rearrange our social priorities to address the future that faces our species or will we play the same old “values” game that has glossed the existential issues we have faced for the last thirty or forty years. Al Gore talks reality with respect to global warming. Barak Obama gives us yet more sentimental pabulum, which makes me very suspicious of his motives and his new found corporate moneybags. As the Daily Kos (2-26-07) says in its plea for progressives to come to Al Gore’s defense, “Note to Senator Obama: spare us the hope and bi-partisanship talk and help us fight back.”

Bob Newhard

On Presidential Coins and the Imperial Presidency

This month saw the issuance of the first of the new Presidential dollar coins. A new one will be issued every three months until all the presidents have their coin issued, providing they are dead. I see in this one more effort to establish in the public mind the concept of the imperial president. Let me explain. Personages represented on our coins and currency have always been people deemed to have made an exceptional contribution to society. Not all presidents have been represented because they made no such contribution. We understood that the office does not make the office holder, but rather the office is made exceptional by the office holder. We long have made it an item of American democracy that the President is no more than any other citizen of the republic. He or she is not above the law and when they leave the office they return to being a citizen again. This is the way a democracy provides leadership. We have had exceptional individuals as presidents, e.g. Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison, and Roosevelt. We have had some that were abysmally corrupt, bigoted and those that focused on the welfare of the rich at the expense of the rest of society, e.g. Taft, Pierce, Buchanan, Reagan, and both Bushes. When we start honoring a class of individuals who have held the power implicit in the American presidency for that reason alone, we have begun to make that office definitive of human worth. This is anti-democratic and is the thing Washington rejected when many sought to make him king. When the war mongering and naked aggression of a Polk or a G. W. Bush can find equal status with Washington’s admonition to avoid entangling agreements with other nations and Wilson’s attempt to establish the League of Nations, one knows that any meaningful commonality between these individuals is absent, that one is dealing with the office, not the occupant. This, in my judgment, has no place in a democratic government based upon the interests of the citizen not those of an officeholder.

In my judgment the Imperial Presidency is not just about G. W. Bush. It is about the corporate displacement of the state by its own governing structures. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. One of the most powerful political and military entities of the later Middle Ages in Europe was the Hanseatic League established by merchants in the interest of controlling trade in the Baltic and having self-contained “embassies” throughout Europe. It was eventually defeated by the nation states, principally England.

Why do I smell corporate interests behind the enabling legislation for these new coins? This is the third time that they have tried to sell the use of these coins to the public. Why do they keep at it? Is it because the U. S. Mint says it would save 500 million dollars a year? Savings alone have seldom generated such repeated efforts by a legislative body. John Sununu originated this bill in the Senate. Notably he was on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee receiving major campaign contributions from the likes of Citicorp. Both Representative Mike Castle and Representative Carolyn B Maloney, sponsors of the bill in the House, are on the House Committee on Financial Services. Both receive the majority of their campaign contributions from banking, financial and insurance companies. The coin vending machine manufacturing and coin-based businesses, e.g. food, car washes, are known to want coins to promote automatic vending, a less labor-intensive retailing mechanism, ergo, more people laid off and out of work. The printing industry wants the one dollar bill retained. The Mint says that it could save 500 million dollars a year by going to one dollar coins and is spending mightily promoting the coins. The Mint web site provides teacher lesson plans and totally bland comments on the presidents. These students will never see the motives and horrible mistakes some of our presidents have made. They will be given an adulatory account. There are even coin-related cartoons for children. The public is known to favor the dollar bill, so Congress has required the continued issuance of the one dollar bill so the overall cost of the one dollar denomination has skyrocketed. Additionally, embedding the concept of an Imperial Presidency is consonant with the corporations’ preference for an authoritarian government that they can directly make deals with rather than one that requires the checks and balances of the democratic process. This is evidenced by their support for Pinochet and Mussolini.

Finally, I believe the ubiquity of these coins and the daily contact people of all ages will have with them will lead to acceptance that all these people were really great individuals and benefactors of our democracy. Such a belief will become as axiomatic as the belief that “In God we trust” was on our coinage from the very beginning rather than added in 1865 at the behest of Christians believing that without acknowledging God on our coinage the outcome of the Civil War was in jeopardy.

Does this all add up to a conspiracy? No, it’s just business as usual, namely corporations seeking their own ends even if it means a further dumbing down of the electorate.

Bob Newhard

Global Warming and Progressivism

Progressivism has always been postulated on making the world better for the mass of people. That central icon of the 19th century, Progress, was built into the movement. America’s multicentury exploitation of a continent provided an abundance of resources thus facilitating our society’s predisposition to reify the concept of progress generation after generation. With global warming, and all that it entails, we know this is coming to an end. My mother’s child-raising maxim was to leave the world a better place than you found it. This will be increasingly impossible for future generations. How will we understand progressivism over centuries of declining resources? What now for progressivism?

In broad outline, will progressivism have to redefine itself as making the world less worse as distinct from making it better? If so, what is the vision for “less worse?” I suggest it may be preserving the best in humans as we struggle to survive. If we do not emphasize both we may well return to the barbaric dog-eat-dog days of prehistory. We must preserve civilizations as we seek to preserve ourselves. And this has to be done on a planetary scale.
One way of addressing this problem has already been offered. With the objective of progressively lowering human-produced greenhouse gasses, it has been proposed that the wealthy most- polluting nations transfer wealth to the poorer less-polluting nations in exchange for the right to keep polluting at an ever diminishing scale as they seek to adjust their societies to the altered living conditions. This transfer of wealth has long been viewed as necessary to global democracy, but now the poorer nations of the world have something to offer that is of fundamental value to the wealthier nations. That there are significant problems with this is evident, e.g. what happens as the poorer societies increase their standard of living? How does a wealthy society react when it sees its living standards declining while those of poor societies are increasing, albeit still much below that of the wealthy? Any such agreement would require that whatever poor societies do with this influx of wealth it would not contribute to global warming. This is just one meager example of the complexity that will be involved in the many well-motivated proposals that will be forthcoming. . Let us not be too sanguine about these efforts to move wealth to the poor in exchange for reducing the pollution of the wealthy at a slower rate. We must keep in mind how resistant the wealthy nations have been to adequately assist the poor. An occasional disaster such as the Indian Ocean tsunami can elicit an immediate outpouring of aid as the media plays it up, but we have not been in it for the long haul – and it is the long haul that matters with global warming
In addition to the well-motivated we have the devious who will udoubtedly be even more prevalent. Bush’s energy proposal contained in his State of the Union address focuses on biofuels, especially corn.
President Bush asked Congress to help solve "one of the great challenges facing our generation" by approving proposals he says will cut U.S. gasoline consumption by up to 20 percent over 10 years.
"Every member of Congress who cares about strengthening our economy, protecting our national security and confronting climate change should support the energy initiatives I have set out," the president said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "We can leave behind a cleaner and better world for our children and grandchildren."
Bush's energy proposals, made in his State of the Union address last month, include ramping up the production of alternative fuels such as ethanol made from new, non-corn feedstocks. The president wants to require the use of 35 billion gallons a year of ethanol and other alternative fuels, such as soybean-based biodiesel, by 2017, a fivefold increase over current requirements. The ethanol would be in gasoline blends of 10 percent to 85 percent.
The call for sharp increases in ethanol use will get bipartisan support in Congress. But production of ethanol from corn is expected to fall far short of meeting such an increase. So Bush envisions a major speedup of research into production of "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips, switchgrass and other feedstocks. (AP report) The major producer of ethanol in the United States, Archer Daniels Midland, is a major player in political influence and is a major polluter, including pollution associated with producing ethanol. This piece of corporate greed has other dimensions. For a fuller account see http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646&printsafe=1.

Additionally, the skyrocketing price of corn because of its use to produce ethanol is already causing food shortages. The poor in Mexico have been rioting because the price of tortillas, a Mexican staple, has gone beyond their reach. We must keep in mind that the United States produces food for much of the rest of the world.

Violence, of course, will always be there to play a major role as resources diminish. Bush’s Middle East adventures to control oil are a prime example. What happens when two major nuclear powers instead of a small and large state face off for this diminishing resource?
This is a dead serious complex business. We must do everything we can to keep the various efforts transparent, to point out the greed and self-interest that will permeate these efforts and above all exert ourselves to understand as much of this hideously complicated problem as we can.

Bob Newhard

The All Volunteer Army and Some of Its Implications

One of the concepts that is of interest in various industries, notably, the consumer electronics industry, is “convergence.” This is an effort to understand where various technologies may converge in order to create new products by merging the functions of the converging technologies. An example is the cell phone which is being viewed as a phone, camera and computer. Whether and how these can be productively integrated is a matter of considerable study.
I want to consider a more ominous case of convergence, namely that of military technology and the loss of human freedom and of democracy.

From one direction there is our volunteer army. It came into existence after the Vietnam conflict because the military did not want to deal again with all the resistance a conscripted army generated. This is the first step in removing the military from citizen influence. It has become an army for hire, i.e. paid in the form of an education, new citizenship, etc. With the volunteer army serving under contract, not unlike the French Foreign Legion, the military has gained a level of independence from public concern and scrutiny. The result has created a military primarily of the poor. As it is relatively easy for an older generation to send a younger generation into battle so it is even easier to send the poor into battle. There is ample evidence that the Vietnam level of resistance has not been forthcoming because the relatively affluent have not been required to serve.

.The military’s next level of independence is gaining momentum, namely, the roboticization and other technological innovations applied to the military. Examples are: DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has released research grants for drugs that will permit soldiers to fight up to three days in combat without debilitating fatigue; A recently released military vehicle carries a ray gun that makes humans feel as though they are on fire thereby debilitating them. The stated aim is to develop technology that debilitates rather than kills, i.e. non-lethal weapons. The products of DARPA’s immense technological budget are not subject to any civilian agency, e.g. FDA, EPA, etc. review. There is an enormous level of human-control technology development taking place with no civilian oversight. With respect to the “supersoldier” a recent report states

“…the Pentagon seems intent on giving its troops every tactical advantage while they are in combat, even if those advantages are distinctly disadvantageous to the long-term health of American servicemen. However, whatever FDA regulators privately think about the ‘supersoldier’ of the future, any attempt to materially change military policy would likely result in the Pentagon simply flouting FDA regulatory control.” (Better Fighting Through Chemistry? The Role of FDA Regulation in Crafting the Warrior of the Future, March 8, 2004)

This developing technology is not significantly subject to control by the citizen’s representatives, which further distances the military from the citizen and increases the danger to democracy by a very powerful agency focused on controlling humans and on destruction.

Another trend is the increasing involvement of the military in domestic issues. Notoriously the military under Rumsfeld found no problem developing and promoting the Total Information Awareness program for spying on citizen telephone calls. The F.B.I was created specifically to keep the military out of domestic affairs.

So now we have the substitution of a volunteer, i.e. paid, army to minimize citizen influence, a robotized, supersoldier, army much more attached to the military that to our civilian institutions and a simultaneous incursion into domestic affairs by the military, which is exactly what the nation’s founders feared.

One further consideration: The military is designed to cope with masses of people, e.g. armies, navies and air forces. The domestic equivalent to an army is the protesting crowd. One way of looking at DARPA creations is their potential for crowd control and dispersal. The description of the device that makes people feel as though they are on fire specifically mentions crowd control. It does not take much of an imagination to see military technology turned on citizens by malmotivated individuals such as G. W. Bush. One can recall Attorney General John Ashcort equating protest with treason because it aided the enemy. To my mind, progressives need to promote not only reducing the size and influence of the military, but also placing their technological developments under civilian review.

Bob Newhard