When the cultural history of the period following World War II is written, I suspect one of the most interesting (baffling) questions will be, "Why did our country, in the midst of the unprecedentedly successful application of science, e.g. man on the moon, discovery of DNA, etc. undertake such a massive, deliberate, dumbing down of its culture in which more people knew less than in the preceding generation?
I believe there were a number of causes, e.g. the substitution of the image for print as in television, affluence itself, but I want to dwell on a primary source: religion.
To begin, why is it that "people of faith" is an honorable, respect-laden, descriptor? Why do we not hear "people of reason" as such? Faith is a form of ignorance. The fundamental necessity of faith occurs when we must act, but we have less than adequate evidence to do so. It should be noted that even then we would prefer evidence or knowledge, but the exigencies of life require action in its absence. However, as is so often the case, we humans transform necessity into desire. Because faith has sometimes seen us through some of life's exigencies it must have some efficaciousness. As I mentioned in an earlier post we abstract from a specific event or events to a general proposition. In consequence believing has become, in our time, more important than thinking.
At a time when society must think its way out of a complex multifaceted threat of global disasters, violence and indeed the continued existence of our species, we have the most pronounced calls to religious faith. Indeed, knowledge itself is massively opposed by people and institutions of faith. Evolution is not only denied, but replaced by religious dogma. Population reduction is vigorously opposed despite the evidence that its growth is a major cause of violence. Faith has become a threat to our continued existence.
In our society it is considered bad form to criticize religion. Why? Let me suggest at least one reason: the Constitution. The Constitution's first amendment, in addressing the relationship between government and religion, elevated religion to the highest prominence. I sometimes wonder what religion's place in our culture would be if the first amendment had read, Congress shall make no law abridging the citizen's freedom of conscience, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. By using religion, an organized body of great power, it incorporated a force that could and does oppose or manipulate the state for its own benefit. Had this right been framed in terms of individual conscience it would not have such political power. In any event religion has become a prominent political player and yet would hold itself above criticism.
As a result religion now has corporate-like power to influence our government. It is as adept as corporations at getting public funds for its own purposes. It pressures our public institutions, e.g. schools, to become vehicles for its propaganda. In so doing it introduces a dumbing down process into public education. I have witnessed courses in religion being introduced into a public school district on the premise that students could not understand cultural clichés derived from religion unless the religion was taught. There would, of course, be no proselytizing.
Because religion does not have to take the real world seriously as does science, e.g. there are no empirical tests, it can make outlandish claims, do anything to appeal to human emotions and still be followed by the thoughtless. Hence we have the barbarities of Mumbai, the spraying of battery acid on Muslim girls who dare try to get an education or the promotion of maximum birth rates on a vastly over populated planet. Even the most benign of religions has an element of irrationality to it, which makes it difficult for its adherents to condemn the barbarities of fundamentalist adherents on doctrinal grounds.
Religion has the temerity in most cultures to define and become the guardian of morality. With the Age of Reason an effort to divorce religion and morality began. So far this effort has not been a stunning success. It is even a philosophical maxim of secular Western philosophy that you cannot derive a moral proposition from a factual one. This has led to an unnecessary cultural bifurcation in Western culture. Immanuel Kant, in my estimation, provided a clue to how we might reduce this cultural chasm. As an instance, he argued that lying was not wrong because some religion or its deity said it was. It was wrong because if everybody lied society could not function. This is a factual, empirical, justification for not lying. Suppose we tested every so-called moral proposition in this manner. Those that had a deleterious effect on the functioning of human societies would be regarded as immoral those that did not were matters of personal preference. While some problems would obviously remain, e.g. how does one separate morality from prudence (To which I would respond that cultural prudence may lie at the evolutionary root of morality.) These problems would have far less adverse impact on human beings and their societies.
Considerations of this sort may have to be pursued if we are to minimize the enormities that passionate ignorance has and will increasingly inflict on society. It must become a maxim of society that faith is not knowledge and belief is not reason if we are ever to live in concert with the planet, the two edged sword that science has given us and the common plight we all share.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Financial Tsunamis
In the last few days I have read a few articles on the effect of the global financial crisis on Japan. The owners of much of the world’s liquid wealth, having withdrawn their funds from U. S. and European financial markets to cut their losses, have decided that the Japanese yen is the safest major currency in which to place their money. This has created a monumental problem for the Japanese because it has rapidly increased the value of the yen by about 12%. This has commensurately increased the price for Japanese products. For a nation as dependent upon exports as Japan, this is a real blow to their economy. Thus because of the crash of the American economy and in consequence a debased dollar the Japanese are faced with selling expensive products that the world cannot buy. What does this tell us about an economic tsunami that can slosh back and forth across the world’s societies with no control?
The first thing it says, I believe, is that the world needs some mechanism by which, for starters, the size of the tsunami can be reduced. Capitalism has always had the boom and bust cycle so we know that this will happen again and again and in the globally integrated economy we now have it will have repeated disastrous consequences. To reduce the magnitude of the tsunami waves we need to reduce the over speculation that produces them. This speculation goes on globally 24 hours a day every day in the foreign exchange market, i.e. making money by exploiting the constantly changing relative values of the different national currencies. To quote from the Global Policy Forum,
“The foreign exchange market is the largest market in the world, with an estimated $1.9 trillion currency traded per day (2004). This means that in less than one year, currency worth 10 times the global GDP is traded. Of this massive amount, international trade in goods and services, which requires foreign exchange, accounts for only a small percentage ($9 trillion per year) of the total trading.”
That such a massive amount of money is in motion around the globe and not focused on any human need creates, in my view, a wild beast capable of great harm at any time and any place. It also indicates that the resources exist to deal with humanity’s oppressing needs. Controlling this beast that can devastate a nation’s or a region’s (Southeast Asia in 1997) or the global economy should be of the highest priority for the world’s leaders and especially that of the United States. A good device for doing this, as I have mentioned previously, is the Tobin Tax on global financial transactions.
James Tobin and others have proposed tax rates ranging from 0.005 to 0.25 percent that would generate between $15 and $300 billion per year for the benefit of the poor areas of the planet or addressing the social problems at the root of conflict. A UN study has estimated that about $150 billion per year is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals, including halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, ensuring primary schooling for all children, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases.
To my mind, this tax verges on a no brainer. We negotiated the GATT, NAFTA, etc. for the benefit of the corporations. It is high time we did the same for the benefit of humanity. We ordinary people have long lived with transaction taxes such as the sales tax. It is also high time that the wealthy of this planet pay a transaction tax as they move their wealth around the world manipulating money to make even more money. We badly need to bring this money market into some conformity with the world’s real economy. The wealthy and the Far Right will and are fighting it, usually as that hated economic practice called socialism, which has been made a bogeyman in the campaign against Obama. Which brings me to my final point (at last?). Several countries, e.g. France and Belgium, have already adopted the Tobin Tax conditional upon other major economic powers adopting it also. If the G8 plus India, China and Brazil could be persuaded to use this tax to mitigate the massively destructive over speculation of the global capitalist system’s impact on their own economies, the benefits to world economic stability would be substantial. By using the tax proceeds to progressively enhance the lives of the world’s poor, humanity just might find its way through the chaos of global warming and overpopulation.
Bob Newhard
The first thing it says, I believe, is that the world needs some mechanism by which, for starters, the size of the tsunami can be reduced. Capitalism has always had the boom and bust cycle so we know that this will happen again and again and in the globally integrated economy we now have it will have repeated disastrous consequences. To reduce the magnitude of the tsunami waves we need to reduce the over speculation that produces them. This speculation goes on globally 24 hours a day every day in the foreign exchange market, i.e. making money by exploiting the constantly changing relative values of the different national currencies. To quote from the Global Policy Forum,
“The foreign exchange market is the largest market in the world, with an estimated $1.9 trillion currency traded per day (2004). This means that in less than one year, currency worth 10 times the global GDP is traded. Of this massive amount, international trade in goods and services, which requires foreign exchange, accounts for only a small percentage ($9 trillion per year) of the total trading.”
That such a massive amount of money is in motion around the globe and not focused on any human need creates, in my view, a wild beast capable of great harm at any time and any place. It also indicates that the resources exist to deal with humanity’s oppressing needs. Controlling this beast that can devastate a nation’s or a region’s (Southeast Asia in 1997) or the global economy should be of the highest priority for the world’s leaders and especially that of the United States. A good device for doing this, as I have mentioned previously, is the Tobin Tax on global financial transactions.
James Tobin and others have proposed tax rates ranging from 0.005 to 0.25 percent that would generate between $15 and $300 billion per year for the benefit of the poor areas of the planet or addressing the social problems at the root of conflict. A UN study has estimated that about $150 billion per year is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals, including halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, ensuring primary schooling for all children, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases.
To my mind, this tax verges on a no brainer. We negotiated the GATT, NAFTA, etc. for the benefit of the corporations. It is high time we did the same for the benefit of humanity. We ordinary people have long lived with transaction taxes such as the sales tax. It is also high time that the wealthy of this planet pay a transaction tax as they move their wealth around the world manipulating money to make even more money. We badly need to bring this money market into some conformity with the world’s real economy. The wealthy and the Far Right will and are fighting it, usually as that hated economic practice called socialism, which has been made a bogeyman in the campaign against Obama. Which brings me to my final point (at last?). Several countries, e.g. France and Belgium, have already adopted the Tobin Tax conditional upon other major economic powers adopting it also. If the G8 plus India, China and Brazil could be persuaded to use this tax to mitigate the massively destructive over speculation of the global capitalist system’s impact on their own economies, the benefits to world economic stability would be substantial. By using the tax proceeds to progressively enhance the lives of the world’s poor, humanity just might find its way through the chaos of global warming and overpopulation.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Trickle down crisis ‘solutions’
The other day I was talking with a local Democratic congressional candidate. I asked him for his views on the current economic situation. He said we have a liquidity problem and that we have to get money to the small business people so they can start borrowing again. While I agreed that small business needed help I thought that FDR’s approach of feeding the money in at the bottom rather than the top of economic food chain was preferable both because it would immediately help the people who needed it most and the money would immediately go into circulation because of those needs. He said that this situation was not like the one in the Great Depression. He said that this one was one of restoring liquidity to the economic system and that small business, which would hire more people as business improved if they could get bank loans, rather than public works was the quickest way to do this. He pointed out, as many people do, that the New Deal recovery was not fulfilled until the full employment of World War 2. I was struck by this comment from one who had earlier expressed admiration for Franklin Roosevelt. To me it was an indicator of just how far Reaganesque, profit-first, economics has permeated Democratic thinking. Let me explain.
First, the Great Depression was understood as a liquidity problem. I can remember my mother, who by instinct was a saver (She cut up and hemmed old towels to make washcloths.) say that people needed to spend more. There was a national campaign against hoarding. Second, the lesson to be learned by the fact that the New Deal was not completely accomplished until World War 2 is that government provision of jobs does work. It was war, that is government, production that spurred the economy along with the fact that there were fewer workers, which should tell us something about overpopulation. I have asked myself repeatedly why Democrats will do almost anything to preserve the dominance of the free enterprise system. As long ago as the 1870’s the economist Henry George was concerned about eliminating the boom and bust cycle of capitalism. Obviously this occurred because capitalism always overshot the mark due to the over speculation it generated. George saw taxation as the appropriate device for controlling this repeated over speculation. Indeed that was the basic mission of the Federal Reserve established after the great depression. It did not work this time because the people let themselves be gulled by Reagan’s irrelevance about ‘Welfare Queens” and the need to get “government off our (corporate) backs” by way of deregulation.
That this should happen well within the lifetime of many who suffered in the Great Depression, demonstrates the need for this lesson to become a part of the American way. Not free enterprise, but regulated enterprise in which the economy’s sole justification is the welfare of the people. Even Adam Smith recognized this when he expressed concern that corporations like the East India Company could dominate a country’s economy and politics.
Taxation as a control mechanism is better suited to ameliorating the boom and bust cycle than the usual practice of trying to deal with depressions by wasteful corruption-prone tactics of money infusion on those occasions. Taxation has the advantage of being continuously available as problems arise. It can be increased to reduce the excesses of wealth underlying speculation as well as being reduced to stimulate an economy. Further it can be targeted on specific parts of an economy if they are seen to be the problem. An example of this latter is the proposed Tobin tax, named after James Tobin the economics professor who first proposed it, which would place a small tax on the billions of dollars of investment transactions that fly around the world electronically 24/7 in order to transfer some of the wealth of the northern hemisphere to the poverty-ridden southern hemisphere.
Underlying this view is the need for the American people to abandon their insane belief in the sanctity of the free enterprise system. It is a controlling mechanism used by the wealthy. The profit-driven free enterprise system has, and can have, no regard for human beings other than as cogs in an economic machine that regards them as either assets (customers) or liabilities (seniors, the ill, children etc.). Citizens have to be disabused of the manipulative Horatio Alger myth that because some people can “make it” all can and if they don’t it is their fault not the system’s, no matter how prone the system is to the influence of wealth. This myth has caused great unnecessary suffering. The people should understand that the “taxes are bad” mantra of conservatives is designed by the wealthy to control the welfare of those less fortunate. Joe the Plumber’s complaint about taxes being too high and robbing him of what he earned despite the fact he would benefit from Obama’s tax plan serves to underscore American’s ignorance of their current tax “system” and the extent of the indoctrination they have been subjected to. What do we expect when so many of television’s news readers (I refuse to call them reporters.) are millionaires themselves.
Finally, it should be a matter of common sense and taught as a part of the American ethos, that redistributive taxation is necessary to preserve democracy. Without it the wealthy will be in a much better position to accumulate additional wealth than will those who lack wealth. This will eventually produce a society of the rich and the poor, which is and always has been inimical to democracy. We have glossed this fact by saying democracy requires a large middle class. This is simply a sociological way of stating the same economic fact, which in taxation terms, we call the graduated income tax. Wealth must be controlled in the interest of preserving democracy. This, to my mind, should be an essential feature of the economic education of the citizenry.
As a footnote and perhaps a future column I would point out that, unlike the Great Depression, we no longer have a manufacturing-based economy. We have so dramatically outsourced and robotized manufacturing that finance has now replaced manufacturing as the largest segment of our economy. How this nation will recover using our current ‘service’ economy is far from clear.
Also, how much will the rest of the world let us increase our enormous global debt in order to finance rebuilding our infrastructure and the alternative energy resources we need, e.g. wind farms from Texas to North Dakota.
Another, deeper issue, is whether a manufacturing economy can be grown without disastrous effect on our environment. Our productivity of the last 200 or so years has decimated the natural environment and has allowed human population to become unsustainable. These highly relevant issues seldom come up in the contemporary discussion of what is now the world’s economic crisis.
Bob Newhard
First, the Great Depression was understood as a liquidity problem. I can remember my mother, who by instinct was a saver (She cut up and hemmed old towels to make washcloths.) say that people needed to spend more. There was a national campaign against hoarding. Second, the lesson to be learned by the fact that the New Deal was not completely accomplished until World War 2 is that government provision of jobs does work. It was war, that is government, production that spurred the economy along with the fact that there were fewer workers, which should tell us something about overpopulation. I have asked myself repeatedly why Democrats will do almost anything to preserve the dominance of the free enterprise system. As long ago as the 1870’s the economist Henry George was concerned about eliminating the boom and bust cycle of capitalism. Obviously this occurred because capitalism always overshot the mark due to the over speculation it generated. George saw taxation as the appropriate device for controlling this repeated over speculation. Indeed that was the basic mission of the Federal Reserve established after the great depression. It did not work this time because the people let themselves be gulled by Reagan’s irrelevance about ‘Welfare Queens” and the need to get “government off our (corporate) backs” by way of deregulation.
That this should happen well within the lifetime of many who suffered in the Great Depression, demonstrates the need for this lesson to become a part of the American way. Not free enterprise, but regulated enterprise in which the economy’s sole justification is the welfare of the people. Even Adam Smith recognized this when he expressed concern that corporations like the East India Company could dominate a country’s economy and politics.
Taxation as a control mechanism is better suited to ameliorating the boom and bust cycle than the usual practice of trying to deal with depressions by wasteful corruption-prone tactics of money infusion on those occasions. Taxation has the advantage of being continuously available as problems arise. It can be increased to reduce the excesses of wealth underlying speculation as well as being reduced to stimulate an economy. Further it can be targeted on specific parts of an economy if they are seen to be the problem. An example of this latter is the proposed Tobin tax, named after James Tobin the economics professor who first proposed it, which would place a small tax on the billions of dollars of investment transactions that fly around the world electronically 24/7 in order to transfer some of the wealth of the northern hemisphere to the poverty-ridden southern hemisphere.
Underlying this view is the need for the American people to abandon their insane belief in the sanctity of the free enterprise system. It is a controlling mechanism used by the wealthy. The profit-driven free enterprise system has, and can have, no regard for human beings other than as cogs in an economic machine that regards them as either assets (customers) or liabilities (seniors, the ill, children etc.). Citizens have to be disabused of the manipulative Horatio Alger myth that because some people can “make it” all can and if they don’t it is their fault not the system’s, no matter how prone the system is to the influence of wealth. This myth has caused great unnecessary suffering. The people should understand that the “taxes are bad” mantra of conservatives is designed by the wealthy to control the welfare of those less fortunate. Joe the Plumber’s complaint about taxes being too high and robbing him of what he earned despite the fact he would benefit from Obama’s tax plan serves to underscore American’s ignorance of their current tax “system” and the extent of the indoctrination they have been subjected to. What do we expect when so many of television’s news readers (I refuse to call them reporters.) are millionaires themselves.
Finally, it should be a matter of common sense and taught as a part of the American ethos, that redistributive taxation is necessary to preserve democracy. Without it the wealthy will be in a much better position to accumulate additional wealth than will those who lack wealth. This will eventually produce a society of the rich and the poor, which is and always has been inimical to democracy. We have glossed this fact by saying democracy requires a large middle class. This is simply a sociological way of stating the same economic fact, which in taxation terms, we call the graduated income tax. Wealth must be controlled in the interest of preserving democracy. This, to my mind, should be an essential feature of the economic education of the citizenry.
As a footnote and perhaps a future column I would point out that, unlike the Great Depression, we no longer have a manufacturing-based economy. We have so dramatically outsourced and robotized manufacturing that finance has now replaced manufacturing as the largest segment of our economy. How this nation will recover using our current ‘service’ economy is far from clear.
Also, how much will the rest of the world let us increase our enormous global debt in order to finance rebuilding our infrastructure and the alternative energy resources we need, e.g. wind farms from Texas to North Dakota.
Another, deeper issue, is whether a manufacturing economy can be grown without disastrous effect on our environment. Our productivity of the last 200 or so years has decimated the natural environment and has allowed human population to become unsustainable. These highly relevant issues seldom come up in the contemporary discussion of what is now the world’s economic crisis.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, October 5, 2008
On Religion, Morals and the Public Weal
The current bellicose, undemocratic, and corrupt presidential administration was put in power by the most religious movement in this country since the last fit of religiosity in the series of Great Awakenings to which this country has been subject. What are we to make of this?
These are the people who claim they are the moral majority. The discrepancy between this claim and the president and administration they put in power are in glaring contrast. Why so?
I believe that there is more to such a contrast than mere hypocrisy. What we are looking at is, I suggest, a reflection of the American’s self absorption. By self absorption I mean that the American value system is far more focused on the individual than on the society.
Notice that the so-called moral majority is concerned mainly with personal behaviors, although they do oppose some societal practices, e.g. teaching evolution. Their heavy emphasis and activism has been focused on abortion, same-sex marriage and other “misbehaviors” of private life. These are said to be personal sins and society must suppress them.
The result of this moral predisposition is to analyze and account for social issues in terms of individual responsibilities or individual failures. This approach fails to consider the complex relationships that a modern mass society generates and the consequences that flow from this fact. It also inhibits the ability to treat social and political arrangements as systems and therefore to look for systemic problems. Thus we know that there is a high correlation between crime and poverty and yet we address crime solely as an individual responsibility not as a consequence of a misdistribution of societal wealth.
For example, this intense focus on individual “responsibility” assumes that in a society of 300 million we can know of the personal failings of those in power as one might have in an early Puritan village. Additionally, when we try to compensate for this lack of knowledge of individuals by passing laws against proscribed behaviors we create far worse problems. Examples are the ten-year crime wave prohibition unleashed and the disastrous cost in lives and wealth of our ongoing war on drugs. These are direct consequences of the American proclivity to “personalize” social problems. That this is an old mistake is evidenced by Plato’s Republic in which knowledge is the primary human virtue. To make knowledge effective in society Plato advocates rule by a philosopher king, in other words a dictatorship of the wise. This proposal was made in the context of the world’s first constitutional democracy. What Americans have done is to substantially amplify this by applying it to a complex society of 300 million and substituting the values of an essentially tribal religion, Christianity, for Plato’s knowledge.
This failure to distinguish between social problems and moral issues is routinely employed by dictators and would be dictators. Note G. W. Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s reference to nations as evil. The leaders of a nation may in some sense be evil, although it is interesting that increasing amounts of “evil” are being reduced to psychological and genetic factors by science, but it is ludicrous to call a nation evil.
One of the most egregious manifestations of this disposition is found in the continuing refusal by Americans to see America as part of the world. We are a nation apart. For such a nation there is only one role in this highly integrated planet and that is to dominate the rest of the world. Until Americans firmly reject this posture they will have no peace and the level of human suffering and death will continue to escalate. The neocon criminals who sought to impose an American imperium on the rest of the world must be publicly and vigorously rejected to begin compensating for the harm we have done.
Bob Newhard
These are the people who claim they are the moral majority. The discrepancy between this claim and the president and administration they put in power are in glaring contrast. Why so?
I believe that there is more to such a contrast than mere hypocrisy. What we are looking at is, I suggest, a reflection of the American’s self absorption. By self absorption I mean that the American value system is far more focused on the individual than on the society.
Notice that the so-called moral majority is concerned mainly with personal behaviors, although they do oppose some societal practices, e.g. teaching evolution. Their heavy emphasis and activism has been focused on abortion, same-sex marriage and other “misbehaviors” of private life. These are said to be personal sins and society must suppress them.
The result of this moral predisposition is to analyze and account for social issues in terms of individual responsibilities or individual failures. This approach fails to consider the complex relationships that a modern mass society generates and the consequences that flow from this fact. It also inhibits the ability to treat social and political arrangements as systems and therefore to look for systemic problems. Thus we know that there is a high correlation between crime and poverty and yet we address crime solely as an individual responsibility not as a consequence of a misdistribution of societal wealth.
For example, this intense focus on individual “responsibility” assumes that in a society of 300 million we can know of the personal failings of those in power as one might have in an early Puritan village. Additionally, when we try to compensate for this lack of knowledge of individuals by passing laws against proscribed behaviors we create far worse problems. Examples are the ten-year crime wave prohibition unleashed and the disastrous cost in lives and wealth of our ongoing war on drugs. These are direct consequences of the American proclivity to “personalize” social problems. That this is an old mistake is evidenced by Plato’s Republic in which knowledge is the primary human virtue. To make knowledge effective in society Plato advocates rule by a philosopher king, in other words a dictatorship of the wise. This proposal was made in the context of the world’s first constitutional democracy. What Americans have done is to substantially amplify this by applying it to a complex society of 300 million and substituting the values of an essentially tribal religion, Christianity, for Plato’s knowledge.
This failure to distinguish between social problems and moral issues is routinely employed by dictators and would be dictators. Note G. W. Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s reference to nations as evil. The leaders of a nation may in some sense be evil, although it is interesting that increasing amounts of “evil” are being reduced to psychological and genetic factors by science, but it is ludicrous to call a nation evil.
One of the most egregious manifestations of this disposition is found in the continuing refusal by Americans to see America as part of the world. We are a nation apart. For such a nation there is only one role in this highly integrated planet and that is to dominate the rest of the world. Until Americans firmly reject this posture they will have no peace and the level of human suffering and death will continue to escalate. The neocon criminals who sought to impose an American imperium on the rest of the world must be publicly and vigorously rejected to begin compensating for the harm we have done.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Real Surrealism
You may have read an August 7, 2008 report in the Californian (Remote-control warriors suffer war stress, too) regarding Predator drone operators at March Field. In case you did not, the article describes the daily life of these operators. They remotely fly Predator drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Their daily mission is to pilot their drones and fire the Predator’s weaponry to kill people that have been assigned them as targets. The Predator’s cameras are so accurate that they can distinguish between a man and a woman and image a person sitting on a bench. At the end of their shift they go home to their families, take the kids to a soccer game and carry on as a normal family. Or do they? Some of these soldiers say they can handle the daily job to kill and their family relations by keeping them separate. At what price? Others seek the help of psychiatrists caringly provided by the military.
What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.
We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.
This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.
Robert Newhard
What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.
We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.
This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.
Robert Newhard
Friday, September 5, 2008
Intellectual Honesty in Desperate Times
It is said the truth is the first casualty of war. I believe honesty precedes it.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.
But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.
We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.
Intellectual honesty and pessimism:
Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.
Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage
” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”
articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.
Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The fault, dear Brutus...
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves” observes Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I would add “in our evolution.”
We humans in the course of our evolution acquired a brain that could abstract from its experiences and thereby create the ability to analyze and relate enmities that did not exist to our senses. Initially we did this in religion and worshiped our abstractions. Eventually, with science, we used this capacity to develop a profound prediction-capable use of abstractions, especially in mathematics. While all this was going on in or brains our emotions remained at their pre-intelligent level. Our emotions, e.g. fear, sex, distrust of the unfamiliar, etc., which functioned as our primal instruments of response, e.g. fight or flight, remained the same. We became an organism with a powerful, curious brain which began to develop understandings of the real world and develop a technology to extract from that natural world what we needed and desired. We have evolved so powerful a technology that we can destroy ourselves. We are now an organism that is bifurcated between a highly innovative, powerful, comprehending brain AND an emotional apparatus little different form that of our earliest ancestors. Our emotions, as decision makers, remain as potent as they did in early man. The result is that our brains have produced the capacity to destroy ourselves and our emotions are as capable of doing that as they were when men used spears and swords. I suggest that this fault line between the emotions and the intellect is the fundamental and perhaps irreducible source of our current dilemma. While our political and economic institutions are obviously in need of massive reform the major problem is the fault that lies within us.
Let me cite just a few random evidences of this fundamental human dichotomy by way of indicating its pervasiveness.
• People were appalled by the introduction of the machine gun into World War I. They saw it rightly as the introduction of the factory system into the slaughter of humans.
• We now routinely justify the killing of innocent children as collateral damage. A primary goal of the combatants in World War II was the destruction of human beings in order to weaken the will to fight. Infants and children, not soldiers, became the enemy because the brain’s technology made it possible.
• In the face of declining oil resources the United States produced the largest automobiles in its history, appealing thereby to dominance and safety at the expense of others.
• Amusement constitutes over 30% of the gross domestic product o the Unfired States. Human emotions have become the dominant consideration in promoting human consumption otherwise known as advertisement.
In each of these the brain’s technology produced the products the emotions desired. When our technology, powerful as it is, is placed at the service of our emotions, we know we are in trouble, especially when we are aware of the impending “Perfect Storm” of global warming, peak oil and the tyranny of corporations. Human emotions, which constitute the core of our values and patriotic and religious belief, simply are. They have no mechanism for adjudicating the values of other emotions. It takes the intellect to do that. As such the emotions are essentially arbitrary and they put an immense amount of human energy at the service of such arbitrariness. Additionally, because of this arbitrariness they are largely indifferent to, or even gleeful at, the results of the carnage they produce..
Knowing that emotion was the major decision maker long before we became humans and knowing that our brains are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene and knowing that our brains are far more powerful in understanding and manipulating the natural world, the promotion of the intellect to the position of primary decider is, in my judgment, the single most important and difficult task we human’s face if we are to survive the ominous complexities of our immediate future.
Robert Newhard
But in ourselves” observes Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I would add “in our evolution.”
We humans in the course of our evolution acquired a brain that could abstract from its experiences and thereby create the ability to analyze and relate enmities that did not exist to our senses. Initially we did this in religion and worshiped our abstractions. Eventually, with science, we used this capacity to develop a profound prediction-capable use of abstractions, especially in mathematics. While all this was going on in or brains our emotions remained at their pre-intelligent level. Our emotions, e.g. fear, sex, distrust of the unfamiliar, etc., which functioned as our primal instruments of response, e.g. fight or flight, remained the same. We became an organism with a powerful, curious brain which began to develop understandings of the real world and develop a technology to extract from that natural world what we needed and desired. We have evolved so powerful a technology that we can destroy ourselves. We are now an organism that is bifurcated between a highly innovative, powerful, comprehending brain AND an emotional apparatus little different form that of our earliest ancestors. Our emotions, as decision makers, remain as potent as they did in early man. The result is that our brains have produced the capacity to destroy ourselves and our emotions are as capable of doing that as they were when men used spears and swords. I suggest that this fault line between the emotions and the intellect is the fundamental and perhaps irreducible source of our current dilemma. While our political and economic institutions are obviously in need of massive reform the major problem is the fault that lies within us.
Let me cite just a few random evidences of this fundamental human dichotomy by way of indicating its pervasiveness.
• People were appalled by the introduction of the machine gun into World War I. They saw it rightly as the introduction of the factory system into the slaughter of humans.
• We now routinely justify the killing of innocent children as collateral damage. A primary goal of the combatants in World War II was the destruction of human beings in order to weaken the will to fight. Infants and children, not soldiers, became the enemy because the brain’s technology made it possible.
• In the face of declining oil resources the United States produced the largest automobiles in its history, appealing thereby to dominance and safety at the expense of others.
• Amusement constitutes over 30% of the gross domestic product o the Unfired States. Human emotions have become the dominant consideration in promoting human consumption otherwise known as advertisement.
In each of these the brain’s technology produced the products the emotions desired. When our technology, powerful as it is, is placed at the service of our emotions, we know we are in trouble, especially when we are aware of the impending “Perfect Storm” of global warming, peak oil and the tyranny of corporations. Human emotions, which constitute the core of our values and patriotic and religious belief, simply are. They have no mechanism for adjudicating the values of other emotions. It takes the intellect to do that. As such the emotions are essentially arbitrary and they put an immense amount of human energy at the service of such arbitrariness. Additionally, because of this arbitrariness they are largely indifferent to, or even gleeful at, the results of the carnage they produce..
Knowing that emotion was the major decision maker long before we became humans and knowing that our brains are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene and knowing that our brains are far more powerful in understanding and manipulating the natural world, the promotion of the intellect to the position of primary decider is, in my judgment, the single most important and difficult task we human’s face if we are to survive the ominous complexities of our immediate future.
Robert Newhard
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