Rand Paul, the GOP candidate for Kentucky's U.S. senate seat and son of Libertarian leader Ron Paul, recently stated that he believed the Civil Rights law of 1964 should have applied to public venues only, not private establishments. He argues that the Federal Government has no right to tell private business, organizations, etc. whom they can serve or admit as members with respect to race or sexual orientation. For him, when it comes to freedom of the individual versus other rights, there is no higher value than freedom. Many people view this argument as fundamental to the "American way." Others simply declare he is a racist and would be done with it. I think there is a more fundamental issue here and it is one that infects a good deal of American politics.
The argument from democracy as individual freedom goes back to the nation's founders. Jefferson believed freedom was fundamental to a democracy, however, he recognized that freedom had to have an economic base configured to democracy's needs. For this reason he argued for a nation of small farmers, each having the land and associated resources to maintain his economic independence of other citizens. In contrast Hamilton, among others, saw no threat to democracy when employees were dependent upon a factory owner for their jobs.
However, freedom and society can be in conflict because in addition to freedom all societies generate power. Under conditions of absolute freedom that power will gravitate to the strongest individuals or groups who, in their own interests will destroy the freedom of others. This is the law of the jungle. A democracy is intended to distribute the power a society generates to all its members thus assuring that freedom is not lost to those who agglomerate power. This simple lesson, I believe is at the root of much of what is wrong, dysfunctional, and potentially destructive of our society.
In Rand Paul's case if people and institutions, except those of government, were free to discriminate the power available to discriminate would be at least equal to that of government. The majority of employees work in the private sector. Think about the implications of that one fact. Michael Lind has an excellent article on this matter at http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/05/25/rand_paul_black_like_him. Lind recalls the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin that relates how Griffin, who had had his white skin darkened by a dermatologist, experienced the hostile racism that permeated the southern states. Griffin's experiences alone are enough to indicate the consequences of Paul's distinction between public and private sector racism.
This advocacy of radical individualism by Libertarians plays out in our own area also. The Murrieta Public Library as well as some others, offers as reading rewards at their summer reading programs for children, coupons from In 'N Out Burger for a free burger. The coupons are emblazoned with a burger, fries and a soda. I have repeatedly expressed my concern, in view of our rampant and increasingly dangerous childhood obesity epidemic. Every major political office from the President, to the Surgeon General, to the California Governor, and the Riverside County Health Officer has expressed their profound concern over what we are doing to children. In most of these cases they have launched programs to fight this trend. This generation of children is projected to be the first in 200 years to have a shorter average life span than the preceding generation. Adult onset diabetes usually first seen at age 45 to 55 is now being seen in children 14 to 16. Over the last 20 years childhood diabetes has increased 10 fold. I have presented this information to the city's Library Commission, to the Library Director and to the City Council. I have been told that it is not the Library's role to determine what the child eats; it is the child's parent. Put another way, the Library can offer coupons for food that is bad for the children, thereby becoming a shill for corporate marketing to the young, and it is up to the parent to stop them. That this is the environment in which this epidemic has occurred and has demonstrably failed escapes them. When children are threatened by commercial products, as in cases from defective cribs to cigarettes, we do not trust parents to protect their children; we pass laws enforced by government. This is exactly the same argument the Libertarians have used repeatedly and is, at root, the same as Rand Paul's racism, i.e. government has no right to tell free individuals in a democratic society what to do. Of course government does, of necessity, tell citizens what to do and often penalizes them if they don’t, e.g. our traffic laws. That an argument this transparently ludicrous should have power in this democracy bespeaks the low level of citizen education, awareness, concern, and, I believe, the power of the media. Why is it that people cannot see that a democratic society requires a strong government to keep the strong (think corporations), from preying on the rest of the citizenry. Is there a risk in a strong government? Of course there is if it is not held accountable by the people. But the people have to be adequately informed, willing to make government part of their lives and pass on a culture of responsible citizenship to their offspring. Without this they shall never be free. Without this they will be deceived pawns of the wealthy and the corporations they control. The pernicious practice of divorcing freedom from power so that power can prevail will inevitably destroy our democracy.
In the mouths of Libertarians "freedom" means power for the few. As recently made evident by the Tea Party rallies saturated with Libertarians, the Party has been a cover for racists, white militia, etc., all of whom prefer power to democracy. Unless capitalism is controlled by a responsible democratic government, it is nothing but a method for transferring power to the wealthy few. These people will trade this delusory notion of freedom for power any time for they know that power allows them great latitude to manipulate the ill defined , easily manipulated, and generally emotion-driven concept of freedom. Until the American public gets this through their heads we shall never have an effective democratic government. Until Progressives make this use of "freedom" clear to the public, they have failed in their presumed purpose.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Drowning in Denial
"Denial" is often offered as an account of why someone refuses to acknowledge the obvious. This has become a cultural phenomenon in the United States. But what are we really saying when we say a person or collection of persons denies that something obvious or exceedingly well founded either does not exist or is not true?
Two psychologists, Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, in their book Politics of Denial offer an explanation of the denial phenomenon. They say that this kind of adamant denial has its origin in the denier's childhood. Children unable to face a situation restore their sense of equilibrium by denying whatever they cannot face. We have often seen children put their hands over their eyes or pull the covers over their head when faced with an unplessantness. Supposedly, if it is not seen it does not exist. The human psyche requires this kind of protection. Having found the techniques useful in childhood, many people continue to use it throughout their lives. Indeed as they become adults they become belligerent in its defense. And when a large number of people find their society facing a catastrophe this kind of denial can become national policy. Denial in this sense thus becomes a very dangerous "madness of crowds" reaction to reality. Milburn and Conrad argue that this delusive mentality now dominates the Republican Party.
Bill Moyers in a talk titled Penguins and the Politics of Denial suggested that the way to deal with this phenomenon in the radical religious right is to translate an issue, in this case global warming, into the language and thought patterns of the religious right. He suggests, for instance, using the story of Noah, whom God had warned of an imminent flood, to build an ark. Noah's fellow citizens jeered him and denied the reality he declared. This, according to Moyers, rather then the language of science used by global warming environmentalists, could convince these deniers of the reality of global warming. This is seen by one writer as an advance in the effort to convince a large segment of the American population that something needs to be done. But is it the right thing? I think not. It is, in effect, to sacrifice science and the exactitude and discipline of its language to the vagaries of religious usage in which it enters into a welter of irresolvable "interpretations". There is nothing for it but that those who think in terms of stories need to realize that language matters. In my university days I had an Ethiopian friend working on his degree in pharmacology who assured me that one could not "do" science in Amharic, the major language of Ethiopia.
Making denial the threat to our society that it is is the work of those who manipulate this human failing. A prime example is the oil companies. Exxon Mobil, for example has given millions to the American Enterprise Institute to produce reports denying global warming or at least questioning its validity, which for political purposes amounts to the same thing. As a result the Institute advertised grants of $10,000 to any scientist who would produce a paper at least questioning the validity of global warming. Then there are those who use the ignorance of the deniers for political purposes. You may remember the scene from the 2008 Republican Convention when Sara Palin supporters, old and young, energetically chanted "Drill, baby drill." These people in their enthusiastic ignorance were pursuing continuing and increasing harm, both global warming and oil-spill, to the only planet they or their children have. Talk about immaturity!
There is another aspect to this gross denial which is that it is another instance of what I have called the downside of abstraction. Humans, when they were still living close to the real world as hunter-gathers and even as farmers had to take account of reality moment by moment, and could not indulge denial without great peril to themselves. They could indulge myth because it was generally used to emphasize reality. Thus the various rain and corn dances were performed to insure that the real world would remain true to them. Similarly, humans in their hubris prayed for the sun to return at the winter solstice. They were not creating a different world as today's deniers do. Once again it is the remoteness of people's mental state from the demands of the real world that allows this type of insanity to not only flourish, but to influence policies of the world's largest military power. That is frightening in its implications. I think this kind of mass craziness, undisciplined by reality is, to a considerable extent, the product of societal affluence. We need to be vigorous in our pursuit of understanding the downside of affluence before we do consummate damage to this planet and thus to ourselves and our posterity.
Bob Newhard
Two psychologists, Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, in their book Politics of Denial offer an explanation of the denial phenomenon. They say that this kind of adamant denial has its origin in the denier's childhood. Children unable to face a situation restore their sense of equilibrium by denying whatever they cannot face. We have often seen children put their hands over their eyes or pull the covers over their head when faced with an unplessantness. Supposedly, if it is not seen it does not exist. The human psyche requires this kind of protection. Having found the techniques useful in childhood, many people continue to use it throughout their lives. Indeed as they become adults they become belligerent in its defense. And when a large number of people find their society facing a catastrophe this kind of denial can become national policy. Denial in this sense thus becomes a very dangerous "madness of crowds" reaction to reality. Milburn and Conrad argue that this delusive mentality now dominates the Republican Party.
Bill Moyers in a talk titled Penguins and the Politics of Denial suggested that the way to deal with this phenomenon in the radical religious right is to translate an issue, in this case global warming, into the language and thought patterns of the religious right. He suggests, for instance, using the story of Noah, whom God had warned of an imminent flood, to build an ark. Noah's fellow citizens jeered him and denied the reality he declared. This, according to Moyers, rather then the language of science used by global warming environmentalists, could convince these deniers of the reality of global warming. This is seen by one writer as an advance in the effort to convince a large segment of the American population that something needs to be done. But is it the right thing? I think not. It is, in effect, to sacrifice science and the exactitude and discipline of its language to the vagaries of religious usage in which it enters into a welter of irresolvable "interpretations". There is nothing for it but that those who think in terms of stories need to realize that language matters. In my university days I had an Ethiopian friend working on his degree in pharmacology who assured me that one could not "do" science in Amharic, the major language of Ethiopia.
Making denial the threat to our society that it is is the work of those who manipulate this human failing. A prime example is the oil companies. Exxon Mobil, for example has given millions to the American Enterprise Institute to produce reports denying global warming or at least questioning its validity, which for political purposes amounts to the same thing. As a result the Institute advertised grants of $10,000 to any scientist who would produce a paper at least questioning the validity of global warming. Then there are those who use the ignorance of the deniers for political purposes. You may remember the scene from the 2008 Republican Convention when Sara Palin supporters, old and young, energetically chanted "Drill, baby drill." These people in their enthusiastic ignorance were pursuing continuing and increasing harm, both global warming and oil-spill, to the only planet they or their children have. Talk about immaturity!
There is another aspect to this gross denial which is that it is another instance of what I have called the downside of abstraction. Humans, when they were still living close to the real world as hunter-gathers and even as farmers had to take account of reality moment by moment, and could not indulge denial without great peril to themselves. They could indulge myth because it was generally used to emphasize reality. Thus the various rain and corn dances were performed to insure that the real world would remain true to them. Similarly, humans in their hubris prayed for the sun to return at the winter solstice. They were not creating a different world as today's deniers do. Once again it is the remoteness of people's mental state from the demands of the real world that allows this type of insanity to not only flourish, but to influence policies of the world's largest military power. That is frightening in its implications. I think this kind of mass craziness, undisciplined by reality is, to a considerable extent, the product of societal affluence. We need to be vigorous in our pursuit of understanding the downside of affluence before we do consummate damage to this planet and thus to ourselves and our posterity.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, May 2, 2010
The Future of Property
Given the imminent convergence of major impacts on humanity, e.g. global warming, global food shortage, global water shortage and all that these imply for human society, one of the more useful forms of inquiry is to ask what our situation implies for fundamental societal institutions, e.g. governance, marriage and family, social structure itself. In this column I will take a look at the future of property in an era of increasingly reduced resources and increasing population.
Property has had a varying history. Hunter gatherer societies had little property except their weapons and tools. To what extent these may have been held in common for everybody's use I am uncertain. While land was not owned, tribes might by force or tradition lay claim to hunting grounds. In the 21st century the "hunting ground right" is still an issue as the fish population declines. More on this later.
As humans moved to agriculture after the last ice age specific land allocation became more important for survival. Not only did the rise of agriculture result in more stable societies providing the basis for the rise of civilization, it also placed land ownership at the center of the human economy.
In terms of human history it wasn’t that long ago that medieval societies regarded all property as ultimately the monarch's, but in practice much of it belonged to the monarch's aristocracy. In the typical feudal arrangement the lord owned all significant property especially land. Even the so-called commons were owned by the lord and his serfs paid him a portion of the benefit they accrued from its use. At this time the economy was land based and wealth measured primarily in land holdings.
Gradually, with increased commerce, including the discovery of the new world, the European economy began to expand and land was no longer the only measure of wealth. The Industrial Revolution greatly enlarged the European economy, but also provided a new basis for wealth, i.e. manufacturing. Interestingly, at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution the land-based economy was facing a dilemma of its own creation. As families grew larger land holdings were being fragmented by multi-child inheritance, Thus came the practice of primogeniture in which the eldest son inherited all the land. A significant portion of the initial Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs and workers were the children of land holders ineligible to inherit the land.
Writing in the earlier phase of this economic transformation, Thomas Hobbes based freedom itself on property ownership. We find this notion in Jefferson when he envisioned a nation of small farmers as the economic foundation of democracy because their property and the living it provided would make them independent of overlords. I think that one reason for this close association of property ownership and freedom lay in the fact that the property of the monarch and aristocracy had given them power over the populace and that therefore property was necessary to assure freedom of the ordinary citizen. There is, to this day, a strong feeling among some citizens that property is the root of freedom.
However, as the impact of diminishing resources and increasing population make property increasingly scarce, ownership of property will become more problematical. One can easily see this as a source of ongoing violence.
With this brief history in mind what are the prospects for property or for that matter ownership in general? To assess the distance this society has to travel in this matter we need only recall G. W. Bush's 2004 campaign that flaunted the banner of the "Ownership Society." Such a society thoroughly based on ownership would require little government (except for military) and society's major domestic transactions, e.g. health care, education, retirement, employee benefits would be negotiated between "independent" entities. This would promote values such as personal responsibility, economic liberty and owning of property. Interestingly this view, but not Bush's reasons for it, is not too far removed from Jefferson's belief. Jefferson feared that Hamilton's economic view, focused on a manufacturing-based economy, would make employees vulnerable to political manipulation.
But back to Bush and the Republicans. The Ownership Society was little more than an attempt to preserve the wealth of the rich. It was offered as a defense for his wealth-favoring tax cut. It uncritically assumed that property would remain the basis of the U.S. economy, even if the rest of the world moved on.
This conservative effort to impose the wealthy on the rest of us by way of a 400 year old view of property and with mankind's survival in mind, indicates how massive a cultural shift will be required to allow our species to survive. In short, is there a surrogate for property?
One answer to that question is that we should substitute access for ownership.
There is some modest potential in some current arrangements. The fishing industry provides some perspective. While nations have long laid claim to areas of the ocean for fishing purposes they could, of course, not lay claim to the fish themselves, which may or may not enter a given national boundary. It is useful to keep in mind that fishing is the one holdover from the hunter gatherer societies.
Another step in this direction is car sharing instead of car ownership. Two companies, Zipcar and Flexcar, using a combination of wireless, GPS and other computer technologies allow customers to reserve cars online, walk a few blocks to where it is parked in their neighborhood, use it and return it to the parking spot. This form of car use not only avoids the ownership costs of maintenance, insurance, etc., it means fewer cars can provide the transportation needs of metropolitan areas.
Bicycle sharing, especially in Europe, is a going and growing public/private enterprise. Mexico City is trying to clean up its immense smog problem using bicycle sharing in the city's core areas.
Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, has a long and interesting article on access versus ownership in which he sees technology driving a passage from ownership to access. He notes the digitized book as an example. It is interesting to note that Kelley, an avowed libertarian, sees tax-based public enterprise as a vehicle for this change as well as private enterprise. The article may be found at http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all.
But what of land itself, which remains the most basic measure of wealth for much of the planet's population? In this regard it is instructive to note that China, Saudi Arabia, etc. are buying up large tracts of land in Africa to grow food for their own populations. The only large effort at abandoning land ownership was the Soviet Union in which society, through the state, owned the land and farmers were in essence state employees. To many people in the West this was an instance of dictatorship. Farmers, like employees of a corporation, were told what and how much to grow based on the needs of their society. The farm was made to emulate the factory. This feature is currently duplicated, in spades, by American corporate farms, in which animals are raised in very confined space, fed large amounts of medication to avoid easily transmitted disease and hormones to increase the rate of growth and hence saleability. It is not clear whether this form of agriculture is necessary to support the population that the human species has produced and continues to produce.
Finally, ownership may be finding its comeuppance in the developing politics of Latin America, especially Bolivia. Evo Morales has been returning major extraction industries such as oil and minerals to the people by way of nationalization of corporations. Morales, of indigenous extraction himself, is basing this process on what the dominant economies owe Bolivia's indigenous people in recompense for all that has been taken from them. It will not do for a corporation to declare they have a contract with a preceding government that ruled by the power of elitism, not by the consent of the people. Morales in a recent conference in Cochabamba seemed to be calling upon all indigenous people to rise up and demand compensation from those who have plundered their lands and resources. In this connection more than one African government that agreed to sell millions of acres for growing food to China and others has been forced by outraged citizens to withdraw these agreements. China and others are now calling for such countries to supply troops to protect "their interest." If Morales and others focused on the welfare of the population find a significant and determined constituency among the economic victims of this planet, we may have found something of an answer to the future of property. At least in certain areas it will be possessed by society not by individuals. It will, however, place a greater burden on the citizen to insure that government itself is not co-opted by the wealthy and thereby become tyrannical. It may be that humans are condemned by their very nature to repeat Plato's cycle of aristocracy, timocracy (government by those possessed of great honor, usually military), oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny endlessly until the technology of violence overwhelms our species.
Bob Newhard
Property has had a varying history. Hunter gatherer societies had little property except their weapons and tools. To what extent these may have been held in common for everybody's use I am uncertain. While land was not owned, tribes might by force or tradition lay claim to hunting grounds. In the 21st century the "hunting ground right" is still an issue as the fish population declines. More on this later.
As humans moved to agriculture after the last ice age specific land allocation became more important for survival. Not only did the rise of agriculture result in more stable societies providing the basis for the rise of civilization, it also placed land ownership at the center of the human economy.
In terms of human history it wasn’t that long ago that medieval societies regarded all property as ultimately the monarch's, but in practice much of it belonged to the monarch's aristocracy. In the typical feudal arrangement the lord owned all significant property especially land. Even the so-called commons were owned by the lord and his serfs paid him a portion of the benefit they accrued from its use. At this time the economy was land based and wealth measured primarily in land holdings.
Gradually, with increased commerce, including the discovery of the new world, the European economy began to expand and land was no longer the only measure of wealth. The Industrial Revolution greatly enlarged the European economy, but also provided a new basis for wealth, i.e. manufacturing. Interestingly, at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution the land-based economy was facing a dilemma of its own creation. As families grew larger land holdings were being fragmented by multi-child inheritance, Thus came the practice of primogeniture in which the eldest son inherited all the land. A significant portion of the initial Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs and workers were the children of land holders ineligible to inherit the land.
Writing in the earlier phase of this economic transformation, Thomas Hobbes based freedom itself on property ownership. We find this notion in Jefferson when he envisioned a nation of small farmers as the economic foundation of democracy because their property and the living it provided would make them independent of overlords. I think that one reason for this close association of property ownership and freedom lay in the fact that the property of the monarch and aristocracy had given them power over the populace and that therefore property was necessary to assure freedom of the ordinary citizen. There is, to this day, a strong feeling among some citizens that property is the root of freedom.
However, as the impact of diminishing resources and increasing population make property increasingly scarce, ownership of property will become more problematical. One can easily see this as a source of ongoing violence.
With this brief history in mind what are the prospects for property or for that matter ownership in general? To assess the distance this society has to travel in this matter we need only recall G. W. Bush's 2004 campaign that flaunted the banner of the "Ownership Society." Such a society thoroughly based on ownership would require little government (except for military) and society's major domestic transactions, e.g. health care, education, retirement, employee benefits would be negotiated between "independent" entities. This would promote values such as personal responsibility, economic liberty and owning of property. Interestingly this view, but not Bush's reasons for it, is not too far removed from Jefferson's belief. Jefferson feared that Hamilton's economic view, focused on a manufacturing-based economy, would make employees vulnerable to political manipulation.
But back to Bush and the Republicans. The Ownership Society was little more than an attempt to preserve the wealth of the rich. It was offered as a defense for his wealth-favoring tax cut. It uncritically assumed that property would remain the basis of the U.S. economy, even if the rest of the world moved on.
This conservative effort to impose the wealthy on the rest of us by way of a 400 year old view of property and with mankind's survival in mind, indicates how massive a cultural shift will be required to allow our species to survive. In short, is there a surrogate for property?
One answer to that question is that we should substitute access for ownership.
There is some modest potential in some current arrangements. The fishing industry provides some perspective. While nations have long laid claim to areas of the ocean for fishing purposes they could, of course, not lay claim to the fish themselves, which may or may not enter a given national boundary. It is useful to keep in mind that fishing is the one holdover from the hunter gatherer societies.
Another step in this direction is car sharing instead of car ownership. Two companies, Zipcar and Flexcar, using a combination of wireless, GPS and other computer technologies allow customers to reserve cars online, walk a few blocks to where it is parked in their neighborhood, use it and return it to the parking spot. This form of car use not only avoids the ownership costs of maintenance, insurance, etc., it means fewer cars can provide the transportation needs of metropolitan areas.
Bicycle sharing, especially in Europe, is a going and growing public/private enterprise. Mexico City is trying to clean up its immense smog problem using bicycle sharing in the city's core areas.
Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, has a long and interesting article on access versus ownership in which he sees technology driving a passage from ownership to access. He notes the digitized book as an example. It is interesting to note that Kelley, an avowed libertarian, sees tax-based public enterprise as a vehicle for this change as well as private enterprise. The article may be found at http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all.
But what of land itself, which remains the most basic measure of wealth for much of the planet's population? In this regard it is instructive to note that China, Saudi Arabia, etc. are buying up large tracts of land in Africa to grow food for their own populations. The only large effort at abandoning land ownership was the Soviet Union in which society, through the state, owned the land and farmers were in essence state employees. To many people in the West this was an instance of dictatorship. Farmers, like employees of a corporation, were told what and how much to grow based on the needs of their society. The farm was made to emulate the factory. This feature is currently duplicated, in spades, by American corporate farms, in which animals are raised in very confined space, fed large amounts of medication to avoid easily transmitted disease and hormones to increase the rate of growth and hence saleability. It is not clear whether this form of agriculture is necessary to support the population that the human species has produced and continues to produce.
Finally, ownership may be finding its comeuppance in the developing politics of Latin America, especially Bolivia. Evo Morales has been returning major extraction industries such as oil and minerals to the people by way of nationalization of corporations. Morales, of indigenous extraction himself, is basing this process on what the dominant economies owe Bolivia's indigenous people in recompense for all that has been taken from them. It will not do for a corporation to declare they have a contract with a preceding government that ruled by the power of elitism, not by the consent of the people. Morales in a recent conference in Cochabamba seemed to be calling upon all indigenous people to rise up and demand compensation from those who have plundered their lands and resources. In this connection more than one African government that agreed to sell millions of acres for growing food to China and others has been forced by outraged citizens to withdraw these agreements. China and others are now calling for such countries to supply troops to protect "their interest." If Morales and others focused on the welfare of the population find a significant and determined constituency among the economic victims of this planet, we may have found something of an answer to the future of property. At least in certain areas it will be possessed by society not by individuals. It will, however, place a greater burden on the citizen to insure that government itself is not co-opted by the wealthy and thereby become tyrannical. It may be that humans are condemned by their very nature to repeat Plato's cycle of aristocracy, timocracy (government by those possessed of great honor, usually military), oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny endlessly until the technology of violence overwhelms our species.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Idiocy and its manipulation
As have many others, I have tried to understand the phenomenon of political rage demonstrated by Republicans. We apparently have millions of presumably mature adults very distressed about issues that have no substance. There are many answers and that is part of the problem. Are they no longer capable of recognizing reality? Do they really believe Obama is a socialist? Do they really believe Sara Palin is presidential material? In that event do they really care what happens to this country? These people appear to be very angry. About what? Loss of jobs or homes? That is due to corporate greed unleashed by the Republicans. They must know this.
I think people are angry because of what has happened to them and the rather bleak prospects for much improvement in the near term. But then why vilify Obama? He did not cause the pain they feel. There was outrage at Clinton presumably for his sexual behavior, but nothing comparable to the noisy, often vicious, protests against Obama. Representatives who voted for Obama's health care bill have had their homes vandalized. Tea Partiers have spat upon and subjected black congress people to racial slurs.
I think there is a two-part answer. Being black and president, Obama is an easy target for predominantly white outrage. While there has been notable improvement in the racial structure of this society the felt racism is still very much alive and available for political manipulation, which brings me to the second part of the answer.
If you trace the origin of the "Tea Party" phenomenon you will find it is a creation of Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks operation. FreedomWorks is funded by corporations such as General Electric, General Motors and AT&T. What, one might ask, do the unhinged thousands that participate in Tea Party events, spit on and utter racist slurs to black congressmen who voted for the health care bill, vandalize the homes of representatives who voted for the bill, and believe that Sara Palin is presidential material, have in common with the heads of major U.S. corporations? From the corporate point of view, these people, frightened by fear and loss, vessels of sublimated racism and members of a middle class that has been shrinking for decades at the hands of corporate outsourcing, being highly emotional, easily manipulated by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck are ideal foils for distracting public antipathy from themselves and focusing it on the government they use for the fall guy. The danger is that this kind of purposeless stress, especially in a society as vacuous as ours, will produce insane responses divorced from any humane workable solution. In Nazi Germany the jobs that we now cry for were provided by a war machine that killed millions. Our current situation fits, with a good deal of accuracy, the early 20th century rise of fascism.
Noam Chomsky recently gave a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in which he sees the storm clouds of fascism forming in this country. I have appended a report on the speech below. These are very dangerous times beyond the ken of the majority of Americans who believe their justified anger will lead them to an acceptable solution. They are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. One important task at hand is how to penetrate that anger and direct it to its cause. The corporations are the primary villains and are the proper and productive target for their rage. We must ask ourselves, for example, why we have not long since pilloried Rupert Murdoch for his calloused efforts to create a massively destructive earthquake along the racial and class fault lines of our society. There is no need in reality for the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Their only function is to further Murdoch's greed for both money and power at the expense of our society's sanity, the destruction of our democracy and an increasing risk of fascism. This man is a calloused culprit and should be so branded by all who are concerned to create a workable society in these increasingly strange times in human history.
Bob Newhard
*************************
As have many others, I have tried to understand the phenomenon of political rage demonstrated by Republicans. We apparently have millions of presumably mature adults very distressed about issues that have no substance. There are many answers and that is part of the problem. Are they no longer capable of recognizing reality? Do they really believe Obama is a socialist? Do they really believe Sara Palin is presidential material? In that event do they really care what happens to this country? These people appear to be very angry. About what? Loss of jobs or homes? That is due to corporate greed unleashed by the Republicans. They must know this.
I think people are angry because of what has happened to them and the rather bleak prospects for much improvement in the near term. But then why vilify Obama? He did not cause the pain they feel. There was outrage at Clinton presumably for his sexual behavior, but nothing comparable to the noisy, often vicious, protests against Obama. Representatives who voted for Obama's health care bill have had their homes vandalized. Tea Partiers have spat upon and subjected black congress people to racial slurs.
I think there is a two-part answer. Being black and president, Obama is an easy target for predominantly white outrage. While there has been notable improvement in the racial structure of this society the felt racism is still very much alive and available for political manipulation, which brings me to the second part of the answer.
If you trace the origin of the "Tea Party" phenomenon you will find it is a creation of Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks operation. FreedomWorks is funded by corporations such as General Electric, General Motors and AT&T. What, one might ask, do the unhinged thousands that participate in Tea Party events, spit on and utter racist slurs to black congressmen who voted for the health care bill, vandalize the homes of representatives who voted for the bill, and believe that Sara Palin is presidential material, have in common with the heads of major U.S. corporations? From the corporate point of view, these people, frightened by fear and loss, vessels of sublimated racism and members of a middle class that has been shrinking for decades at the hands of corporate outsourcing, being highly emotional, easily manipulated by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck are ideal foils for distracting public antipathy from themselves and focusing it on the government they use for the fall guy. The danger is that this kind of purposeless stress, especially in a society as vacuous as ours, will produce insane responses divorced from any humane workable solution. In Nazi Germany the jobs that we now cry for were provided by a war machine that killed millions. Our current situation fits, with a good deal of accuracy, the early 20th century rise of fascism.
Noam Chomsky recently gave a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in which he sees the storm clouds of fascism forming in this country. I have appended a report on the speech below. These are very dangerous times beyond the ken of the majority of Americans who believe their justified anger will lead them to an acceptable solution. They are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. One important task at hand is how to penetrate that anger and direct it to its cause. The corporations are the primary villains and are the proper and productive target for their rage. We must ask ourselves, for example, why we have not long since pilloried Rupert Murdoch for his calloused efforts to create a massively destructive earthquake along the racial and class fault lines of our society. There is no need in reality for the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Their only function is to further Murdoch's greed for both money and power at the expense of our society's sanity, the destruction of our democracy and an increasing risk of fascism. This man is a calloused culprit and should be so branded by all who are concerned to create a workable society in these increasingly strange times in human history.
Bob Newhard
*************************
Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America
By Matthew Rothschild, April 12, 2010
Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.
“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.
He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.
“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.
Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”
There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.
And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.
“The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain,” he said. “They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are “fine guys” and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’
People see that and are not happy about it.
”
He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”
“People want some answers,” Chomsky said. “They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.
And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.
“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”
He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.” When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.
No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said. “These are lessons to keep in mind.”
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
.
I think people are angry because of what has happened to them and the rather bleak prospects for much improvement in the near term. But then why vilify Obama? He did not cause the pain they feel. There was outrage at Clinton presumably for his sexual behavior, but nothing comparable to the noisy, often vicious, protests against Obama. Representatives who voted for Obama's health care bill have had their homes vandalized. Tea Partiers have spat upon and subjected black congress people to racial slurs.
I think there is a two-part answer. Being black and president, Obama is an easy target for predominantly white outrage. While there has been notable improvement in the racial structure of this society the felt racism is still very much alive and available for political manipulation, which brings me to the second part of the answer.
If you trace the origin of the "Tea Party" phenomenon you will find it is a creation of Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks operation. FreedomWorks is funded by corporations such as General Electric, General Motors and AT&T. What, one might ask, do the unhinged thousands that participate in Tea Party events, spit on and utter racist slurs to black congressmen who voted for the health care bill, vandalize the homes of representatives who voted for the bill, and believe that Sara Palin is presidential material, have in common with the heads of major U.S. corporations? From the corporate point of view, these people, frightened by fear and loss, vessels of sublimated racism and members of a middle class that has been shrinking for decades at the hands of corporate outsourcing, being highly emotional, easily manipulated by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck are ideal foils for distracting public antipathy from themselves and focusing it on the government they use for the fall guy. The danger is that this kind of purposeless stress, especially in a society as vacuous as ours, will produce insane responses divorced from any humane workable solution. In Nazi Germany the jobs that we now cry for were provided by a war machine that killed millions. Our current situation fits, with a good deal of accuracy, the early 20th century rise of fascism.
Noam Chomsky recently gave a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in which he sees the storm clouds of fascism forming in this country. I have appended a report on the speech below. These are very dangerous times beyond the ken of the majority of Americans who believe their justified anger will lead them to an acceptable solution. They are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. One important task at hand is how to penetrate that anger and direct it to its cause. The corporations are the primary villains and are the proper and productive target for their rage. We must ask ourselves, for example, why we have not long since pilloried Rupert Murdoch for his calloused efforts to create a massively destructive earthquake along the racial and class fault lines of our society. There is no need in reality for the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Their only function is to further Murdoch's greed for both money and power at the expense of our society's sanity, the destruction of our democracy and an increasing risk of fascism. This man is a calloused culprit and should be so branded by all who are concerned to create a workable society in these increasingly strange times in human history.
Bob Newhard
*************************
As have many others, I have tried to understand the phenomenon of political rage demonstrated by Republicans. We apparently have millions of presumably mature adults very distressed about issues that have no substance. There are many answers and that is part of the problem. Are they no longer capable of recognizing reality? Do they really believe Obama is a socialist? Do they really believe Sara Palin is presidential material? In that event do they really care what happens to this country? These people appear to be very angry. About what? Loss of jobs or homes? That is due to corporate greed unleashed by the Republicans. They must know this.
I think people are angry because of what has happened to them and the rather bleak prospects for much improvement in the near term. But then why vilify Obama? He did not cause the pain they feel. There was outrage at Clinton presumably for his sexual behavior, but nothing comparable to the noisy, often vicious, protests against Obama. Representatives who voted for Obama's health care bill have had their homes vandalized. Tea Partiers have spat upon and subjected black congress people to racial slurs.
I think there is a two-part answer. Being black and president, Obama is an easy target for predominantly white outrage. While there has been notable improvement in the racial structure of this society the felt racism is still very much alive and available for political manipulation, which brings me to the second part of the answer.
If you trace the origin of the "Tea Party" phenomenon you will find it is a creation of Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks operation. FreedomWorks is funded by corporations such as General Electric, General Motors and AT&T. What, one might ask, do the unhinged thousands that participate in Tea Party events, spit on and utter racist slurs to black congressmen who voted for the health care bill, vandalize the homes of representatives who voted for the bill, and believe that Sara Palin is presidential material, have in common with the heads of major U.S. corporations? From the corporate point of view, these people, frightened by fear and loss, vessels of sublimated racism and members of a middle class that has been shrinking for decades at the hands of corporate outsourcing, being highly emotional, easily manipulated by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck are ideal foils for distracting public antipathy from themselves and focusing it on the government they use for the fall guy. The danger is that this kind of purposeless stress, especially in a society as vacuous as ours, will produce insane responses divorced from any humane workable solution. In Nazi Germany the jobs that we now cry for were provided by a war machine that killed millions. Our current situation fits, with a good deal of accuracy, the early 20th century rise of fascism.
Noam Chomsky recently gave a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in which he sees the storm clouds of fascism forming in this country. I have appended a report on the speech below. These are very dangerous times beyond the ken of the majority of Americans who believe their justified anger will lead them to an acceptable solution. They are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. One important task at hand is how to penetrate that anger and direct it to its cause. The corporations are the primary villains and are the proper and productive target for their rage. We must ask ourselves, for example, why we have not long since pilloried Rupert Murdoch for his calloused efforts to create a massively destructive earthquake along the racial and class fault lines of our society. There is no need in reality for the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Their only function is to further Murdoch's greed for both money and power at the expense of our society's sanity, the destruction of our democracy and an increasing risk of fascism. This man is a calloused culprit and should be so branded by all who are concerned to create a workable society in these increasingly strange times in human history.
Bob Newhard
*************************
Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America
By Matthew Rothschild, April 12, 2010
Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.
“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.
He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.
“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.
Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”
There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.
And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.
“The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain,” he said. “They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are “fine guys” and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’
People see that and are not happy about it.
”
He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”
“People want some answers,” Chomsky said. “They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.
And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.
“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”
He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.” When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.
No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said. “These are lessons to keep in mind.”
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
The Insidiousness of Privatising Public Services.
On Wednesday, March 31 2010, the Californian carried an editorial arguing that Saturday mail delivery should be abolished in the interest of saving money. The editorial, dripping with anti-government sentiment, stated that "The U.S. Postal Service is gushing red ink like, well, the rest of the federal government …" To help stop this "gushing" the Californian argues that Saturday mail delivery should be abandoned. In effect the argument is that because the Postal Service is not making money, actually loosing it,, its service should be truncated. This is a free market argument and should have nothing to do with government services, which are not intended tg make a profit. While cost controls are necessary, they are not to be determined by the private sector. Until 1970 the Postal Service was known as the Post Office Department, one of two departments specifically required by the Constitution and whose head was a member of the President's cabinet. As a result of the Postal workers strike, because of abysmally low pay and poor working conditions, President Nixon in 1970 pushed through the act creating the United States Postal Service, a private entity. From that point on what was a tax-supported public service became a for profit operation and thereby a suitable target for conservative maligning. The Post Office was set up as a government service in the Constitution, not unlike the military or the court system. Conservatives have repeatedly pulled this game of privatizing a public service and then criticizing it on private sector criteria. They are trying the same thing with a national health care plan, but are having a hard time because the exorbitant costs of private sector health care have been long established and glaring.
Under Ronald Reagan this was no longer a game. It became policy to appoint government agency heads with the specific intent of weakening or abolishing those agencies. It is interesting that people can be sent to jail for plotting to overthrow the government, but when Newt Gingrich's Republicans refused to fund the federal government or Ronald Reagan set about systematically destroying it or when Grover Norquist says it must be drowned in a bathtub not a peep was or is heard.
This kind of argument is endemic to the conservative mind set, namely, that the profit-driven sector should be the measure of public services. It is erroneous, if not malicious, in its assumption not only in measuring services by profit measurement alone, but even in assuming that profit-driven services can out perform the public sector even on a cost basis. Health care cost in this country compared to that of other industrialized countries is a glaring example.
I first noticed the technique now being employed to attack the Postal Service when, in the early 1960s, I was a librarian at the Los Angels Public Library. I had responsibility for the printing collection. The trade magazines were running articles on California's decision to transfer the printing of the election ballots from the state printer to a commercial firm that said they could do it cheaper. The name of that game was to continuously deny the state printer funds to upgrade its equipment until it was made sufficiently inefficient to warrant transferring its business to the private sector. Similarly, by refusing to make e-mail a public service under the Postal Service even though e-mail Internet service providers (ISPs) were using the government-built Internet, conservatives now use the adverse impact of e-mail as another reason to cut back on Postal Service funding. E-mail, as part of the Postal Service, could have been much more productively integrated with regular mail service.
Over all this privatization gambit is but one conservative strategy as it has laid siege to our government. Government can become inefficient, but the remedy is not to turn its functions over to the for-profit sector, which has no fundamental concern, not can it have, for citizen well being. Nor is it a shining example of efficiency as is amply demonstrated by the automobile industry. Progressives need to dispel this Regan-generated myth, which has of late generated the practice of depriving employees of legally required benefits and the government of taxes by declaring employees as contractors. And these people are the shining examples of how our society should be run?
Bob Newhard
Under Ronald Reagan this was no longer a game. It became policy to appoint government agency heads with the specific intent of weakening or abolishing those agencies. It is interesting that people can be sent to jail for plotting to overthrow the government, but when Newt Gingrich's Republicans refused to fund the federal government or Ronald Reagan set about systematically destroying it or when Grover Norquist says it must be drowned in a bathtub not a peep was or is heard.
This kind of argument is endemic to the conservative mind set, namely, that the profit-driven sector should be the measure of public services. It is erroneous, if not malicious, in its assumption not only in measuring services by profit measurement alone, but even in assuming that profit-driven services can out perform the public sector even on a cost basis. Health care cost in this country compared to that of other industrialized countries is a glaring example.
I first noticed the technique now being employed to attack the Postal Service when, in the early 1960s, I was a librarian at the Los Angels Public Library. I had responsibility for the printing collection. The trade magazines were running articles on California's decision to transfer the printing of the election ballots from the state printer to a commercial firm that said they could do it cheaper. The name of that game was to continuously deny the state printer funds to upgrade its equipment until it was made sufficiently inefficient to warrant transferring its business to the private sector. Similarly, by refusing to make e-mail a public service under the Postal Service even though e-mail Internet service providers (ISPs) were using the government-built Internet, conservatives now use the adverse impact of e-mail as another reason to cut back on Postal Service funding. E-mail, as part of the Postal Service, could have been much more productively integrated with regular mail service.
Over all this privatization gambit is but one conservative strategy as it has laid siege to our government. Government can become inefficient, but the remedy is not to turn its functions over to the for-profit sector, which has no fundamental concern, not can it have, for citizen well being. Nor is it a shining example of efficiency as is amply demonstrated by the automobile industry. Progressives need to dispel this Regan-generated myth, which has of late generated the practice of depriving employees of legally required benefits and the government of taxes by declaring employees as contractors. And these people are the shining examples of how our society should be run?
Bob Newhard
Sunday, March 21, 2010
The Case of the Misplaced Virtue
I first noticed this phenomenon many decades ago when studying Plato's Republic. Plato holds that knowledge is the highest virtue. It followed therefore that society should reflect this fundamental truth. It followed from this that what was needed to assure that knowledge would remain society's defining virtue was a philosopher king. Hence a fundamental individual virtue, when applied to society, resulted in a dictatorship, albeit a dictatorship of wisdom. This is a case in which a private virtue, one properly ascribed to an individual, was made into a public virtue with, I suggest, the expected result. Indeed I. F. (Izzy) Stone the renowned investigative reporter, in his book, The Trial of Socrates, argues that Plato was part of a movement to overthrow the Athenian democracy.
For much of human history private virtues dominated the public arena. Government was viewed by the mass of people as good or bad on a personal scale, e.g. a good or bad monarch. The notion of the family was expanded to government as the monarch was viewed as the father of the country and the population as his children. Theoretically the state was his private domain. All others held their land in fief to him. Again this resulted in arbitrary rule as the father was viewed as the arbitrary ruler of this family.
Public virtues such as justice and equality came to the fore with the rise of democracy. Emanuel Kant saw this dichotomy and sought to reconcile these two kinds of virtue when he proposed that the private virtue of not lying was actually a public virtue because if everyone lied society could not function. While this effort to derive the private virtue of not lying from public necessity merits significant thought, it is interesting to note that not even the highest oath of office in our country, that of the President, makes no mention of not lying.
The problem is that private virtues are absolute for the individual who subscribes to them and thus become tyrannical when applied to public affairs. If honesty is a virtue for an individual then "more or less honest" will not do.
In our time this confusion of private and public virtue has become critical for the survival of our democracy. Conservatives, by passionately trumpeting individual virtues as replacements for public virtues such as equality and justice, have argued that charity should replace some major social services. You may remember President George H. W. Bush's call for a thousand points of light to solve glaring discrepancies in wealth. Thus the wealthy would decide when and if the poor were to receive the help they badly needed. This is not democracy! Again the current "debate" on health care pushes the conservative's private virtue of individual responsibility into the public arena where citizen rights and welfare should predominate and it does this with disastrous results for 46 million Americans, including 9 million children who have no health insurance.
One result of this relentless and deliberate insertion of private virtues into the public arena is that Americans have lost the sense of society and its importance. Democracy must accommodate a wide variety of private values of citizens; therefore its values, must in a sense, transcend those values in the interest of the society as a whole. This is not to say, for example, that we do not want personal honesty in government. It is to say that we do not require it as a condition of public office holding except in positions where it is critical, e.g. the town treasurer in the conduct of affairs related to that office. If honesty were rigorously required of politicians neither they nor this society could function for the simple reason politicians must say different things to different constituents if they are to be elected. We the citizens require this as we so frequently vote our private values rather than the public values of justice and equality.
There was a time when public virtues played a much stronger role in our public affairs. During Franklin Roosevelt's administration we actively sought and voted for the public good. We believed in the public good of public education as a right for children not a privilege of the wealthy. Public education was full of experimentation as we tried to understand what stimulated young people to learn. John Dewey fought to make the student the focus of education, not the institution. He understood Jefferson's view that education was the primary job of society and should focus on helping people realize their potential. Properly understood, society's goal was to produce an increasingly competent and curious citizenry. Conservatives have turned this on its head by declaring that they know the best things for students and education should be directed at instilling those values. Contemporary conservatism is at its heart dead. It is analogous to a hurricane or tornado; next to nothing at its center, but enormously destructive to everything around it. It does not want to inquire and base knowledge on the results of honest inquiry. Neither do corporations, and this is one of the roots of agreement between conservatives and the corporate world. It should never be forgotten that ignorance is deeply rooted in Christian culture. Knowledge of good and evil was a penalty God bestowed on Adam and Eve for their misbehavior. The Christian phrase " a little child shall lead them" implies that the ignorance of innocence is a virtue. These are the kinds of homilies out of which dictatorships are fashioned. Hitler's vision for the Nazi youth movement was purity of spirit. The image of Nietzsche's young eubemensch striding the Bavarian mountaintops captured the German imagination as "family values" and sexual purity threaten to distort our own public perceptions.
In short, be wary, very wary, of translating personal virtues into public virtues.
Bob Newhard
For much of human history private virtues dominated the public arena. Government was viewed by the mass of people as good or bad on a personal scale, e.g. a good or bad monarch. The notion of the family was expanded to government as the monarch was viewed as the father of the country and the population as his children. Theoretically the state was his private domain. All others held their land in fief to him. Again this resulted in arbitrary rule as the father was viewed as the arbitrary ruler of this family.
Public virtues such as justice and equality came to the fore with the rise of democracy. Emanuel Kant saw this dichotomy and sought to reconcile these two kinds of virtue when he proposed that the private virtue of not lying was actually a public virtue because if everyone lied society could not function. While this effort to derive the private virtue of not lying from public necessity merits significant thought, it is interesting to note that not even the highest oath of office in our country, that of the President, makes no mention of not lying.
The problem is that private virtues are absolute for the individual who subscribes to them and thus become tyrannical when applied to public affairs. If honesty is a virtue for an individual then "more or less honest" will not do.
In our time this confusion of private and public virtue has become critical for the survival of our democracy. Conservatives, by passionately trumpeting individual virtues as replacements for public virtues such as equality and justice, have argued that charity should replace some major social services. You may remember President George H. W. Bush's call for a thousand points of light to solve glaring discrepancies in wealth. Thus the wealthy would decide when and if the poor were to receive the help they badly needed. This is not democracy! Again the current "debate" on health care pushes the conservative's private virtue of individual responsibility into the public arena where citizen rights and welfare should predominate and it does this with disastrous results for 46 million Americans, including 9 million children who have no health insurance.
One result of this relentless and deliberate insertion of private virtues into the public arena is that Americans have lost the sense of society and its importance. Democracy must accommodate a wide variety of private values of citizens; therefore its values, must in a sense, transcend those values in the interest of the society as a whole. This is not to say, for example, that we do not want personal honesty in government. It is to say that we do not require it as a condition of public office holding except in positions where it is critical, e.g. the town treasurer in the conduct of affairs related to that office. If honesty were rigorously required of politicians neither they nor this society could function for the simple reason politicians must say different things to different constituents if they are to be elected. We the citizens require this as we so frequently vote our private values rather than the public values of justice and equality.
There was a time when public virtues played a much stronger role in our public affairs. During Franklin Roosevelt's administration we actively sought and voted for the public good. We believed in the public good of public education as a right for children not a privilege of the wealthy. Public education was full of experimentation as we tried to understand what stimulated young people to learn. John Dewey fought to make the student the focus of education, not the institution. He understood Jefferson's view that education was the primary job of society and should focus on helping people realize their potential. Properly understood, society's goal was to produce an increasingly competent and curious citizenry. Conservatives have turned this on its head by declaring that they know the best things for students and education should be directed at instilling those values. Contemporary conservatism is at its heart dead. It is analogous to a hurricane or tornado; next to nothing at its center, but enormously destructive to everything around it. It does not want to inquire and base knowledge on the results of honest inquiry. Neither do corporations, and this is one of the roots of agreement between conservatives and the corporate world. It should never be forgotten that ignorance is deeply rooted in Christian culture. Knowledge of good and evil was a penalty God bestowed on Adam and Eve for their misbehavior. The Christian phrase " a little child shall lead them" implies that the ignorance of innocence is a virtue. These are the kinds of homilies out of which dictatorships are fashioned. Hitler's vision for the Nazi youth movement was purity of spirit. The image of Nietzsche's young eubemensch striding the Bavarian mountaintops captured the German imagination as "family values" and sexual purity threaten to distort our own public perceptions.
In short, be wary, very wary, of translating personal virtues into public virtues.
Bob Newhard
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Limits
The other day the L. A. Times carried an article on the increasingly evident limits to Olympic athletic performance, unassisted by drugs or technology. To quote;
"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."
That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."
This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"
This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.
What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.
In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.
Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.
He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4
While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.
To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"
Bob Newhard
"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."
That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."
This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"
This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.
What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.
In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.
Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.
He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4
While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.
To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"
Bob Newhard
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