Future Shock

There is a fundamental bifurcation in the human animal between its brain and the rest of its organism. The brain unlike the rest of our being is not tied to the real world. The brain can envision what the rest of our human organism can never experience. This ability to abstract has been both the source of immense human accomplishment and immense human destruction. Our brains have created myth which many of us believe in with the same conviction that we believe the sun will rise tomorrow, if not more so. It is willing to kill other human beings who do not share that belief. This is how tenacious our brain constructs can be.

That same human brain has, using that same capacity to abstract, by carefully observing the world around it, constructed elaborate systems that allow it to place our species on the moon. For most of my adult life this bifurcation has been fundamental to my understanding of human behavior and society. For example, it led me to view human life as essentially tragic because we could conceive more than we could ever be.

However, Ray Kurzweil's latest book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology argues that the brain is breaking its shackles and probably within the first fifty years of this century, certainly by the end of this century, it will have done so. (The term "Singularity" in the title refers to the point at which machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence. The term is derived from its use in physics where it refers to the point in a black hole at which gravity is so intense it destroys space-time. Nothing is the same afterwards.) The driving force behind this development is the relentless exponential increase in technological comprehensiveness and power, especially in artificial intelligence, biometrics and computer capacity. Kurzweil and other scientists, applying Moore's law (the power of computers will double about every two years) to the whole of technology, sees these technologies doubling their capacities every 24 to 30 months. For example, in 1997 IBM's Deep Blue computer, designed to play chess, defeated world champion Gary Kasparov, who five years earlier had scoffed at the idea that a computer could do this. In 2011 IBM's Watson computer defeated the two most winning contestants of the Jeopardy game. The computer was not specifically designed to play the game in which any question can be asked. It won its match. In 14 years this form of computerization had advanced from a single game machine to one that had to deal with every possible question, decide whether it should answer or not and if it answered to be reasonably sure it was correct. (In this game there is a significant penalty for a wrong answer.) The real purpose of Watson is to quickly extract reliable information from very large, complex, databases.

As the power of artificial intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate, so is the rate of global warming and human population growth. All three are expected to reach some sort of threshold in this century. Understanding the full implications of this convergence is, to put it mildly, mind boggling and may require Watson generation 3 or 4 to provide that understanding.

The joker in all this is, of course, that humans are designing these initial iterations. Will they build in their customary human aggression and fear reactions and will this machine intelligence be devoted to military and other human-destructive uses? Kurzweil serves on the five member Army Science Advisory Board. The military, in an effort to minimize battlefield casualties, is moving increasingly to robots. A major problem is to what degree they make the robots autonomous, independent of human control. Technology, it should be constantly kept in mind, is a two edged sword. Kurzweil, however, believes wars are becoming less destructive, especially of human life, as a result of advanced technology. He compares the war technology of World War II, e.g. carpet bombing, with its millions of casualties to those of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I find this dubious, especially when one looks ahead to the destructive potential of such biological warfare weapons nano-sized viruses.

Yet in spite of all this, and there is far more to it than I have mentioned, if Kurzweil and other technologically savvy academics and innovators are right about an immanent explosion of artificial intelligence, then the run up to it as well as its consequences will mark one of the most dramatic shifts in human existence. Some compare it to the introduction of agriculture and language.

One of the useful things one can do is look for the signs of the run up to the Singularity. For example there is a current controversy as to whether astronomy or atoms should be the measuring source for time. The problem is that atomic time, and time measured by the rotation of the earth, are getting increasingly out of sync. While on the one hand the atomic source is more accurate, on the other hand all of human behavior has been molded from the very beginning of evolution by astronomical time. How much of what we are as humans, of our institutions and our accounting for ourselves, is tied to astronomical time? Is one more link between man and his environment being broken?

The same issue without the apparent conflict can be seen in a video clip in which owners of Sony's robot dog Aibo gathered to discuss their dog's latest tricks and other behaviors. The emotions and attachments to their dogs were obviously the same as if they had been real dogs. Simulation is one of the technologies that will smooth the passage to and through the Singularity as humans identify ever more closely with their creations.

The conflict between human values and human technology is not new. A hundred years ago John Galswothy published his story of a bootmaker know for the high quality of his boots, losing out to factory-made boots of lesser quality. That quality, i.e. human care and competence, no longer mattered, was incomprehensible and devastating to the bootmaker.

My stepfather was born in a covered wagon heading to Canada where his father had heard farming opportunities were better than in his native Iowa. He lived to see a man on the moon. I have often asked myself, given the increasing rate of technological change, what change I might see that could approach such a dramatic difference. I think I may be seeing the initial stages of that change in which the human brain creates an intelligence vastly superior to itself and must live with the consequences.

This rapid coalescing of major global-scale trends, i.e. global warming, population increase and the shift of intelligence to machines, portends a future of enormous complexity. Will human beings finally realize that intelligence is the only tool they have for dealing with this complexity and can this be done without surrendering their humanity? Will the bifurcation in man's brain become the bifurcation in his future?

Bob Newhard

A Way Out?

It is generally agreed that humanity has to develop a sustainable economy; otherwise we will consume ourselves out of house and home. Various proposals have been made for achieving sustainability such as retuning to a simpler life in which we consume less and much of what is consumed is produced locally thereby reducing the many adverse environmental impacts of the global market. When one considers proposed solutions such as this the problem of how to get from here to there inevitably becomes daunting because of the apparently insurmountable social and economic changes that would be required, which would, past human behavior indicates, create enormous suffering and violence. It would take stark awareness of impending doom to bring humanity to this point.

There may be, however, a method of transitioning humanity to a substantially less environmentally demanding economy than the one we have. Additionally, we have already incorporated a great deal of this less demanding economy into our everyday lives. I suggest that we look carefully at the service economy as a device for segueing to a less destructive economy.

Given the low wages that many people associate with service jobs, e.g. waitresses, store clerks, gardeners, etc., this may seem like a real downer. Consider however that doctors, lawyers and teachers are also service jobs. In a World Bank Report titled Growth of the Service Sector, which may be found at http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/beyondco/beg_09.pdf, another dimension to the service economy is that it can handle growth with much less adverse impact than the commodity capitalism that now prevails.

We thus have in the service economy an existing and growing economy. Mike Davis in his book Planet of the Slums observes that the so called informal economy, in which individuals work for other individuals under terms arbitrarily stipulated by the employer, e.g. domestics, gardeners, constitute as high as 70% of total employment in some poorer countries. The service economy is already there. It has to be made more rewarding. One way of doing this is to impose a cost-to-the-environment tax on the producing of things. Notice that we now allow oil and mining companies to deduct a depreciation allowance from their taxes for the materials they remove from the earth, not to mentions such allowances on equipment made from mined ore. The environment requires that we make far fewer things than we have in the past, yet we subsidize that activity. That subsidy could be put to far better use by increasing the wages in the poorer parts of the service economy.

To my mind, the service economy offers other benefits as well. By its very nature it brings people closer together in shared undertakings in a time when the fascination with technology is displacing the fascination with people. The world of things we have created has introduced a substantial level of individual isolation. Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone notes some of the fallout from this. The service economy is also much more directly focused on human beings than our economy of production. It keeps humanity at the center of things, not some arbitrary function called profit. Keeping human beings as the focus in something as bedrock serious as employment is necessary as the so-called economies of robotization dictate that humans compete increasingly with their machines for existence. Economies are created by humans and humans must insure that their economies serve them well, including preserving their home.

Bob Newhard

A Neglected Consequence of Our National Decisions

When we initiate massive undertakings, especially wars which are so emotionally charged, we will weigh many consequences such as world opinion, effect on other counties, even regional balances of power that may result. One we seldom, if ever, consider is the mindset of the American people that may result.

A mindset is a cultural phenomenon. Societies have them as a result of unusual experiences or as a means of accounting for what they do or have done. In this context slavery was a mindset in addition to a practice. When the practice of slavery was abolished the mindset remained, even to this day. Mindsets, being held for reasons usually immune to rational criticism, can be very dangerous to a society. They are vulnerable to political and other manipulation and, more importantly, they prevent a society from productively engaging in solutions to societal problems.

By way of example, let us consider what I believe to be one of, if not the most, significant changes in the American mindset to occur in the 20^th century, the militaristic mindset of the American people. After every major war until World War II America always disarmed and returned its focus to domestic issues. After World War II it did not.

By way of personal experience let me illustrate the depth of disarmament to help in understanding what disarmament meant and hence the magnitude of the change in the American mindset over the period discussed herein. As a child in the 1930s I lived within a few blocks of Fort MacArthur whose mission was to protect the port of Los Angeles from any enemy. The fort had an upper and lower reservation. The lower reservation had the barracks and officer housing. It was open to the public and I, a civilian, got my haircuts there for 25 cents. The upper reservation had the 14 inch disappearing gun battery that could hurl a 1, 560 pound projectile 14 miles in defense of the port. I ran around the tunnels of the gun emplacements and dug bullets from the small arms firing range to melt and make lead soldiers. Additionally, San Pedro was then home port for the Pacific Fleet. When the fleet was in anyone could ride the gigs that transported naval personnel to and from the ships. As youngsters we tried to get a gig going to a battleship, but sometimes wound up disappointed by being delivered to a tender. This was the state of disarmament about 15 years after World War I. There was no effort to keep the public mindset on war.

By the end of World War II the powers that be had already decided that the Soviet Union would probably be our next enemy. Even before the end of the war Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech on March 5, 1945 at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. About the same time Henry Stimson, Secretary of War (it was then called the War Department, not the current euphemistic and deceptive Defense Department) under Truman wrote in his diary that it might be necessary to take on the Russians over their invasion of Manchuria. He said this in connection with the importance of dropping the atom bomb to demonstrate our power to the Russians. In brief, there was no intention to disarm after World War II.

This so-called Cold War produced two hot wars as well as many proxy wars around the globe. For our purposes the most significant of these was the Vietnam War.

The first of these hot wars, Korea, came barely five years after the end of World War II. Fearing the displeasure of an American public that had so recently been through a long war, the Korean War was officially called a police action.

The second, and most important for the purpose of this article, was the Vietnam War. The American defeat in this war was attributed by the military to U.S. civilian opposition to the war, especially to the draft. In consequence the U.S. military sought and won approval to convert itself from a citizen conscript organization to an all volunteer one. This created a military that was considerably less a concern for ordinary Americans who would no longer have to weigh going to war in terms of possibly sacrificing their sons. With this burden off their shoulders the Americans could more easily view war as a kind of video game played with other people's children. This new volunteer military is paid in advanced educational opportunities, medical care for themselves and their families plus a modest salary. We had in effect a paid standing army, which brought us, at least psychologically, one step closer to accepting a full mercenary army whose precursor we now employ for the State Department in Iraq. This has been a major enhancement of the change in the American mindset regarding engagement in war.

During the 1980s we also invaded two small nations. The navy was sent by Reagan to attack the island nation of Granada because it had a socialist government and H. W. Bush sent the army to attack Panama because its leader was said to be trafficking in drugs. These two events were so bizarre they suggest a desire to keep war and "the enemy" in public focus and to discourage any thoughts of challenging the American hegemony in South and Central America.

The next major event in hardening the American appetite for world dominion and the militarism that goes with it was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This left the United States as the oft declared "sole remaining super power." As such, the neocons Cheney et al began planning, during the presidency of H. W. Bush, with their document Project for a New American Century for an American empire to rival Rome in the scope of its dominion. For this a well-funded military would be essential, which I suggest is the real reason we never saw the peace dividend many thought would follow the end of the Cold War.

September the 11th of 2001 came as a godsend for the neocons who had, during H. W. Bush's presidency, laid out their plan for a new American empire analogous to that of Rome in its dominion. An analysis of what was done in rapid sequence after the attack of 9/11 evidences a pre-made plan. It was immediately called a war rather than a police action so the full involvement of the military could be justified. The Patriot Act curtailed civilian freedoms. The federal government was reorganized to facilitate a continuing integration of military and police, and citizens who protest what is going on are now increasingly treated as the enemy.

We are now an empire with over 700 military facilities world wide. Empires generate enemies more readily than almost any other form of political organization. As such, we are continuously on the alert for potential enemies. We are easily led to treat those who may not accept American hegemony as enemies to be dealt with by the military. The latest episode in this world-wide game of containment is our response to China's increasing power. We have moved troops to northern Australia and we are trying to induce Burma to side with us against China.

This whole process from initial reluctance to get involved in one more European war to the creation of an American empire out of the ashes of World War II has had as its backdrop the American mindset nurtured by a media that kept public attention focused on "the enemy." That media and the American people paid far less attention to the efforts of the United Nations to spread some of the global wealth to the world's neediest. We often treated the U.N. as the enemy and any adherence to its rules as anti-American.

One day the full extent of what the Americans and the mindset they developed after World War II have done to this world may be thoroughly articulated. This is now being done with respect to our unnecessary use of the atom bomb. This articulation will not be pretty. It will be filled with large­-scale avarice, pursuit of power and dominance, which became global after World War II. It will have events of unconscionable brutality. We Americans may have to face the kind of collective guilt that Germany has had to deal with. Despite the rhetoric we use to describe ourselves and our motives we have managed to betray our heritage despite many opportunities as our performance on the world stage unfurled. Franklin Roosevelt understood this. During World War II he pushed the creation of the United Nations in which the smallest of nations would finally have a voice. He rejected Churchill's efforts to reestablish the British Empire. He articulated his Four Freedoms, which included a freedom from want and in which the Marshall Plan was rooted. With his death we lost the kind of leadership a nation conceived as was ours requires. We took the first step toward world domination with the dropping of the atom bomb, which to my mind, Roosevelt, with his profound concern for humanity, would never have authorized. Perhaps one of the larger tragedies of the last 300 years is an America, which was conceived with so much promise for humanity, played out as simply one more empire.

Bob Newhard

India, the Other Path

One of the salient issues facing humanity is whether democracy can survive the monumental changes that will engulf it, or will we humans find no other way to continue our existence than to rely on high levels of authoritarianism. As an example, China has slowed its population growth by fiat of authority requiring most families to have only one child. India, a democracy, has made not such demands. As a result India's population will surpass that of China in 2013.

India, in my judgment, should be a focus of interest to those concerned with the future of democracy. It is an emerging economic powerhouse, a global player. On the one hand it is fractured by an addiction to the new, fostered by a robust economy of technology and on the other hand deep attachment to the old as a country with long standing traditions that go far toward being definitive in a country not long out from under the heel of colonialism.

One policy that demonstrates the difference between China's authoritarianism and India's democracy is population control. China mandated a one child per family policy in the 1970s. Exceptions were made for farm families and some others. As a result, according to Chinese authorities, 400 million births have been prevented from 1979 to 2011. A Chinese spokesperson has said that currently about 35.9% of China's population is encompassed by the program. If a woman becomes pregnant and the family already has a child the woman is forced to have an abortion.

India tried a policy of sterilization instead of abortion in the 1970's, but abandoned it in the face of backlash it occasioned. Recently, the Indian state of Rajasthan has begun a policy of voluntary sterilization for men and women. Sterilization is rewarded with various appliances such as food processors or television sets and includes eligibility to win a new Indian-made Tata Nano automobile. In short, and with an adherence to the objectivity that the threats of overpopulation present to the future of our species, we must ask ourselves which of these two approaches is most likely to accomplish the population reduction required.

Another prominent current display of Indian democracy in action is the furor over the government's permitting foreign big box stores such as Wal-Mart and the British Tesco to open stores throughout India. Due to India's particular form of parliamentary government, a decision of this sort can be made by the government without parliamentary discussion or approval. From its independence to 2006 kirana, small mom and pop neighborhood stores, seldom larger than 500 square feet, and including even cart and sidewalk vendors, were by law the primary form of retail operation permitted in India. There are millions of these shops throughout India and, combined, they represent about 15% of India's gross domestic product (GDP). In 2006 large foreign retailers were permitted to operate, but only as suppliers to small Indian-owned stores. By fiat of government order in November 2011, these large foreign retailers were permitted to establish and operate their own supermarkets if they had no more than 51% foreign ownership. The government's action caused an uproar in the Indian Parliament with one parliamentarian declaring that he would personally set fire to the first Wal-Mart store to appear. Within days the ruckus in parliament became so great that the government had to rescind its order; with what degree of permanence is yet to be seen. I find it significant that this revolt in behalf of the little people took place immediately in Parliament without the need for massive demonstrations by those affected kirana owners. Can one imagine this response to government dictate taking place in China?

Part of the argument for permitting this form of foreign investment had been that both China and Thailand had permitted this kind of foreign investment and their economies have boomed. Regardless, the Indians chose tradition rather than modernization. In India's case the people spoke, in China's case a wealth- dominated government decreed that foreign investment would be permitted albeit under government oversight. (We have seen what happened when Google incurred the government's wrath over Google's resistance to China's demand that it censor its content.) One interesting question is which of these two major influences on the world's future, both developing at break neck speed, will, in the long run, be successful? No matter what we may think humanity ought to do, this is the real world in which democracy and authoritarianism will be tested.

I have tried to think out some of the pros and cons of this issue because I believe it reflects a fundament source of conflict in the future of our species. For example, it is said that the big box stores will eliminate many of the middle men in the kirana supply chain and thereby make goods, especially food, cheaper at a time of ever rising prices. But, I ask myself, at what energy and pollution costs as people have to travel further to a big box store rather than their corner kirana. Could, for example, the big box stores, being regional, create an additional impetus to automobile purchase? In brief, does it do less environmental damage and perhaps societal stress, to move people or products? Lest this seem trivial, it is important to keep in mind that we are talking of a society of nearly one billion people, over three times the population of the United States.

Some kirana vendors rely on local food sources more than the big box stores can be expected to. One kirana butcher said he did not fear Wal-Mart because his customers, like most Indians, preferred fresh meat to frozen meat and he slaughtered his own animals, assuring that his meat was fresh. If you have ever noticed, poor people, lacking refrigeration, buy their meat alive, hence the popularity of chicken, and slaughter it immediately prior to cooking. Ecologically, this considerably reduces the energy consumption of refrigeration and the accompanying CO2 pollution. Of additional concern, will the increased advertising and sophistication of that advertising by the big box stores accelerate overconsumption as it has in our country?

There is a significant movement in India to preserve Indian ecology, even to the point of returning to the land. Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Little Things, a prize winning novel, and activist for global social reform, comes close to taking this view in an interview in the Guardian UK newspaper, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger. People like she and Bill McKibben are driven to much smaller units of human organization in their search for a viable sustainable economy.

As a final note, I would ask if one can imagine a people-centered economist like India's Nobel Laureate Armartya Sen arising and prospering in China? Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in rigorously demonstrating that economics can be most productively viewed as a device for improving human life.

China is rigorously, and sometimes callously, planning its future. Humanity is viewed in its depersonalized mass. To get a feel for the enormity of Chinese planning I suggest reading relevant passages from Mike Davis' Planet of the Slums in which he describes Chinese plans for a megalopolis extending from the delta of the Pearl River (Hong King) to the delta of the Yangtze River (Shanghai) with a population equivalent to that of the entire United States. As I say, the Chinese are planning on an enormous scale. India, in contrast, exhibits much of the people-centered decision making. I have asked myself, and continue to ask, which is the most likely scenario for humanity's future? As the watersheds on both sides of the Himalayas continue to shrivel, as their populations continue to increase, as they each pursue a rate of development not seen before, their differing ways of dealing with much the same problems will be highly instructive for those concerned about the future of mankind.

Bob Newhard

Capitalism's Inherent Inequality as a Global Economic System and a Possible Alternative

I think it is obvious that humanity will require, in some sense, a global economic system. We humans have gone too far in technological development, overpopulation and planetary destruction to assume otherwise. Further I think such a global economic system must have the welfare of human beings, in their totality, as its fundamental objective. Given these assumptions and values, can capitalism, no matter how modified, measure up?

I suggest that the European Union (EU), having as members a mixture of nations and their national economies can serve as the best example of what capitalism, as a global economic system can be expected to do. But why is Greece, for example, so wanting in productivity to elicit from Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and David Cameron the openly expressed regret that Greece was ever admitted to the eurozone? Could it be that Greece does not have the natural resources, e.g. coal, major rivers, a variety of mineral resources, that their northern neighbors do and therefore must do with less in health care, education, etc. than those northern neighbors? It would seem so. Is this not the naturally wealthy nations dictating to those of less endowed nations how they must live if they are to be loaned a portion of that natural wealth as a bailout? Again, this division of nations along the lines of natural resources would, if capitalism is the governing global economic system, condemn billions of the worlds population to, at best, second class global citizenship.

The EU's economic system, commonly called the eurozone, is much like any national bank. Not all member of the EU are members of the eurozone. An EU member nation must have a sufficiently viable national economy to become a eurozone member. Every EU member that has such an economy must join the eurozone. There are no protocols for withdrawal, either voluntary or otherwise, from the eurozone once admitted. The eurozone, as any nation, has its own central bank (ECB) which, among other things, issues its own currency and bonds.

Given this background what has capitalism done as this amalgam of nation states seeks to survive and prosper in the global capitalist market place as it currently exists?

As we know, the eurozone did not protect the citizens of the EU from the greed-driven shenanigans of Wall Street's securitized mortgage fragments. Some EU national economies, i.e. Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy are all being required to impose severe cutbacks in social services in return for eurozone bailout funds. This is causing riots in Greece and Portugal and, as noted above, a variety of disparaging remarks from the French, Germans and English to the effect that Greece for example, should never have been admitted to the eurozone. Here we see a group of nations struggling to form a more perfect union to avoid the wars that so frequently have plagued their lands and, in consequence struggling to form a common economy, being defeated in that attempt by capitalism's single focus on wealth. Indeed, Spain, in its recent election, has decided to opt out of its social programs and follow the ER/IMF imposed drastic reductions in social services. This, despite the fact that Wall Street was the ultimate cause of their social distress. Extrapolate this to a global scale, with much greater natural economic potential, and billions of human beings will not qualify for membership in a global economic system. Wealth once again trumps human need and human potential.

Well, what can we do? David Korten in his book Agenda for a New Economy, articulates 12 steps to be taken to achieve an equitable and sustainable world economy. Korten presents no utopian construct, but takes the real world seriously in his proposals. While I agree with much of what he proposes as a remedy for what we now have, I believe his call for more local units of economic organizations flies in the face of the level of technological integration and population density that humanity has developed. Humanity, if it is to survive, will require a global economy to assure a sufficient measure of equality in the distribution of the world's economic productivity.

One possibility I find heartening is to view humanity itself as our primary resource. By way of illustration let us consider Japan and South Korea. Both countries are exceptionally short of natural resources, yet both countries have thrived economically. However, initially in Japan and in South Korea the population was viewed as their only significant resource. More specifically, the brains resident in that population, as with all human brains, were known to be very powerful. All they needed was sufficient education to become a major resource for doing all the things those humans do well, such as innovate and organize. This, by the way, is an illustration of what I meant by an economy based on understanding rather than power in an earlier column.

Here, however, because this reliance on human intelligence had to function within a capitalist system, the educational process was highly competitive and resulted in significant numbers of student suicides.

Nonetheless, these countries have demonstrated that it is possible to develop viable economies when the only significant resource is human intelligence. The fact that this resource is widely distributed on our planet provides the basis for mitigating the problems created by maldistributed natural resources. In brief, human intelligence provides one of the essentials for a viable world economy--equitable resources.

The other essential requirement, in my judgment is that we must move the basis for exercising that economy from competition to cooperation. An economy in which people contribute to achieving societal goals and through that personal satisfaction will, for example, devote sufficient resources to insure that everyone can get as good an education as he/she can master instead of competing to the point of suicide to win acceptance to a university. Culturally we must pass from being focused on winning to being focused on creating a better society and the development of human potential. This may sound like it is expecting too much of humanity, but as our options continue to diminish we may be forced to focus on our better selves instead of surrendering to our lesser selves as we have done for so long.

Bob Newhard

Here We Go Again

In an interview with Al Jazeera Jin Liiqn, the supervising chairman of China Investment Corporation, China's sovereign wealth fund, was asked whether China intended to invest in the European Union's new bailout fund. He did not think so unless Europe's labor laws, which provide for shorter work weeks and longer vacations than found elsewhere, were made more demanding of the workers. He accused European workers of being given to "sloth and indolence."

This from a high official of a government that allows its corporations to work people so hard they commit suicide as in the company that produces Apple's iPad; allows deceptive recruitment of young, poor, rural women to work in immense factories working long hours cheek by jowl as they sew clothing and assemble electronic parts only to then be housed in controlled corporate dormitories when off work; that is throwing peasants off their land in Africa as they plant massive, GM laden monoculture crops to feed its population. In China we are witnessing the worst aspects of capitalism being played out once again, but with all the "efficiency" trappings of the 21dt century. We have been here many times before. The initial Industrial Revolution in England forced peasants off their land in order to graze sheep and provide wool for the new machines of textile factories. The resultant poverty, slums, and other social dysfunctions are powerfully depicted in the engravings of William Hogarth and the novels of Charles Dickens. In the United States it resulted in the 1911 New York City Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146, mostly teenage immigrant girls, died because of locked doors and grossly inadequate fire escapes. Many chose to leap to their death on the concrete 9 stories down rather than burn to death. Some apparently 'froze', their skeletons still bent over their sewing machines. Would that the greed-driven connections between Goldman Sachs' Commodity Index and its speculative increases in the price of grain-based food, causing death by starvation, could be so explicitly drawn. Now, after three hundred years of this repeated barbarity, we have China, with the world's largest population going hell-bent down the same road focused on becoming the world's next dominant economy, not on the welfare of its people. Reading Arundhati Roy, India is little better and it is expected to exceed China's population soon. The enormous slums of Mumbai India, substantially created by the same process of driving rural farmers off their small land holdings, abut the skyscraping condos of the rich. All of this vicious imposition on a poor and desperate humanity is, of course, called progress.

In contrast, the object of this Chinese economic disdain, Europe, is the only area on this planet where a sustained effort has been made to insure that capitalism's capacity to produce goods and services is harnessed to human welfare. After World War II, amid its massive destruction, Europe was so focused on making its society and its economy function for human benefit that the British, within three months of the end of the European phase of that war, rejected their charismatic war-time leader, Churchill, and elected Clement Attlee's Labour Party. They, as Wikipedia notes, presided "over a policy of nationalizing major industries and utilities including the Bank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, telephones and inland transport including railways, road haulage and canals. It developed and implemented the "cradle to grave" Welfare State conceived by the economist William Beveridge. To this day the party considers the 1948 creation of Britain's publicly funded National Health Service under health minister Aneurin Bevan its proudest achievement.^[68] Attlee's government also began the process of dismantling the British Empire." That, I suggest, is reform, in contrast to the pusillanimous efforts made in this country.

Recently Al Jazeera presented a video report on China's expanding military might. It showed Chinese military jets flying in formation, not unlike the Blue Angels (What a name for a killing instrument!) of the United States. Chinese civilians, men, women, and children were ecstatic at the display of military might. More often than not, achievement of economic prominence has led to military prominence and then military dominance. The political mechanism for this process is called "national interest." As every "great power" has done, China can be expected to define its national interest in ever widening spheres of influence. America's national interest requires 737 military facilities around the world, often at the host country's reluctant acceptance. The enormous Okinawa military base, occupying a large amount of prime farm land, is a constant source of resentment by the Okinawans. This sequence of economic power being converted into military power and the constant threat of war it engenders is very well know, yet our species has yet to be the fundamental concern of humanity and we repeats this sequence again and again with an ever increasing power of destruction. Indeed, as of this writing it has just been announced that the United States will establish a new Marine base in Darwin, Australia said to be directed at containing China. As Denis Kucinich cried out during the 2008 presidential campaign, "Wake up America! Wake up!," so we need a clarion call to humanity to wake up to the deceptions it practices on itself.

Now let us consider some of the consequences for this planet and humanity as the world's two most populous countries, China and India, rush to produce and consume at the ever increasing rates that human technology can produce.

Not long ago Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute published a small book titled "Who Will Feed China?" to draw attention to the impending global food shortage. The answer is, of course, we all will, but the burden, given the price structure that will govern food distribution and availability, will be the poor of this earth. As noted above, Goldman Sachs is already playing its role in this impending disaster as well as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the agricultural corporate conglomerate converting corn from food to fuel. According to the United Nations, there is already famine in parts of drought stricken Somalia. Delivery of sustaining food is compromised by warring faction, a phenomenon we may expect to accompany food shortages elsewhere. This, again, is a scenario that most of humanity will not take seriously.

Additionally, as wealth and its concentration increases in these two countries, food tastes will move to meat and the vast waste accompanying the consumption of animals will make itself felt, especially in the consumption of water, already in short supply. Add to all this the increasing trend toward agricultural monoculture and the patent control of seed and you have the makings for further sources of conflict. Finally, add to this the still increasing world population and you have the basis for massive conflict, not just over national sovereignty, but over the basics of human life, i.e. food and water, and those conflicts will taking place in the context of weaponry that can destroy civilization if not our species.

In this context the United States, China, Russia, etc. are planning their military strategies in terms of winning any confrontation or, at least, reaching some level of fear-driven mutual detente, however fragile.

Much of this scenario is known with a probability verging on certainty, yet the powers that be do not for a moment consider a policy and practice of cooperation in dealing with the massive problems we humans have created. We will waste enormous portions of what the planet has left fighting for ever-diminishing resources. This is childish schoolyard behavior! Every institution that either practices or promotes practices inimical to the continued survival of our species should be called vigorously to account, whether religious groups against abortion and birth control, the over consuming wealthy of the planet, financiers and their spurious economies of investing money in money and not for human needs, advertisers aiming to induce people to consume the unnecessary, and any number of other destructive practices.

In all of this we are not talking about niceties, but about necessities.

All of this mad rush down the road of unfettered capitalism and the greed, waste and conflict it entails must be stopped. It is clear that competition is, as this list of consequences notes above, a wasteful means to get things done. It also distorts or misses its objectives because it tends to focus on the competitor, not the problem. Cooperation takes far less of human effort and planetary resources to get better things done than does competition. Cooperation to deal with what we have done globally requires that we see with clear and distraction-resistant perception our common human destiny and, if we survive, our common human ability to understand ourselves and our potential for understanding the universe we inhabit. To constantly remind ourselves of our common destiny we need to use this planet as the basic frame of reference in dealing with all that would divide us. This is our common home. This is what we should pledge allegiance to. This is the only frame of reference that can address the massive problems we have created for ourselves. In 1940 Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate running against FDR, articulated his vision of one world so effectively the after the election Roosevelt asked him to become a roving ambassador for Roosevelt's efforts to persuade the nations that would be left exhausted by that conflict, that creation of a world organization would be imperative. Without commenting on what Republicans from Ronald Reagan to G. W. Bush have done to that party since, we need to reinstall Roosevelt's and Willke's vision and articulate the necessities that then and now make it imperative that we change our human mindset from nation, religion, or any other subset of human thought and attachment, to articulating our commonality in fact and in destiny.

Bob Newhard

Power and its Alternative

To my mind, one of the great cultural cleavages in humankind is that between power and understanding. Basically, power seeks to change things, at root, by brute force. Understanding, in and of itself, seeks to perceive the way things are, and hence sees the exercise of power, per se, as a threat by the very fact that it disrupts what needs to be understood. Power, per se, takes no notice of understanding whatsoever. Both of these proclivities are essential to human survival and, as is so frequently the case with human values, can be fundamentally at odds with each other.

I suspect power is earlier in the course of human evolution than understanding. As a species, humans were as much prey as predator, if not more so. Thus, living in constant fear, they were both impressed with the power of the animals that preyed on them and, perhaps, longed for the power they witnessed. It is instructive that the animals that received so much honor in human religions were the powerful ones, especially the lion, in India the elephant, and in Mayan culture the leopard. It is not surprising that power being so long and deeply ingrained in human nature should be more suasive in human affairs than understanding. In daily discourse we often hear people say what do I have to do?; not what do I have to know when confronted with a problem.

Understanding, being of more recent evolutionary development, is less firmly ingrained in our nature. It is, however, what finally allowed humans to redress their power imbalance with their predators. Using the two together the human species became the dominant species, for good and bad.

One of the continuing imbalances in our human and social affairs is that between these two influences. We so easily take the fruits of our understanding and wantonly place them at the service of our power proclivities. Through understanding, our brains continually create new technologies, new ways of dong things, which we, almost gleefully, pursue to their, often bitter ends. We created extremely useful computers, cameras, sensors of all kinds and produced the Predator and Reaper drones used to hunt and kill human beings as if in a video game.

Of late, there has been a movement to adhere to a "precautionary principle" which would require an assessment of all technology for its potential impacts before it is released for use. Genetically modified grains are a case in point. On a much larger scale, notably weaponry, this way of thinking needs to be implemented and rooted deeply in the human response to the inventions of its brain. For example, malaria, until the 19^th century, was thought to be caused by bad air. With the discovery that it was transmitted by mosquitoes their breeding grounds were drained, netting used over beds at night, etc. People hailed the conquering of this disease that had been a primary source of childhood mortality, and made building the Panama Canal feasible. As a result many more humans survived to child bearing age and populations increased globally. This along with many other beneficial sanitary developments based on increased understanding greatly increased the human life span as well. Both contributed to increased population growth, which if not stopped, will destroy our species. We can ask, should we have required a reduction in birthrate as these consequences of disease mitigation took place? This is an old problem going back to Thomas Malthus who saw in the 19^th century that mankind could out grow the resources necessary for its survival and therefore must control its growth. Seeing no other way to control that growth, he assumed it was one of the functions of famine, disease and constant war. This is the kind of problem that has become critical for human survival, largely because of our technological capabilities. It is also, obviously, a fundamental human problem to be resolved by humans if they are to continue to survive. By obvious implication, if technology is the primary source of this kind of dilemma, then the science that is technology's birthplace must be taken into account.

Science, in and of itself, is the fundamental cultural expression of the human proclivity to understand. We often undertake scientific efforts that have no practical use and thus no potential for our power impulse: the astronomy of intergalactic space is a case in point. Along the way we may find some uses for the knowledge we thus acquire, but that is not the reason for the undertaking. The more narrow minded among us, especially those politicians seeking the vote of the uninformed, often decry the uselessness of such, often expensive, knowledge quests, e.g. NASA, as a waste of money. The word "use," so employed, is an expression of power.

An interesting feature of understanding and one that I suspect may become fundamental to human survival is that understanding is much less culturally restricted than power. If you notice, understanding can break the bonds of cultural parochialism that cause so much conflict and human destruction. Physics, chemistry and mathematics remain the same whether in America or China or Timbuktu. This bodes well for the basis of a global human society. We have the basis for a common understanding. We have a way to get beyond the cultural divisions that plague us. This implies that the current attempt to deal with the dysfunctions of cultural diversity, i.e. to celebrate diversity, is in the long run inadequate. While I understand the intentions behind this approach of cultural identity awareness, I think it is clear that mankind needs a human identity if it is to survive on a planet of increasingly known limitation.

With respect to science, a world of fact and evidence, generating a moral system, you may find the book "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, significant. I am finding it so.

A Case in Point:

The history of Japan and the United States over the last 50 years offers an instructive example of these two proclivities in action. During that period the United States spent its energies on power, specifically the power to dominate the world. Japan, a small nation with few natural resources, substantially by a major emphasis on education, developed an economy that was the second largest in the world, after that of the United Sates. I am aware of some of the usual arguments made for this glaring difference, e.g. Japan did it under the military protection of the United States and hence did not have to invest so immensely in armaments. Protect them from what, the fantasies that led to General MacArthur's deliberate provocation of China and its entry into the Korean conflict? In any event, all that says is that peace, per se, can be more productive than war. In matters of such large scale as mankind's future, all the caveats usually lodged against Japan's achievement still leave this difference between it and the United States highly instructive.

The Learning Society

The Learning Society is an ongoing effort by UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to base economic development on life-long education. Far too often, indeed I suspect in the majority of cases, nations have built their economies on conquest, i.e. power, as did the United States as it pushed indigenous people from one ocean to another. The hegemony-declaring Monroe Doctrine asserted our power over the western hemisphere. Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet, a flotilla of warships, around the globe to emphasize our power and our willingness to use it. I submit this whole posture crushed the potential for an understanding-based society that could have sprung from the passion to understand found in some of our nation's most prominent founders, e.g. Jefferson and Franklin, had we heeded Washington's advice against entangling foreign alliances.

The point of these kinds of large-scale and admittedly very complex examples is that our species cannot continue to exist if we rely on power as the driving mechanism of our future as we so thoroughly have in our past. We have developed the capacity to destroy ourselves and yet behave like children with a new toy at each technological advance in the exercise of power. We, as a species, have demonstrated the capacity to develop through understanding. Our problem has been that we then insist on wantonly turning that understanding into power. We must learn to be satisfied with understanding, tread lightly on this earth and each other and be far more careful about turning understanding into power.

The Precautionary Principle

By way of developing a method to inhibit our largely uncontrolled practice of turning understanding into power there is an effort to define and implement deterring practices known as the Precautionary Principle. There are various definitions of this principle due to the complexity of the many issues and the vested interests of various segments of the world's population. Basically the principle would prohibit the introduction of new technology and the accompanying processes unless it was proven to be safe with respect to mankind and the environment. A Google search will turn up a plethora of information, and complexity, for those who may be interested.

As The Learning Society initiative evidences, there are people and groups concerned to deal with the problems our species faces by the use of mankind's unique capacity to understand. We need to bring this need and this approach to general public awareness accompanied by the urgency it deserves. We must think our way out of our massive dilemmas lest we destroy ourselves in the emotional responses we customarily make.

Bob Newhard