Self-University

My Bias Is More Objective Than Your Bias

2012-02-03T08:55:00.000-08:00

Lately a plethora of research in psychology and neuroscience has suggested that when we argue about politics, we are claiming to be more objective than the person or persons we are arguing with. The result is that, most of the time, political argument serves no purpose except to drive home and reinforce the beliefs we already hold. In a recent essay in The Atlantic titled “I Was Wrong, and So Were You,” libertarian Daniel B. Klein writes about how he came to the conclusion through a survey that liberals are less informed about economics than libertarians and conservatives, only to discover an error in his approach that led him to print a retraction and to the inescapable conclusion that all parties are biased. Indeed they are.

You may have noticed that the comment sections in news magazines and blogs become endless tit-for-tat exchanges where one party cites an egregious error that the other group committed, followed by a similar example from the other side. These emotional polemic rejoinders can seem to go on forever, changing no one’s minds, but instead driving the convictions already held deeper and deeper as they up the ante of contempt. Far from being objective, they distract, nitpick, and obsess endlessly about meaningless details that resolve nothing.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman identifies two modes of thinking that highlight human irrationality. His theory offers a persuasive explanation as to why we fall victim to endless unproductive arguments. System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive, metaphoric, and relies on gut instinct driven by the unconscious, while System 2 is slow, concentrated, deliberate, reasoning, analytical, and effortful. My experience and observation suggest that most political discussion takes place at Level 1, which to me seems analogous to a metaphorical tar pit of simmering hot-button liquid.

Level 1 is instinctively bound up in our identity as individuals, encompassing the many groups we associate with, especially our political affiliation. And while this is true of all parties, I have asserted elsewhere that conservatism demonstrably has more to do with identity politics than liberalism does. Conservatism is ideologically less inclusive, as evidenced by the political positions taken in matters of social concern. Conservatives often are very clear about whom they consider to be the out-groups. Still, all political parties rely on identity politics to a degree, which makes objective political negotiation extremely difficult.

I, myself, am very much aware of the danger of stepping into the tar pit in response to criticism about something I’ve written. My hot buttons work very well. There are times when I react before I engage Level 2, and I’m prone to respond to a jab with an overhand right. This is where one needs an internal referee, a ten count, some pertinent knowledge, and thoughtful reflection to have any chance of achieving the objectivity of Level 2.

Now, having made the claim that most political dialog is disingenuous at best, it is still my conviction that political dialog is a necessary condition of democracy. Our founding documents are proof that Level 2 reasoning is politically possible. But, for political discussion to be productive, we have to set aside Level 1, or at least keep a lid on it, and we have to care more about resolution than who wins the argument. This is very slow going, as one assertion at a time has to be put forth and agreed on before continuing.

Kahneman offers numerous examples of how we are susceptible to illusions, and he cites studies that show how quick we are to jump to baseless conclusions, suggesting that if our Level 2 system is preoccupied, we can be convinced to believe almost anything. System 1, he says, was shaped by evolution to be hyperalert, to keep us safe from threat and free from harm. Indeed, I think that’s an inescapable conclusion, but it puts our primeval biology at odds with our contemporary environment. We are no longer hunter-gathers. We overreact with systems developed to keep us from annihilation when we are simply striving to negotiate political matters to our mutual benefit. Kahneman’s work suggests we are rigged for illusion, snap judgments, and irrational argument. But this shouldn’t surprise us if we have two independent operating systems for discerning reality that frequently conflict.

In The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, anthropologist Robert Trivers posits that the evolutionary purpose of self-deception is to allow us to better deceive others. In other words, we are not wired for democracy so much as for the Stone Age. Trivers says if we can deflect incoming information contrary to our views quickly enough, we can avoid retaining it in memory at all. Neuroscience supports this notion by showing that we counter contrary political information with a flood of emotion that acts as effectively as Star Trek deflector shields in keeping us from hearing the logic of opposition.

Is it any wonder that hot-button political dialog so often begets little more than expressions of contempt and anger? In my view, the only way to compensate for the ancient malware in our heads is to use the learning software that resides there, that is, if we can employ a perpetual anti-viral debugging strategy. We have to be as alert to our own deceptive tendencies as we are to our political opponents. And worse, we have to persuade our opposition to do the same thing. This is especially hard to accomplish with individuals who consider themselves privy to pure, unadulterated reality and endowed with a front-row view into the essence of virtue, which they can see clearly but which they believe remains hidden from outsiders.

At every opportunity, I make the case that what we need as individuals is an existential education, which simply amounts to deep enough knowledge in the humanities and of other cultures and traditions to enable us, through thoughtful reflection, to deal with the omnipresent angst that comes with the human condition. We must learn to accept our own mortality without misdirecting our anxiety by finding surrogates to blame for our fears, anger, and frustration. This degree of understanding would give us a chance to confer at Level 2 and meet other people in what Martin Buber referred to as an I-Thou relationship instead of the contemptuous I-It relation which is so common today.

I am an unabashed liberal, admittedly partisan, and I make no apologies for it. But if I didn’t believe myself capable of accepting the better argument on its grounds alone, and not on who is presenting it, I would bow out of political dialog altogether. When I hear conservatives declare what liberals want in life, I know without question that they are not speaking for me, and I grant conservatives the same benefit of knowing what they want politically without it being declared from a liberal perspective.

What seems clear to me is that there is much more common ground in America’s center than our media let on. Commercial media thrive on dissension, so their pursuit of perpetual conflict is easy to understand, even if it is not always forgivable. Moreover, media entertainment that is coarse and steeped in derision and disrespect is popular and cheap to produce. The realty television shows that depend upon public humiliation to draw an audience are, in my view, little more than modern day examples of barbarism.

I believe most liberals, conservatives, and libertarians want pretty much the same things in life; we just disagree on how to go about getting them, and our volatile emotions are triggered by different symbols of value that serve to blot out competing views. The way forward is to persuade enough people to strive for objectivity, based on what we’ve learned about human behavior in recent years, instead of tuning out that which they don’t want to hear. If more people cared more about solutions to problems than who was offering them, the world could, would, and should be a better place.

The Dalai Lama said recently that it is time to think beyond religion when it comes to spirituality and ethics. Surely the same can be said for getting beyond partisan politics, which should make this goal worthy of aspiring toward, even if we find contemptuous outbursts harder to give up than smoking or chocolate.

KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning in

Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees

Training Yourself: The 21st Century Credential

Self-University: The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

KINDLE Essays on Amazon:

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous

NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous

Websites

Autodidactic Press Website

September University.org Website

Blog Sites

Self-University Blog

September University Blog

What Do You Mean By Socialist?

2012-01-07T09:39:00.000-08:00

© Charles D. Hayes

Countless times over the years, I’ve asked people exactly what they mean when they call someone a socialist. Invariably there follows a long moment of silence that culminates in an unintelligible and inarticulate reply, demonstrating beyond a doubt that the person trying to answer the question had never given it much thought. They’d learned, as I did growing up, that you didn’t really need to know what socialism is, it was just bad—no, evil—all bound up with Communism, the Iron Curtain, and duck-and-cover drills under one’s schoolroom desk.

Dictionaries typically describe socialism as the means of production being owned collectively or controlled by the state. Capitalism is defined as a system in which the means of production are owned and controlled by individuals or corporations. Not exactly a clear divide of good and evil, as both imply advantage and disadvantage, depending on the type of organization, the desired outcome, and the character of the owners or managers. Taking this comparison further, one could conclude that these two competing systems can exist, and do in fact exist, more as a matter of degree than by absolute differences.

The U.S. Postal Service and the Social Security Administration are overt examples of socialistic organizations, and so are the Armed Forces. The Post Office aims to earn its keep, even though its universal delivery service makes profitability unlikely. Social Security has capitalistic aspects in that the amount paid in affects the payout. Military organizations can be bureaucratically dysfunctional, but they seldom get the bad rap attributed to the Post Office; they are more frequently referred to in a heroic sense. Yet, with only a fraction of what we spend on the military, a subsidy for the Post Office could radically promote commerce by making the shipment of small goods much more affordable. Instead, the Post Office has to cut back. As a further illustration, we’ve seen how adept the Wall Street financial sector can be at capitalizing profits and socializing losses.

One of the greatest fears frequently expressed about socialism and government control is the creeping spread of bureaucracy. My experience suggests this is a legitimate concern because of the restraints we apply to government organizations. It is often the case that government agencies are given little room for exercising commonsense judgment when circumstances require exceptions beyond their charter. Bureaucracy in government is partly due to operational restrictions resulting from compromises negotiated between political parties with sharp ideological differences, but most large private organizations suffer bureaucracy as well.

I have worked for three major oil companies, a pipeline consortium, and a big city police department, and I’ve served as a U.S Marine. In all of these workplaces, I experienced bureaucracy primarily from inattention to details. Look around your own workplace and you will find plenty of things that people do, not because they are productive, but simply because that is how they have gotten into a habit of doing them. Bureaucracy is a virus-like entity that will fill any organizational vacuum where accountability is absent. To keep it from taking hold requires constant housekeeping. If you run up against a brain-dead form of bureaucracy in government, relief can sometimes be found through contacting a legislative office, but if the problem is with a private company, say an insurance company, you will likely need a lawyer and deep pockets.

Another fear often expressed is that socialistic enterprises result in a loss of incentive. Again, I suspect there is some truth to this notion, but nowhere near as much as is commonly thought. For example, one of the biggest fallacies of contemporary economics, and right-wing propaganda in particular, is that a progressive income tax is counterproductive because it dampens incentive. This simply is not true, and yet it is repeated as gospel truth ad nauseam. Some of the greatest periods of growth in America have occurred during times with extraordinarily high taxes. By comparison, taxes today are historically low, and we are in a deep recession.

What all of this boils down to politically is public versus private and the assumption that one is good beyond reproach and the other is evil beyond redemption. The virtue of private enterprise has been championed for so long and so loud in America that we have, in effect, drowned out common sense when it comes to attending to matters of the common good requiring a communal effort. Psychologically, public versus private amounts to us versus them, because we readily exclude those who do not belong to our respective identity groups as deserving of anything we might be forced to share.

The word socialism can stop arguments dead in their tracks without further discussion. This nonsensical behavior is the primary reason our middle class is in danger of disappearing, not simply because of a global economic crisis, but because we are too afraid to act as if what we have and hold in common is more important than greed.

There are numerous examples of democracies that are more socialistic than we are, with measurable indices of quality of life far better than ours, and yet we do little to make improvements in our lives if doing so requires a collective effort. Instead, we make vociferous claims about our being the greatest country on earth. We talk the talk, we just don’t walk it. A middle-class society is a purposeful effort. How can we be the greatest country on earth when we are way down the list on quality of healthcare, even as we spend more money on healthcare per capita than anyone else?

At every opportunity, champions of everything private over everything public hype freedom as the ultimate benefit of their system. Indeed it is true that many people earning Wal-Mart wages are free to quit and go to work at Target or McDonald’s. Alternatively, of course, they could start their own Google or Microsoft. It’s true they are free to do this, just as it’s true that rich people can sleep under a bridge if they want to. Now, if this line of reasoning seems flippant, try telling that to the millions of people desperately looking for work today, many with advanced college degrees.

Socialism and all things socialistic have been touted as the epitome of evil for as long as I can remember. Now nearing 70, I found it interesting and insightful to read Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage, and to learn that during the Second World War, before the Cold War fervor began in earnest about the evils of everything social, people like Hessel were fighting the same battle that continues today to ensure the economic rights of people over privatized greed.

Hessel is 93. He was a member of the French Resistance, was captured by the Germans, and sent to a Buchenwald concentration camp. While waiting to be executed, he managed to exchange identification with a prisoner who had died in the camp. He escaped and after the war became a diplomat. When he says that today we need to fight more than ever for the rights of the common man and that we should strive not be known as a nation wary of immigrants, I believe he knows what he is talking about.

Hessel calls our attention to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. I find it deeply ironic that the fourth has been used so effectively to keep the populace confused about the third.

Go back further to 1910, and here is Theodore Roosevelt making a speech in Kansas, quoting Abraham Lincoln from yet another half-century before: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.” Roosevelt said that if he had made this claim instead of Lincoln, he would be denounced as a Communist. As you read this, keep in mind that Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, as was Lincoln.

So we’ve been fighting this battle for more than 150 years. Look where we are today: Wall Street capital is off the charts in superiority to labor. Fox Business Network recently made the claim that the Muppets are Communists; Karl Rove’s group is trying to smear senate candidate Elizabeth Warren as Wall Street’s best Marxist friend; and President Obama can’t even get his nominee approved to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because there is obviously a group benefit implied by the agency. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says that the agency itself is like “something out of the Stalinist Era.”

When will this nonsense end? What happened to the U.S. economy due to deregulation is more like something out of the Stalinist Era. What will it take to get over the hysteria of the frightened rich and their vanguard of protective legislators and lobbyists, so that we can gain some semblance of equity for labor?

What will it take to get the working people who continuously fall for right-wing propaganda and vote Republican to wake up to the reality that they are being made fools of by people who do not even respect them?

Ask yourself this question: What would be the result today and tomorrow if the private company you work for switched to government control, or the reverse, if you work for the government? No doubt, changes would occur in either direction, but I think they would be measurable in matters of economic degree and not in terms of good and evil. Would you act differently at work? Would your work ethic change? Do you think your coworkers would behave differently?

When I picture the oil companies I have worked for in the past as being owned by the government, I can imagine some significant changes and some clear benefits. I believe that the dedicated employees I’ve worked with over the years would continue taking pride in their work and that the same work ethic that guides their behavior today would prevail. Politically, however, we might be able to keep the companies from being looted from the top with executive bonuses in the stratosphere that amount to quid pro quo treatment between the executives and their board of directors.

Should the country need more oil in this scenario, the government could be called upon to drill on leases that it owns but has let sit idle, waiting for the price of oil to go up. Sure, profit is important, but is it really more important than national security? Is profit more important than avoiding drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, where the risk outweighs the public benefit? More important than assisting in a global effort to wean the world of its dependency on fossil fuels? I suggest these possibilities not to recommend that we nationalize the oil industry, but rather that we apply reason to these matters and stop the hysteria over things that require a group effort.

Cold War paranoia conditioned millions of people to recoil in trepidation at the mere mention of a word: In America the word is socialism, in Russia it is capitalism. The stigma in both countries for a large segment of the population is such that these words are still radioactive, and it keeps commonsense solutions to major problems off the table. In America the fallout from this mania has resulted in a hatred for government that borders on cultural insanity.

There is a conservative mantra that says the government doesn’t produce anything, but if they owned an oil company, would that still be true? I don’t think so, and if you pay close attention, you may notice that the majority of people who shout the loudest about the government not producing anything of value get their paychecks from Uncle Sam.

I have always thought of myself as a capitalist and still do, but, in my view, we have enabled an irrational fear of socialism, leveraged by the Cold War, to traumatize average citizens into the position that the only way to keep themselves free is to allow rich people to hold all of the money. It used to make sense in a fuzzy sort of way, but it doesn’t any more. Like Stéphane Hessel says, it’s “time for outrage.”

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An Ayn Rand Train Wreck

2011-12-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

© Charles D. Hayes

Imagine a 500-car train with radioactive cargo jumping the track at a high overpass near a nerve center switch-station, traveling through the air over a treacherous swamp and a commercial office complex, then landing at the edge of a cliff with the lead locomotive and a few cars dangling over the edge. The runaway train, the second worst train wreck of the century, occurred because lobbyists got the restrictions removed from speed limits. The damage is so severe and the financial liability so great that thousands of stockholders lose their fortunes, thousands more individuals lose their jobs, and the staggering debt incurred for the cleanup threatens the very survival of the nation’s transportation system.

You step up to be the overseeing conductor charged with cleaning up, getting the useable cars back on track, and repairing the damage. There are big obstacles in your way, however; you have to fight tooth and nail with the private landowners just to get your equipment onto the private property between the cliff and the tracks. And at the behest and frantic urging of the stockholders and government officials you arrange a loan of billions of dollars to keep the railroad company afloat.

The lawyers and judges who oppose you are in the pocket of the landowners, as are the politicians. It takes years, but gradually you succeed a few feet at a time until not only do you get the train cars off the cliff, but you get most of them near the track and you get a new lead locomotive into position. The public is still very worried, but some are beginning to think the railroad will recover and some of the former employees are being rehired.

You are getting close to success, in spite of the nearly insurmountable odds against you when the lawyers for the landowners, in collusion with your political opposition, serve you with court papers: You are being sued and blamed for the wreck. You weren’t the conductor in charge of the train when the accident occurred, but they say that doesn’t matter now. You asked for the job, you haven’t restored the system as fast as was expected, you spent too much, even though the railroad and your political opposition thwarted your efforts at every possible juncture. Now they say it’s time to admit that the whole damn thing is your fault. If you were John Galt, they would let it slide. But you’re not. Your name is Barack Obama.

Special Notice:

If you have a Kindle or Nook, see below. The piece titled “Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand” may be of interest to you.

KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:

KINDLE Essays on Amazon:

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September University Blog

Conservatism’s Growing Affection for Ignorance

2011-12-03T08:19:00.000-08:00

Conservatism’s association with ignorance is growing at an unprecedented pace. An affiliation between the two has been observed by philosophers for a couple of centuries, but nothing matches what we’re seeing today. With spokesmen like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Matt Drudge, Michelle Malkin, Gretchen Carlson, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Glenn Beck, how could it be otherwise?

Apart from these, however, the debt owed George W. Bush in this regard is enormous. During his presidency, Bush malapropisms reached a level so embarrassing that the media seemed to curtail any mention of them, simply because the only real conclusion one could reasonably reach is that this man was egregiously incompetent; calling attention to the fact portended doom. Of course, his ineptitude is now self-evident. It may take generations to repair the economic mess he left behind, not to mention what his disastrous foreign policy did to America’s reputation. But the anti-intellectual effort to resist political acumen continues.

Glenn Beck says that Rick Santorum could be “the next George Washington.” Who would have imagined George Washington as being obsessed with gay marriage or creationism? And people wonder why conservatism is linked with ignorance.

I watched an interview recently featuring Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Putting Sarah Palin and Edmund Burke in the same sentence is an eye-opener, but Robin argues that the essence of conservatism is that it is an ideological intellectual position. Intellectual indeed. There are conservative intellectuals to be sure, but the conservative base is viscerally anti-intellectual, which is why presidential candidate Herman Cain thought he could make points with his supporters by saying he didn’t want a president who is a reader.

Robin’s book would be better named The Reactionary Emotion. Conservatism is experienced viscerally by its base as individual identity, which is precisely why there are so many right-wing proponents who are anti-intellectual. For both political parties, identity is important, but it is demonstrably much more of an issue for conservatives by nature of their political posture. When interviews with Sarah Palin revealed that she lacked the knowledge necessary to qualify as a candidate for high political office, the conventional wisdom was that that she would go home, hit the books, and return to the public spotlight stronger than ever. Numerous influential conservatives advised her to do this very thing, and they expected that she would. Instead, she continued to demonstrate an egregious lack of knowledge about important political matters.

Many people, especially religious conservatives, experience truth metaphorically, as a product of association, making familiarity a rallying point and a condition of good, while simultaneously rendering one’s group impervious to criticism because of what psychologists call the “halo effect.” Sarah Palin could be the archetype or icon representing this kind of association, and I know this first-hand because I live in Wasilla, Alaska, as she does. Identity is drenched in emotion, and it can easily trump reason—especially if one’s group appears to be threatened or under assault—unless there is a concentrated effort to be objective beyond the bounds of one’s penchant for a passionate defense.

Palin and those who identify with her think they already know everything they need to know. It’s who they are that’s important. This is why facts contrary to their beliefs and arguments don’t matter to them. They are who they are, and this is what counts. Moreover, people who cannot confirm this from their own observations are simply too deeply immersed in their own identification with Palin to be objective. Think about this: If a group of people believe with all their heart that they are the only ones going to heaven, why would they care what anyone else, says, thinks, believes or does, unless it is something that gets in their way or does not earn their approval? Moreover, this kind of logic of association is pliable, adaptable, and easily transferable, in that it can also mean “we are the only true Americans.” From there, it becomes self-evident to the true believers that their lot in life is simply to fight for good against evil.

Intellectual conservatism is worthy of debate. There is great value to be found in conservative philosophy. It’s the shallow stance taken by those whose ideology is based solely on their identity that resorts to an ethos of we are good and others are evil, especially those who do not share the same religion or worldview. That’s the problem and the tragedy of contemporary conservatism. That’s why their position on so many issues is expressed as “it’s our way or the highway” or “we are bound for heaven and the rest of you are bound for hell.”

Ignorance leaves few options for resolution, and unfortunately most political discourse in America occurs among individuals whose knowledge is superficial. Such an approach is unsatisfactory because it is simply not possible to discuss any important subject without immersing oneself genealogically in its details and the latest research. Without enough knowledge to discuss an issue intelligently, all a person can do is to respond emotionally and more often than not with rejoinders that attack the other person’s character instead of addressing the issue at hand. Conservative talk radio is immensely popular, not because of the reasonable arguments they put forth. Conservative talk radio is all about identity; it’s us and them on steroids, raw emotion to the max, and it depends on contempt and discord for its very existence.

Countering the accusation that conservatives may be dumb or stupid, Corey Robin says that “nothing could be further from the truth.” Well, yes, Corey, it can. It can be light-years further. Glenn Beck considers Rick Santorum George Washington material, Ron Paul thinks he’s electable, Michele Bachmann thinks the founding fathers fought tirelessly to end slavery and that she is gaffe free, Rush Limbaugh thinks he is not a bigot, Ann Coulter thinks she’s a human being, Newt Gingrich thinks that he is not a lobbyist or a hypocrite, Rick Perry thinks he is prepared to be president, Rick Santorum thinks he is not a homophobe, Glenn Beck thinks he thinks. Jon Huntsman is too thoughtful to be considered one of them, so he isn’t.

Forest Gump was right when he said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Smart people who are fundamentally ignorant and self-deceptive to boot do stupid things, and they infuse so much emotion into politics that intelligent dialog is not likely to follow. So, the report from Fairleigh Dickenson University that viewers of Fox News know less than people who don’t watch any news at all should come as no surprise. If Gingrich winds up as the nominee for president in 2012, there is sure to be a lively conversation about who is and who isn’t an intellectual, starting with Newt himself, whose ideas range from brilliant to astonishingly absurd. If Romney is the nominee, we will need a weathervane to keep track of which way the wind blows.

We’re wise to keep in mind the first eight years of this century, when the middle class came under siege and inequality escalated exponentially. If we elect a Republican as president in 2012, we deserve the calamity that will follow. After all, “stupid is as stupid does.”

KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning in

Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees

Training Yourself: The 21st Century Credential

Self-University: The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

KINDLE Essays on Amazon:

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous

NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous

Websites

Autodidactic Press Website

September University.org Website

Blog Sites

Self-University Blog

September University Blog

Empty the Tea Pot

2011-11-20T21:20:00.000-08:00

Media pundits keep asking for clarity. What do the people want? What do the occupiers want? The progressive political agenda for 2012 has never been clearer: Empty the Tea Pot. Remove the Tea Party ideologues from office and those who cater to their whims. If they are not in your district or even your state, target some that you find the most infuriating and donate what you can to their opposition. Tea Partiers do not believe in democracy. They don’t practice it. Democracy is about compromise and solving problems, not rigid ideology. Democracy requires a willingness to embrace the better argument, regardless of its source.

Tea Party zealots have consistently demonstrated that they expect something for nothing. They want extremely low taxes in spite of the fact that our debt is spiraling out of control, our infrastructure is crumbling under out feet, and we require a sentinel level of nation security. They hate government, so let’s get them out of it. It’s the humane thing to do.

Tea Partiers obsess about the size of government, wanting to reduce its size across the board right up until the time they need government assistance and then they demand instant relief. The policies they support send jobs overseas, while they blame the unemployed for being jobless. They slash money for education and complain about ignorance. They want cheap food, but have little but contempt for the immigrants whose labor makes it possible. They support legislation to starve government services like the post office, and then use the agency’s inability to flourish as proof that their services are not feasible.

Disappointment on the part of progressive citizens because of President Obama’s inability to get equitable legislation enacted needs to be tempered with the stark reality of what is sure to happen if the Republicans regain the White House in 2012. We know their playbook agenda. They appeal to the aspiration of values and then demonstrate that they don’t have the ethical standards to back them up.

Right-wingers put foxes in the henhouse. They let the financial industry and major corporations write the legislation that governs their conduct. From 2001 to 2008, this behavior was writ large. The only plan we hear from the Republican candidates for president is to double-down on the ideas that have already brought us to the brink of economic collapse. Simply put, if we think things are bad now, imagine what will happen if their candidate wins in 2012. There are many roads to serfdom, and the Republican agenda currently on the horizon is an American autobahn, where Wal-Mart wages are dead ahead for America’s middle class and benefits will be roadkill.

The solution for progressives in 2012 is clear:

· Empty the Tea Pot.

· Retake the House of Representatives.

· Deliver a filibuster-proof majority to the Senate.

· Campaign reform with publically financed elections.

· End the war in Afghanistan.

· Cut spending where it is needed.

· Raise taxes as needed.

· Repair America’s infrastructure.

· Protect the environment.

· Make universal healthcare a reality.

· Overturn Citizens United with legislation.

If any of these goals seems impossible, like unseating enough key Republican senators to achieve a filibuster-proof majority, just think about how dramatically the political climate has already changed from a year ago, with the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway, the recent vote in Ohio to overturn the anti-union legislation, or the efforts to recall the governor of Wisconsin.

The above list of objectives is nowhere near complete, but it’s a good start toward turning what remains of the New Deal into a Better Deal. In fact, that’s not a bad motto—2012: A Better Deal.

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Real Social Security: A Just Distribution of Wealth

2011-11-11T11:39:00.000-08:00

When I hear senate candidate Elizabeth Warren explain to an audience that no one makes a fortune in America all on their own, I can’t help but wonder why it has taken so long for this argument to surface. Warren praises those who build factories and employ workers, but she reminds entrepreneurs that they did so using an infrastructure paid for by taxpayers and that the workers they hire were also educated with taxpayer money, not to mention the legal system that makes business possible.

When a person purchases a turnkey business, say a fast-food franchise, they pay a percentage of gross income to the company headquarters that put the package together. A progressive income tax is fundamentally a franchise fee on public investment, and those whose success reaches the stratosphere of financial reward should take pride in paying it.

The complex moral concern at the core of this argument is precisely the reason I don’t want as president of the United States a person who claims primarily to be a businessman or businesswoman. The federal government is not a business; it’s much more important than a business on too many levels to list. That’s why America isn’t a large corporation, although I expect some people wish it were. I don’t want a president whose fundamental orientation toward life is the business model. Life beyond business is what makes living truly worthwhile, and our species has lived for thousands of years with many divergent forms of economic exchange. What we have today, for all practical purposes, is new and still being tested, and for a large percentage of our population, it is failing because it is rigged by the winners.

Business depends upon efficiency and the ability to operate at a profit. While these attributes are certainly important to government, they are very often beside the point of what government must accomplish. First off, many of the biological forces that impel and drive the actions of human beings are neither profitable nor efficient. Having children is one glaring example. Raising children is not efficient, and it’s certainly not profitable. War is not in any sense efficient, although for some, it is profitable. Health insurance is another matter which, in my view, leaves no room for profit when that profit depends upon denying citizens needed medical treatment. The government has many functions that are incompatible with profit. The infrastructure we all depend on daily as we go about our lives is a product of government effort, as is the general maintenance required to keep it functioning.

It’s not uncommon to hear our economic system compared to a religion in which free-market zealots qualify as prophets. And it’s not surprising that so many people assume there is something divinely inspired about capitalism. The very familiarity of what we grow up with can assume a religious or spiritual role. We internalize a sense of reverence for our economic system simply because our whole emotional selves are caught up in the experience, whether our familiarity is positive or negative, or whether we are rich or poor. You’ve only to listen to champions of laissez faire capitalism to appreciate their fervent belief in the system’s divine worth.

But the truth of the matter is that many aspects of our current economic system are arbitrary, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that some of them are corrupt. Champions of status quo economics use the word freedom lavishly as a defense for their actions, regardless of the financial or legal advantage they have lobbied into law for themselves. But are people really free who are engaged in seemingly meaningless jobs that someone must do but that don’t pay a living wage? Are they free if they can’t go elsewhere because they will lose their health insurance, even though it offers pitiful coverage to begin with?

In his book Land of Desire, William Leach pointed out that the consumer capitalism we take for granted may have been “among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created,” because it was put in place by elite commercial groups who were in the right position at the right time. People learn to think a system is fair simply because they have become used to it over a long period of time. The same phenomenon causes people to learn to judge themselves by standards they do not even agree with but apply habitually. For example, they may not think they belong to an inferior class or race, but unconsciously they may feel as though they do because they’ve internalized a cultural prejudice simply from long-term exposure. Our economic system may indeed be powerful, it but suffers egregious inequities.

The number of possible methods for conducting our economic business is staggering, and yet we tend to think our current system is the only practical way forward. Imagine following the advice of Silvo Gessel, a merchant of Germany and Argentina, who argued in 1890 that you could move far more goods by reversing the practice of interest payment on capital principle. Gessel suggested that instead of paying interest to those who held onto money, citizens should instead pay a circulation fee for hanging onto it, thus changing private gain to public profit. In her book Interest and Inflation Free Money, German author Margrit Kennedy suggests that modifications to a system like the one Gessel advocated could go much further in bringing about social justice than any kind of government aid program to help the poor. Methods like these can result in having currency circulate through an economy hundreds of times instead of 21 to 25 times, as is normally the case. Kennedy’s book provides the details necessary to put a program like this into action.

Or, imagine a system with two kinds of currency: one for needs and one for wants. The first to be available electronically; the latter would be common currency like what we have now, but the former would expire if not used in a specified amount of time. For another example, Fareed Zakaria suggested a value added tax a while back that would eliminate the federal income tax for most Americans while balancing the budget over time. My point is that an economic system can be rigged for fairness and equitable distribution just as easily as it can to give an advantage to greed.

Extremely low wages do not reflect the real worth of the job for which they are paid. Low wages are expressions of power, namely a lack of it. Having a substantial population of working poor people is a surefire way to avoid real democracy, because it ensures that the people with the most to gain are too busy just scraping by to protest. Moreover, they are very likely to lack the education they need to articulate their unfair disadvantage effectively. This is true, of course, up to a point: revolution.

Here is one quick way out of our current economic slide:

· Take the cap off of Social Security.

· Collect Social Security taxes on all earnings.

· Roll back the retirement age to 65.

Increase the amount of the monthly Social Security benefit so that each recipient receives an income near the top of today’s maximum Social Security payout, regardless of how much they paid in. People who have worked all of their lives at low wages deserve a dividend for having made life easier for those who have earned more and benefited from the low prices of the goods and services that the low wages made possible. This may seem inefficient. It may not be considered good business. But as a foundation for a just society it is much more important than the business of business, period. It would have the distinction of making America a great country. It would clear the way for thousands of younger workers to enter the workforce while making it possible for others to retire. It would, in effect, make freedom ring.

In a society where all of the rules of business are made by those who reap the greatest rewards from the results, there has to be a method of providing equity for everyone else or there can be no common good or common ground. Call it the redistribution of wealth if you wish, but I prefer a just distribution of wealth, which is precisely what it is. Without a method of establishing and maintaining a moral foundation of equity in a society rigged by the winners, an incessant emphasis on the notion of freedom is at best little more than fraudulent propaganda and at worst a seething contempt born of mortal insecurity and the existential angst that comes with the human condition.

Providing a liberal or existential education to the population at large is a reasonable and necessary remedy for this situation. It is the only hope we have of getting citizens to understand the complexity of human behavior and how easily we are turned against one another as a tool of business or when confronting any special-interest group with an agenda. On the one hand, we need to create jobs for full employment, and on the other hand, we would be much better off environmentally and socially if many of the jobs created were left undone or unperformed. It takes a great deal more than business savvy to create a viable democratic civilization.

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Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

2011-11-01T05:53:00.000-07:00

© Charles D. Hayes

“The common man is worthy of a better future, or else he is not worthy of his past.”

-- Jack London, 1905

Sometimes it seems that, for all practical purposes, the class war is over and indeed the rich have won. And then there are times when I’m hopeful that we can address the growing inequality in America with some of the aspirational ideals upon which this country was founded. Perhaps the first consideration here should be to look at what we mean by class.

More than two decades ago, in his book Class, cultural historian Paul Fussell declared that just to mention that he was writing a book on the subject of class was enough to cause people to abruptly exit his presence. In describing the way people define class he said, “At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do is almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style and behavior are indispensible criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.”

In my historical reading of the subject, money and education are so closely bound to the notion of class that it’s hard to separate their importance. Money is clearly out front in significance since, for most people who have money, a good education has been easily within reach. In light of today’s observance of class, things have not changed; net worth is still perilously important and education is even more so, in an existential sense, because it is an essential key element to one’s quality of life. Our democratic values demand a liberal education as the starting place for responsible citizenship.

Recently I’ve heard the term class warfare called a dead metaphor, a political weapon, a distraction, and a reality. Perhaps it’s all four and more things to boot. Wars start for all sorts of reasons. Oftentimes war was far from the minds of those whose actions gave rise to battle. Imagine a peacetime warplane on a training mission that accidently releases live bombs on a sleeping community. War was certainly not the intent, and war may not follow if those adversely affected accept an apology and reparations.

The results, however, are the same. The dead are still dead, and what was destroyed remains so. Results are interesting and relevant, but too often considered beside the point in such matters. I do not believe that the rich people in America set out to wage a war on the poor, but who could tell the difference in the results, if the current economic conditions were all we had to go by? The rich, in recent years, have made out like bandits—literally so—while the poor are demonstrably poorer and the divide between the two groups is growing exponentially. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision heralded the decisive shot a while back, rendering all future battles moot. The results of thousands of other political decisions, at the behest and on behalf of the rich by politicians and lobbyists have resulted metaphorically in a fiscal bombing on all of the lower economic echelons in America. Reparations in the form of a more progressive tax rate are in order, but we’ve lost the power to make it happen. Even if it does, there will be no apology.

As in any occupied state, however, there are those among us who will never give up the fight. We will continue to act as if we can regain lost ground. While doing so is not impossible, it seems nearly so. All you have to do to confirm this in your own mind is to imagine what it might take to overturn the Supreme Court decision that effectively gives corporations the right to buy elections—any election. Can the Occupy Wall Street movement change the political climate to a sufficient degree that our politicians will enact a legislative remedy for Citizens United? Only time will tell.

Now in my seventh decade, I haven’t been able to rid myself of the unrelenting impression that America as a land of opportunity is, for an ever-increasing percentage of our population, a losing proposition. I make this observation after having published a book that posits a hopeful future for our country. That future will depend upon the baby-boom generation’s awakening to their impending mortality in time to unselfishly turn the tide toward a more positive outcome and help the younger generations take the reins of authority.

Nothing in memory compares to the political and economic reality of today, as most all of the people who lived through the Great Depression are gone. Of course, there have always been strains of political animosity so scurrilous as to have erupted, years ago, in the caning of a member of Congress. But today’s ideological divide seems unique in its naiveté. Too many people expect something for nothing. Tea Partiers long for the 1950s as a kind of social nirvana, and yet, in their wanting to return to that era, they don’t seem to have a clue about the tax rates in those days. America has always embraced debt, but a half-century ago we were much better about paying our way.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Texas during the 1940 and ’50s. We were political conservatives, in conservative towns, in conservative states. In point of fact, we didn’t know anyone who did not fit this description, at least who was willing to admit otherwise. My grandfather, born in 1889, served in World War I and lived through the Great Depression. The hard times left a mark on him that stayed with him for life. He added to his savings, even when money was tight. He paid his bills on time and in person. He bought nothing on credit, even his homes and cars. He always paid cash. Since his death in 1981, I remember him as a staunch conservative, although he was nothing like the people we characterize as conservatives today, especially those active in politics.

I’ve always thought of my grandfather as the most honorable man I have ever known, and yet I consider myself a liberal with a capital L. My mind has not changed about my grandfather, even though it has changed dramatically about my politics. But then, the conservatism in his day was something altogether different than today. Back then, in my view, it was something to be admired. Political ideology be damned, he and those like him believed in doing the right things for the right reasons. A good idea was judged on its merits, not where it came from. He was fair-minded and beholden to no ideology for ideology’s sake. My grandfather was proud of his service in the war, but he never talked about it. He was a man of his word and despised dishonesty. He could add and subtract as fast as he talked. I recall more than one incident where he would read his grocery receipt aloud, adding as he went, only to discover it was incorrect. When he found an error, he would return to the store and either collect or pay the difference.

I’m telling you about my grandfather because he personified the best of what I remember about the 1950s and the Jurassic era of conservatism. Elsewhere I have written at length about the blinding conformity and racism of that period, and yet, as is true for most other people who grew up during those years, my childhood memories savor the good things. It’s only in hindsight as adults that we can appreciate the reality of the way things were and recognize the prevailing injustice most of us failed to comprehend, acknowledge, or fight to overturn.

Today, America’s infrastructure is crumbling. Our roads, dams, bridges, sewer systems, and national electric grid require trillions of dollars worth of investment and maintenance to sustain our way of life. This fact makes the current nonstop hypermania about lowering taxes the single most absurd and disingenuous political position ever held by a political party. America in the 1950s was a lot like my grandfather in his fiscal conservatism. The bare fact of history is that the American middle class came into being because of an aggressive federal government, intent upon making a massive investment in a robust future.

We developed an interstate highway system, built great dams and bridges, and brought electricity to rural America. Taxes in the upper brackets were high, very high by today’s standards, pushing 90 percent or more. A progressive income tax ensured investment in the future as a way to shelter one’s wealth. But between the lower and higher brackets was a considerable amount of room for affluence. The earnings from ordinary jobs were enough to allow the purchase of a home and the middle-class lifestyle that we associate with it. Not so today. The American middle class is crumbling along with our infrastructure primarily because we don’t understand the nature of its origin and what’s necessary to sustain it.

Capitalism came very close to failure during the Great Depression, and it seems to come perilously close every time the magical virtue of free markets is taken as gospel. There is no such thing as a free market—never has been and never will be. There are always rules and hidden costs that favor some groups over others, and that’s why the government has to be strong enough and politically unbiased enough to even the playing field. Those who want to get the government completely out of the way ought to consider moving to Somalia. Government is by design imperfect, but if it cannot be depended on to do what it must do for the sake of all of its citizens, then democracy itself is untenable.

What bothers me most about the Tea Party angst is the shallowness of their thinking. Coupling a wish for obscenely low taxes with a smoldering hatred for government is absurdity on steroids. In reality, government is the very thing that makes their lives possible, and extremely low taxes are not possible in a nation that needs high level maintenance and a sentinel level of security. I remember personally what it’s like to engage in such shallow thinking. I remember mistaking first impressions for reality. I remember taking textbook history as fact and political slogans as the truth. I recall being so overwhelmed by appeals to my identity that I didn’t see the bait-and-switch tactics of the politicians who pretended to aspire to my particular values while they simultaneously reworked the tax code in ways that made it impossible to sustain the middle class.

If I have learned anything in my years of intensive self-education, it is that things are not as simple as they appear. Look into any subject in detail and you will find your first impression at odds with what is actually the case. And yet, genealogically, Tea Party politics is based upon a clichéd attack on all things unfamiliar. When you delve deeply into what’s most troubling to the folks who vehemently hate the government, what you discover is plain old existential angst, the kind that comes with an inability to deal with too much diversity and so much change that the whole world seems out of control.

As a gun owner, I can see some truth in the notion that these folks cling to their guns and religion in self-defense. Guns represent part of their identity and so does their religion. They feel threatened by too much otherness, period. This plays itself out with an obsessive contempt for immigrants, hostility toward gays and lesbians, a disregard for people who have been out of work for long periods of time (unless it applies to them personally),and outright expressions of hatred for government programs that promise inclusiveness beyond their particular group identity.

The emotional fallout from the Cold War still renders millions of people fearful of anything that sounds remotely socialistic because they were sensitized to freak out simply upon hearing the word socialism. They are viscerally afraid of socialism, even though many can’t define it. Worse, they can’t seem to grasp the deeply ironic fact that the super-rich have already achieved a genuine form of socialism where their profits are capitalized and their losses are socialized. No matter what happens, they win and we lose.

Tea Party angst doesn’t stop here; these people are hyperalert for any and all reminders of their own mortality, the subconscious concern that lies at the core of their existential discontent. They are mortal, and the fact that they are is perceived as someone else’s fault, psychologically entangled as it is with all things foreign and other uncertainties. The fact that much of this anxiety occurs at an unconscious level that few people are savvy enough to understand doesn’t make it any easier to forgive. We’ve known this about ourselves for decades, but our education system fails to address this particular human weakness. We have Star-Trek technology, but when it comes to human relations, we are a century behind in making practical use of the knowledge we have gained about our behavior.

Now, it’s easy to make a case that there are merits to some of the Tea Party’s arguments. Yes, the federal government is wasteful and at times very inefficient. But the inefficiency is built in by an inborn contempt for otherness that limits tolerance toward individual initiative when it comes to public policy decisions. It is a universal human trait to abhor free riders, and we create our bureaucracies with rigid rules to avoid the appearance of catering to free riders. As a result, we tend to paralyze the ability of bureaucracies to function with enough autonomy to make reasonable decisions or even meet their simple objectives. In other words, bureaucracies are bureaucratic by design. If Jack Nicholson were describing bureaucracies with the zeal he demonstrated in A Few Good Men, I can imagine him saying, “We want them that way. We need them that way.”

Notorious acts by government bureaucrats frequently make news headlines because secrets are hard to keep in a public agency. Large companies suffer bureaucracy too, but their dreadful actions to come to light less easily because they are privately owned and they can fire employees at will. One of the biggest industrial fiascos in our history surrounds the egregious failure of the work by private companies in rebuilding war-torn Iraq, and yet this continuing farce gets scant media attention. Bureaucracy is virus-like: it can flourish anywhere, public or private, when objectivity is lost and accountability is lacking. It will always be the case that the federal government needs to reduce spending in some areas and increase it in others.

Government and private organizations both respond to accountability. Both are dysfunctional without it. Both are helpless without human beings. We the people are the government. We the people are also private company employees. We can’t pay attention to one of these entities and totally ignore the other. It was never intended to work that way, and it doesn’t.

All one has to do is look at the other advanced countries in the world to be awed by the radical notion that we are the only developed country on the planet that has generated such an aggressive and ongoing intense hatred for its own government. America has fallen behind so many other nations in quality of life issues and in such a range of other measures that we should find the reality of our standing with other developed nations shocking. We spend more on healthcare than any other country, and yet we are 37^th on the list for the quality of our healthcare and 36^th for life expectancy. We work longer hours than Europeans and enjoy fewer days off. We fall far below many other developed nations in quality of life standards, but when it comes to rising inequality we are way out front and picking up speed.

Homogeneity is a major criterion that most of the nations ranking above us in quality of life have in common. We pay a price for being a nation of immigrants. Our divisiveness has become so acute that we are no longer a melting pot, so to speak. On the contrary, our ethnocentric lumps are growing, but their size pales in comparison to the escalating strains of run-amok ideology now proliferating on the Internet. The price we pay for extreme diversity is a surplus of contempt for otherness. What’s more, the only way to overcome this condition is through education—a liberal or existential education, as I characterize it in September University.

We human beings are predisposed to act tribally: we have enormous strength for coming together as a group based upon similarity. If not tempered with a strong penchant for reason, however, we can’t do democracy, and thus our strength becomes a weakness. We have to learn enough about the peculiarities of the human condition to understand the precarious, conflicting nature of human relations and not become prisoners to our worst instincts. A liberal education can serve to dissipate existential anxiety because it offers intellectual and emotional thinking alternatives to the simpleminded blame game so often played by people whose feelings trump their capacity for reason. We must not let ourselves be manipulated by politicians who are masters of simple techniques that can cause us to charge emotionally ahead on cue as if they were holding a red cape and we were brainless bulls.

Instead of striving to be a country that produces informed citizens who live up to our democratic ideals and who know enough to look beyond superficial appearances, we allow ourselves to blindly educate toward the goal of employment. We give the highest priority to the intellectual pliability necessary to conform in authoritative organizations. At the same time we pay an immense price in existential anxiety because modern life is so complicated that it takes an extraordinary level of understanding of the human condition merely to cope without the felt need to find someone to blame for our troubles. We are creatures intelligent enough to realize that we are mortal and that there is virtually nothing we can do about it. Unless we’re prepared with a deep understanding of our nature, we lash out at phantoms and scapegoats to distract us from our anxiety. But because the results are so fleeting, the angst escalates in a vicious and repetitious cycle.

Uneducated people seldom figure this out on their own without a rigorous effort to learn what it means to have had the extraordinary opportunity to live as a human being in a world thrown together by happenstance. It’s comforting to learn from Steven Pinker’s insightful tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that there is a historical trajectory underway that suggests we are becoming a more moral and a less violent species, that we are indeed becoming more and more civilized. Progress, however, is so slow that it’s barely noticeable, except in historical perspective, and resistance is palpable.

In his book, The Social Animal, New York Times columnist David Brooks made a valiant effort to demonstrate the complex emotions that make us such imperfect specimens of reason. Critics of all political persuasions attacked him with vehemence because his depiction was biased and, indeed, imperfect—as if some books aren’t. Reason and emotion are messy subjects. They are no more separate entities than the notion of mind and body. What goes on in our heads determines who we are and what kind of a society we live in. That we can’t seem to figure this out is baffling.

Democracy is an all-out intellectual enterprise and cannot be sustained without what most learned individuals would characterize as an elite education. America was founded by deep thinkers, and it is a fallacy beyond credulity to believe it can be maintained by an uninformed citizenry. Large groups of people carrying signs with misspelled slogans and inconsistent metaphors would be laughable were it not so pathetic and so inexcusable in light of what we know about education. Existentially we are an ignorant nation, and in spite of our soaring technology, we don’t seem to be doing much to alleviate that ignorance. In too many instances we are technically savvy and socially inept with regard to human relations. We cannot text our way out of ignorance.

When I consider the sheer intellectual enthusiasm and thoughtful rigor in physicist Lisa Randall’s Knocking On Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, I have a hard time accepting the reality that millions of our fellow citizens not only do not believe in evolution, in point of fact, they still believe in magical thinking and base many of their opinions about matters of paramount importance upon the hearsay of people who lived when the earth was thought to be flat. Is it any wonder these people can be persuaded to turn against their own government and in the next breath celebrate the notion of “We the People” as the virtuous standard of a self-governed people?

The Tea Party brand of hate-the-government ethos that is so virulent today ratcheted up in earnest with Ronald Reagan, who decried government in public even as he expanded its size. And yet, Reagan was savvy enough to raise taxes when conditions warranted it, something that is now considered an all-out abomination to those who clearly expect something for nothing and who never hesitate to demand lower taxes, no matter what is at stake or how badly the country needs revenue.

We are trillions of dollars behind in paying for things we’ve already consumed and for an infrastructure that is already in deep disrepair from a lack of maintenance and upkeep. My grandfather would have wondered why we didn’t pay our way forward. He would have been incredulous at the prospect of having a tax cut with two unpaid wars underway, not to mention a Medicare drug program that amounts to a windfall for drug companies at taxpayer expense.

Early in 2010, Fareed Zakaria (a Jurassic conservative seemingly from my grandfather’s era) suggested a way out of America’s debt crisis, one that would eliminate the income tax for the vast majority of Americans. Zakaria proposed a value added tax between 18 and 25 percent similar to that of many Scandinavian countries—countries that are growing and expanding in an atmosphere pretty much free of pervasive government hatred as it stands in America. Zakaria argues that if we did this, we could balance the budget and pay for healthcare in the same fell swoop. But in today’s political climate, what—short of a revolution—would it take to do something so sensible? How do we get the people who have been quietly shifting the tax burden onto the middle and lower class and sending their factory jobs to underdeveloped nations to once again pay their fair share? Rioting in the streets comes to mind because in some places things are already getting violent and ugly. And if we stay on the current track with growing political animosity, a declining middle class, and rising inequality, the protests may get much worse. As this effort expands and leads to more aggressive incidents, the Occupy Wall Street movement may prove to be only the beginning of something much bigger.

Because it happened so slowly, few people seem to comprehend how we got here. Over four decades, rich and powerful people, through political donations, lobbyists, and a K-Street kind of influence, have rendered our political system incapable of collecting enough in taxes to pay our bills, not to mention spending billions on their pet projects. But the seemingly sheer genius of their efforts resides in the fact that so many people among the middle class, and even many of those who qualify as working poor, whose livelihoods suffer the most in this kind of economy, take up the mantle of taxes as evil on behalf of the rich. It would be an act of genius, were it not so easy to do among citizens without adequate knowledge about the fundamentals of human behavior, namely that even though we think of ourselves as being above and beyond tribal behavior, we are still bound by it psychologically. Far too many people who are without an existential education gravitate toward ethnocentrism with or without provocation. They are as easy to incite to act against their own interests as it is to excite children about going to Disneyland.

What worries me most is that, given all of the time and lobbying effort devoted to rigging the system in favor of great wealth, and given that the blow dealt us by the Citizens United decision leaves us so few options, without some traumatic event, average citizens may never again regain power over lobbied interests and corporate treasuries to further their own special interests. America is now a plutocracy, and the loopholes that have allowed some marginal semblance of democracy to exist have been quietly closing for decades through back-room deals sealed by law as politicians and lobbyists sell the rest of us out. Currently, the ideological bent of the United States Supreme Court makes this easy to accomplish.

Whenever I get very discouraged, I try to imagine what it must have been like to be an abolitionist in the mid-1800s, or a Suffragette a couple of decades before women were able to vote. Such thoughts renew my determination to act. I am encouraged by the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for military service, as it shows a clear decline in one malignant strain of bigotry. I’m also very much aware that there is still plenty of time for the emergence of the positive influences I wrote about in September University, as the baby-boom generation faces up to its impeding mortality. The growth of this aging demographic is barely underway and will continue to play itself out between now and 2029. Instead of a war of among generations, as some pundits project, the baby-boom generation has it within their power to inspire their children and grandchildren to pave the way for common ground.

Lest any of us fail to realize the importance of speaking up or be reluctant to take a risk, I would offer this bit of advice from Steve Jobs. At a Stanford University commencement speech in 2005 he said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” This would seem to apply doubly as one generation contemplates their legacy and the chance that theirs will be one of outright cowardice if they fail to act.

I urge every reader to take steps to help reinvigorate democracy in America. Do whatever you can in any way you can. Make your voice heard. But first do your homework. Learn to reflect from your opposition’s perspective, and find what’s valid in their point of view, because it’s seldom the case that any position is completely without merit. Don’t engage in arguments based upon hearsay, popular culture, and the likes of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. The Tea Party blames big government for the current economic malaise. The Occupy Wall Street movement blames big business. The truth is somewhere in between. Both political parties share the culpability, both are responsible. Putting a stop to the collusion of government and corporate America through special-interest lobbying should be something that the political left and right can find enough common ground to agree on. The public financing of political campaigns and free media provided by broadcast networks should interest all parties concerned about the well-being of the average citizen.

Moreover, we should begin to lobby media, as I argue in Existential Aspirations, to let them know that we don’t want to be referred to as consumers. We are citizens, and the only way we will achieve a just society is to accept the role and responsibility that comes with citizenship. Calling ourselves citizens will remind us of those responsibilities, and I believe the end result could be a dramatic increase in awareness on the part of Americans and a willingness to rise to the occasion.

We should try to match and surpass the kind of rigorous thinking that gave America the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, because it’s clear that many of the people whining the loudest about getting back to the latter haven’t read it, or, if they have, they didn’t understand it. Simply put: We can’t be proud and boastful of “We the People,” hate our government at the same time, and long prosper. Hating our government is tantamount to hating ourselves, and self-hatred is not only self-destructive, it’s a poor premise upon which to found and run a country.

American is the class we should all aspire to. By nature of our founding ideals, there is room for all categories of people, creeds, and beliefs. Our founders said as much in the documents they left behind. One can imagine their chagrin at having those documents touted for reasons they did not intend, by people who do not read them and feel no need to do so, but who presuppose they must contain support for their own kind’s well-being. Disabusing citizens of this notion should, in my view, be the first priority of education. We are Americans by class distinction when we buy into our ideals intellectually and emotionally. Remember, it’s not me the people or us the people, as in our group. It’s “We the People.”

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Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

2011-09-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

“Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.”

--Isaiah Berlin

Remember, when we were children, how important we thought it was that our games be played fairly? If memory serves me correctly, no one wanted to play at all unless fairness was assured. But as we grew to adulthood, many of us, like baby geese, were imprinted with the notion that the way things are is the natural state of the way they should be. In other words, we didn’t recognize social injustice in our midst; it was just reality.

In that frame of mind, one could observe uneducated people and, without blinking, hold their ignorance against them, even if there were unjust societal reasons for their lack of schooling. The same applied to poor people, for whom it seemed self-evident that they had made bad personal decisions. Racial inequality, therefore, appeared to be a natural evolution of poor decisions writ large. Moreover, many of our parents insisted on this being the case. And then, like a lightning bolt, the reality of racial injustice achieved coast-to-coast attention on television, featuring police dogs and fire hoses, and the time period now known as the civil rights era began. That was a half-century ago.

Fresh out of the Marines at the time, I was totally out of step with those who were concerned about civil rights. What many years of serious study have taught me, however, is that there is no greater objective for the trajectory of civilization than the perpetual pursuit of justice. No matter the subject, discipline, or cause, be it politics or economics, justice represents the ethical and moral north of human concerns. Simply put, justice is the ethical ground zero of history, and its whereabouts in any era is what makes history a worthy subject. Moreover, how we relate to the concept of justice sets the path of our lives and the wake of our legacy, be it good or ill. Sometimes it affects the world around us in ways that will ripple through time long after we are gone.

Baby boomers belong to the generation that awakened to the racial injustice they had grown up accepting as the natural way of things. Now they are facing their own mortality at a time when the demographics of economic inequality are once again becoming a front-burner issue of public concern. Today the baby-boom generation has within its grasp the ability to once again move the pendulum of justice closer to where it belongs for the good of the country. The question is whether or not they have the will.

For eons people have been trying to develop insight into how we come to think about what is just and what is not. To better understand how boomers can further their cause, let’s back up and get a better sense of our perceptual differences in approaching social problems.

A Fox or Hedgehog Point of View

Isaiah Berlin, 1909-1997, was one of America’s most celebrated scholars and philosophers. In 1953, he published The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. He did so to illustrate a telling difference in the way people, and writers in particular, view the world. It can best be described as two differing modes that all of us use to perceive the world in varying degrees. Berlin opens with this, “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’” Berlin conceded that scholars differ on the meaning of these words. Still, if we take his metaphor seriously but also cautiously, we might get a sense of the deepest divide in human perception. My hope is that if we can put this knowledge to use effectively, we can move ever closer to a more civilized and more democratic society.

Berlin writes, “For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance—and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.” Berlin tells us the former is the position of the hedgehog and the latter the fox, but he warns us against taking the idea too far because it will ever so quickly become absurd. Evidence of this can be found in some areas of academia where the subject has been pushed to such an extreme that it’s doubtful those arguing, regardless of their perspective or position on the matter, really and truly know what they’re talking about.

Berlin used this metaphor in part to account for the criticism of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. He said he first read the novel himself when he was too young and that the full impact of it came much later in life when it occurred to him that the work had lasting moral implications for humanity at large. When first published, War and Peace was lauded for its artistic style but criticized greatly for getting the Russian history of its time period wrong. Tolstoy himself thought that getting history right was an exercise in futility, and at times his writing seems to make fun of the effort. But to Berlin, modes of perception matter greatly here, and as an added complication he argues that Tolstoy was a fox who thought himself a hedgehog, or at least wanted to be one.

Now turn the question on yourself: Are you a hedgehog or a fox? Do you suppose your answer really matters? And do you imagine your answer will have anything to do with how you define justice? For the past few decades, the rage in academia has been such that most people prefer to think of themselves as foxes because of their romantic appeal and because foxes are said to know many things, which is, after all, a fundamental educational aspiration. Now, with the publication of Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin, all of that may change.

Dworkin is not all that concerned with Tolstoy’s work. Rather, he cares deeply about what he describes as the unity of value, the concept of justice that follows, and the realization of a just society in our lifetime. He cares about what you and I care about politically and, in particular, how we define the concept of justice and how we determine fairness. What is justice, who gets to define it, and why does our perceptual approach to the subject matter at all, especially in a metaphorical sense?

So as not to complicate the issue further, I’m going to simplify the critter dilemma, although some in academia will surely object. The difference between the hedgehog and the fox is as simple and as complex as having an affinity for a big-picture view of the world or for a detailed approach. Simpler still, think about the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy frequently used to explain the way people perceive the world, or reason as juxtaposed to emotion and the role intuition plays in discernment. Considering the hedgehog-versus-fox perception in this manner, with the subject of value hanging in the balance, the former would argue that the latter gets hung up on details and often misses the point of whatever it is the point should be.

The reason for such a fuss about perception is that these ways of thinking can matter greatly when it comes to defining justice and deciding whose word we take about what justice is. Do we let the foxes do it with many unrelated but technically correct arguments, or do the hedgehogs provide a single compelling vision? Or do we need a method, as I will assert, to achieve the best judgment using both modes of perception? In Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock uses charts, graphs, and a long, tedious narrative to make his case that foxes have better judgment than hedgehogs when it comes to analysis and making predictions. He may very well be on to something, except when it comes to recognizing justice and injustice at a gut level.

Whenever I consider an argument about the nature of justice, I’m reminded of the Texas appeals court judge, a few years ago, who refused to allow a DNA test in a death-row case because the law had been followed precisely and, in her view, the defendant had received a fair trial. She apparently found the letter of the law to be more important than the spirit of the law. She was technically correct, but morally bankrupt in my opinion. So, perhaps we should be wary of foxes not only in the henhouse but in the courthouse as well. To deny the possibility of justice in such a case is to deny that the truth is the truth, and that morality is moral, all the way down, as Dworkin argues. I find cases in which the law is satisfied and yet justice is still not served to be morally reprehensible, and this view would seem to be without a doubt that of a hedgehog.

Years ago political philosopher John Rawls laid out a prescription for a just society in A Theory of Justice. In his economic template for society, those who cut the pie would do so without knowing which piece they would get. It was and is an elegant theory. Unfortunately though, it remains nothing but a hypothesis because it has not been put to practical use.

In a similar elegant fashion, Ronald Dworkin presents an argument that confronts his likely opposition head-on with this assertion about aiming for equality of opportunity: “No government is legitimate unless it subscribes to two reigning principles. First, it must show equal concern for the fate of every person over whom it claims dominion. Second, it must respect fully the responsibility and right of each person to decide for himself how to make something valuable of his life.”

I suspect that arguing this principle will be more effective over the long term than that of metaphorical pie cutting, although, in my view, Rawls’ and Dworkin’s theories are superbly compatible. Both pay much-needed attention to the growing inequality in America. Rawls was for maximizing the minimum, in other words making the bottom economic rung in society livable and respectable for all who might find themselves living there for whatever reason. Dworkin’s two principles, if taken seriously, achieve the same objective.

Dworkin contends that what we have in life by way of resources and opportunity depends, in part, on the laws of the place where we are governed, and that if conditions leave some citizens impoverished, it is not a satisfactory answer to say that “people must take responsibility for their own fate.” He says, in essence, that people are not responsible for their genetic endowment or their innate talent. Moreover, just as a demand for an equal distribution of wealth violates his principle for equality, so does ignoring those impoverished through no fault of their own.

So, do you think the government should be concerned with universal justice? If, as we claim, we are a nation of laws, shouldn’t the government be concerned with how its citizens are affected by its laws? Would a game be fair if writing the rules were always the prerogative of the winners? This surely seems the case today with Washington’s legions of special-interest lobbyists. When was the last time that you had a personal impact on a piece of legislation? No lobbyist to represent your views? Then join the rapidly growing club of average Americans whose legislative influence is nil and whose grasp on any sustainable slice or portion of the economic pie is less and less tenable.

Dworkin begins by acknowledging that politics is an extension of law, that both law and politics are corrosive, that both are subject to interpretation, and that “the moral realm is the realm of argument, not brute, raw fact.” Dignity and self-respect, he says, are indispensable conditions of a good life. And further, David Hume’s moral philosophical assertion that we cannot determine an ought from an is, is itself a moral judgment—one that Dworkin says shows morality to be a separate aspect of human knowledge which, because of its uniqueness, presents itself with its own standards for interpretation.

Now, depending on your view, this idea may take a while to take root. It did for me. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and I find it inspiring and compelling in some ways but troubling in others. I’ve been a strong advocate for the reasoning side of life for decades, while simultaneously acknowledging how much the act of reasoning depends upon our emotions. This is something I sensed even before I began writing about the subject of self-education, and the scientific research of recent years bears out the interwoven relationship between reason and emotion with overwhelming evidence that they are indeed not separate entities.

I have always felt an affinity for the hedgehog, but confess having wished at times to be more of a fox. We are all a little of both to some degree. But understanding how we come to believe what we accept as true in important matters, such as how we define or determine what justice is and should be, is not a trivial quest. Having said this, however, I’m not fully confident that talk between foxes and hedgehogs will yield much beyond confrontation. The way we view and experience the world is so powerful and pervasive that it takes an extraordinary degree of resolve to change or alter one’s mind about issues fundamental to one’s perception. Not that I think it’s impossible, by any means, it’s just that both sides have to be so determined and dedicated to getting to the truth of the matters at hand that they can care more about the better argument than about who presents it.

To agree on vying for the better argument and common ground is clearly possible if participants are willing and sincere. Taking the idea further, it seems to me a very practical expectation that the journey of the fox in learning many things may at some point reach a critical mass resulting in an explosive revelation which becomes a single compelling vision. I make this argument on the basis of my personal experience, as it happens to me frequently. Even though I identify with having the hedgehog’s perception, who is to say that this fox-hedgehog convergence is not a common experience? After all, how many young people go off to college and come back home seeming to be out of touch with those they left behind? Education changes us, and indeed, if that were not the case, why would we bother pursuing it?

That we as individuals have a moral sense of right and wrong is a given, unless we are sociopaths or psychopaths or are in some other sense mentally ill. We don’t need to reason to know that murder is wrong or even that lying is unacceptable, and we know instinctively that torturing babies is out of the question. But how do we know these assumptions to be true? Was it because our parents taught us that these things are wrong or is it because of an innate sense we are born with?

The way I read the evidence is that we do have an innate moral sense. Infants show signs of distress upon hearing others in distress. Moreover, we know that when empathy is encouraged it can be developed and further expanded, which means simply that it can be learned and deepened. So, should I take this as evidence that the perceptual differences between hedgehogs and foxes can be diminished to the point of achieving a common ground in agreement about moral issues? Maybe, maybe not, but let’s assume the better argument is what matters here and see where it leads us.

Christians typically object to Dworkin’s assertion that those who “mechanically and unthinkingly” surrender their ethical authority to televangelists and who vote as they are told lead inauthentic lives, and yet, this is something Immanuel Kant warned of repeatedly and vociferously. To surrender one’s reasoning faculties, and therefore one’s conscience by default, is an act of subversion against the very notion of integrity. When weighed against the virtue of one’s duty towards others, it is comparable in Kant’s view to an act of treason. Kant’s notion of virtue is bound to the proposition that there is indeed a unity of value and a sense of duty that is sacrosanct.

Under the product description of Justice for Hedgehogs on Amazon.com is a succinct statement that captures the book’s very essence: “That value in all of its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question.” Perhaps the crux of achieving common ground here is whether or not those who identify with the fox can accept this view as a valid statement.

To Ronald Dworkin, human dignity is a prerequisite for a just society, and to achieve this end requires that government must treat all of its citizens with equal concern. Otherwise, the very notion of human dignity is degraded and devalued. He tells us that justice doesn’t threaten our liberty; to the contrary, it expands it and gives rise to the very notion of self-respect.

What I infer from his book, quite simply, is that some people get the point of justice and some don’t. Some get hung up in the details and miss the point altogether. In other words, some people get what it means to have been afforded the life of a human being and others don’t. Those who don’t get it, very often become enamored with trivialities that turn out near life’s end to have been meaningless distractions from the things that really matter.

Dworkin argues that we should take our lives seriously to the point of ensuring that they don’t amount to wasted opportunity. In my view, this is not possible without a concentrated effort to act responsibly when it comes to forming one’s opinions and striving to develop a sensibility in which one’s standard for veracity depends upon the better argument and not its source. Living one’s life in a media echo chamber leads to intellectual stultification. What Dworkin is talking about here is not self-help careerism; it is about doing something that counts in the scheme of things with relation to our fellow citizens.

Just as we are not responsible for our genetic heritage, neither are we responsible for our default perceptional orientation for how we view the world. We don’t make a choice at a specific point of time in our lives to posses the metaphorical perceptual attributes of a fox or a hedgehog. But most people would agree, I trust, that we do have a moral responsibility to bring to bear the best judgment that we can in resolving important matters. Understanding our common perceptual differences in apprehending the world should help. Regardless of how we are predisposed to perceive the world, it should not keep us from discerning the truth, not on the basis of technical accuracy alone but with a moral measure defensible at every challenge point. People get caught up in the details of living and miss the perspective that offers existential meaning to the struggle. Is the good in life something we can all agree on or not?

I suspect that as we age, regardless of our temperament and disposition toward the fox or hedgehog dichotomy, we are drawn toward the need to make sense of our lives. Dworkin argues persuasively that we have “a sovereign ethical responsibility to make something of our own lives, as a painter makes something valuable on his canvas.” Further, he says, we must find our own value in the act of living well. This doesn’t seem possible to me without an overt attempt to put one’s life in perspective and to do so by examining our own lives in context and in relation to the lives of others—not just our neighbors but people the world over. For he says, “we cannot adequately respect our own humanity unless we respect humanity in others.”

I’m drawn more and more to the compelling idea that the hedgehog perspective is less of an intellectual posture and more of a visceral stance: an internal sense or an emotional and intuitive feeling steeped in empathy and sympathetic to the notion that good is a noun. This is something I think we know, even when we are at a sudden loss to explain it. I’m not sure how or why some people are attuned and sensitive to the notion of fairness and justice to such a degree that they are forever on the alert to call attention to injustice. Nevertheless, I’m grateful that these people are not so caught up with the details of life that they stop paying attention to the notion of human dignity and the need to maintain it. Dworkin says such folks may not achieve moral truth in life, but they do seek it, and in my view that’s a critical component to a good life.

Morality Beyond the Fox and the Hedgehog

A paper by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham of the University of Virginia, titled “When Morality Opposes Justice” has received lots of attention in the past few years. In addressing the subject of morality, the work is considered cutting edge. Haidt and Graham identify five pillars that constitute the moral foundation for American culture. They are: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Haidt and Graham argue that liberals use only the first two pillars for making moral judgments, choosing to focus on caring and fairness, but conservatives use all five. For conservatives, all five pillars matter, but they place greater emphasis on in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. I suspect that conservatives believe justice is in large part a consequence of these three pillars, hence their lack of emphasis on the pillar of fairness itself.

Now, when I compare this research with Dworkin’s notion of the unity of value, I find that one cannot defend value as one big thing without using all five of Haidt and Graham’s moral pillars. Give it some thought. All of these components are in play when we try to capture the unity of value.

Can you envision a just society devoid of the attributes of any one of these pillars? I can’t. And what if someone argues that some people’s idea of the good may actually be bad? What if, for example, they advocate getting rid of society’s weakest members? This is the same argument that is often used to counter Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. But Dworkin’s two-fold universal principle of a legitimate government rules this out. The government can’t show and demonstrate equal concern for some individuals by harming them, and if it were tried, the case would not stand up to the test of the better argument. Now some might argue that we should not concern ourselves with the well- being of criminals and psychopaths, but then that would miss the point as well because what they do affects everyone else.

I’m enthusiastic about Dworkin’s book for the same reason I am about Haidt and Graham’s pillar theory. Both invite the kind of discussion in which a substantial number of points can be made about issues of value without pushing the participants’ political hot buttons—an important prerequisite for objective negotiation. It’s possible to discuss the five pillars and agree that each is a value in its own way and that it is vital to society, whether or not you agree about the particulars that follow at length. It’s also easy to imagine how any society without even one of the five pillars would be seriously impaired in some way, regardless of which pillar was missing. Similarly Dworkin’s two principles are defensible, regardless of the details to follow, and as such both the two-fold principle and the five-pillar theory can be starting points for establishing common ground. Both enable the beginning of clinical discussion with the possibility of agreeing on small issues before bigger problems are dealt with.

While discussing Justice for Hedgehogs in a public forum recently, it occurred to me that one of the most difficult hurdles to achieving common ground and thus reaching common agreement is that even when agreement is reached, the argument continues without taking the agreed upon changes into account. For example, imagine that a discussion about economic justice is taking place between a liberal and a conservative. The two are very far apart philosophically on the subject of salaries and wages, and yet they are both able to agree that the compensation of CEOs at the top of an organization should be tied to the pay at the bottom of the company. That is, when the CEO gets a pay raise, everyone else does too.

Okay great, but then they begin again to argue about economic fairness in general, failing to consider that their agreed upon change has taken place. Now, they don’t do this because they don’t want to; it’s just a very hard thing to do— something most of us are not even accustomed to trying. It takes some imagination to consider how the changes would ripple through society if this tethering of compensation became the law of the land. The original positions held on both sides could shift so dramatically that the effects would be stunning and warrant follow-up arguments that neither side in its wildest dreams would have considered beforehand. Okay, so this is hard, but it’s still not rocket science, and it’s certainly not impossible.

Consider the enormous computer power we have in the United States, and imagine what the results might be if we created models with supercomputers to work out the rippling differences in each congressional point of agreement on the part of opposing parties. The changes made possible by potential agreements could be studied and put in place, so to speak, allowing the discussions to begin anew with new starting points. Of course, one might argue that there would be additional disagreement about the algorithms determining such models, and that’s as it should be, but this would still seem a much better path toward solving the great many divisive issues that now confront us. These models would likely never work perfectly, but they would be a good start. The status quo is simply not acceptable to most Americans, and the very notion of achieving economic justice is getting to be a serious subject by nature of practical circumstance. The American middle class may soon achieve endangered species status.

The Baby-Boom Legacy

For several years now, my interest in self-education has evolved into a fascination with learning, aging, and the notion of whether or not acquiring wisdom is something we can count on if we pursue it. No doubt these topics intrigue me because I’m approaching 70 with what seems like an exponential increase in speed each year. My main area of interest these days is the subject of generativity and, in particular, the forthcoming legacy of the baby-boom generation and how that legacy will square with the notion of justice.

You see, I believe the boomers down deep are still the people who kicked up such a fuss about injustice in the 1960s, and I’m betting they’ll awaken once again before they pass on. The first time they became aware of injustice, they were young and idealistic; this time, if it happens, it will be because they are wise enough to sense what’s ahead and still idealistic enough to believe they can make a difference. I believe the same empathetic feelings that enabled them to awaken from the illusion of justice in the 1950s and ’60s to the reality of racial injustice will resurface to meet the challenges their grandchildren will be faced with and that they themselves are in part responsible for.

Today we face so many problems in so many areas of life that once you start a list, it’s seems impossible to stop adding to it. The engineered structures that we depend on for our very way of life are crumbling; roads, dams, bridges, water and sewer systems, and electrical grids all across America are reaching their sustainable limits. Trillions of dollars are required for their repair, or, we are told, the near future will begin to experience one catastrophe of infrastructure after another. If these problems were not enough, there is the matter of being a debtor nation, of insufficient funds to sustain healthcare, Medicare, and Social Security, and of inadequate plans for addressing climate change, the threat of terrorism, and foreign wars. All of this just for starters, and we can’t even generate enough political goodwill to tackle any of these issues with the amount of effort and funds needed to fully address them.

Even though we have the lowest taxes in nearly a half- century, our politicians don’t have the backbone to raise taxes equal to our debt. Of course, this is because they know that if they do propose such solutions, they will feel the full measure of political backlash from the moneyed interests that protect the status quo. We have achieved a perversion of the Golden Rule—those with the gold make the rules, period. It is my opinion and sincere hope that those of us near the end of our lives can bring enough pressure to bear to turn the tide and realign the scales of economic and social justice before our time is up.

In September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life, I devote several chapters to creating an atmosphere for achieving common ground politically, up to and including starting your own Sept-U discussion groups. Early on, September University offers this caveat: “Never before has the quality of our lives been so dependent upon wise counsel. And yet, in spite of your best intentioned educational theories, our long history of championing reason has created the false impression that we always reason first and then act, failing to appreciate the fact that what we actually do most of the time is the reverse. We depend upon an emotionally internalized moral guidance system to navigate our way through daily life. We act intuitively, relying on stored memory receptors in the emotional regions of the brain, and then we reason away the aftermath of our actions with explanations that sound profound but very often have little to do with the real motive.” Since we know that we behave this way, we need desperately to compensate for this Stone Age predisposition, and my guess is that Ronald Dworkin and Jonathan Haidt would argue as I do that justice demands it.

Another bit of advice from September University: “Today each of us as an individual has the communication capabilities of a Thomas Paine pamphleteer writ large. If only a small percentage of us take up the mantle of Sept-U with the notion of shaping the future, we will represent a revolutionary force that has to be reckoned with.”

Imagine getting together with small groups of people whom you respect but who have opposing political views. You establish an expectation of civility and hold your discussion with one fundamental rule for participation: each side must agree to yield to the better argument, regardless of who is presenting it. You begin with the five moral pillars and Dworkin’s two principles of government concern. Take one issue in the simplest description possible, apply the moral pillars as they pertain to the issue and the two principles as they apply, and see if there is any common ground that can be easily agreed upon. Once that is achieved, try your best to determine how those changes when implemented might change the very nature of the argument before proceeding to another issue.

Achieving a just society depends on large numbers of people engaged in a serious effort to create a better world. I believe the baby-boom generation can leave a lasting legacy that restores the concept of justice at the center of American politics, and the aim of this piece was and is about creating a way to move in that direction. It’s about getting on with what matters in life and keeping these things at the forefront of our attention.

My existential take on the notion of the unity of value mirrors Dworkin’s idea that morality deserves to be its own independent, stand-alone field of inquiry. I agree that the moral realm is an independent field precisely because everything thing we do, hope, feel, experience, or strive for, in our pathetically brief and never-to-be-repeated lives, depends upon what we and others do in this territory. In a nutshell, it’s why Immanuel Kant asserted that “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe: the starry skies above and the moral law within.” Weigh this alongside the certitude that death awaits us all and that what we did here, while we were here, matters to those we will leave behind. What we ought to do in life is an existential conundrum, the crux of which is a field unto itself, because we are entities of selves and what we do with and unto others has to be the point of it all, if there is a point to be had.

It would be a sad legacy to have lived a life as a human being without ever coming close to discerning that the very essence of humanity is in our uniqueness as a species and that this quality depends upon—in fact, can’t exist without—the relentless pursuit of justice. When we fall short and become mesmerized by the details, we are so easily fooled by fox-like perception that we focus on things like the Gross Domestic Product instead of the well-being of our fellow Americans, and we confuse the minimum wage with the notion of human dignity and livable conditions.

A provocative novel by Albert Brooks, titled 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, pits young against old in a near future where the reality of our aging demographics creates a sharp social divide over available resources. One of the most encouraging things about Ronald Dworkin’s book is that it was published when he was 79 years old. The last wave of the baby-boom generation will reach that age in 2043 (when I would have reached 100), and as we’ve observed, aging pushes us ever so acutely toward the perspective of the hedgehog. If baby boomers can make the best use of this notion, 2030 will work out better than any novelist’s dystopia.

KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning in

Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees

Training Yourself: The 21st Century Credential

Self-University: The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

KINDLE Essays on Amazon:

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

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Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

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An Essay by a Philosopher

2011-07-23T11:53:00.001-07:00

Here is an essay titled "Killing the Things We Love" by John F. Schumaker, who is one of the cultural critics that I admire most on this planet. I thought you might find it of interest. Best.

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/762/1/

As always your comments are appreciated.

Charles D. Hayes

Will the Social Animal Achieve Adulthood?

2011-05-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

New York Times columnist David Brooks has a new book out titled The Social Animal. I have watched Brooks for years as a commentator on the PBS News Hour and have always liked him, even though I usually side politically with his colleague Mark Shields. That said, in my view, The Social Animal is a brilliant piece of work, far exceeding my expectations. I have some issues with the book, but they aren’t worthy of discussion in light of what the book accomplishes.

During the past couple of years, I have mentioned the new research in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology so many times that I am always pressed for an original way to bring the subject up again. But David Brooks has this to say: “We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing. And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.”

I’m torn between wanting to say amen or duh. My frustration comes from having been aware of and very much interested in this enterprise for several years, while still waiting anxiously to see some societal benefit resulting from this research. Instead, regardless of the context or subject, whenever these new realities are mentioned, the conversation goes on as before with no acknowledgement that anything has been learned.

For example, when it comes to politics, we don’t reason so much as we relate, and if we can’t relate to the other side, we tend to dismiss the others’ legitimacy, or we flood our minds with an emotional response during their argument so we can ignore what they say altogether. An instance of relating over reasoning is evident with the faction know as the “birthers.” These people cannot relate to President Obama; therefore they will not accept any evidence of his having been born as an American citizen. Because he is viewed simply as not being one of them, they can’t accept him as legitimate under any circumstances. Many well-educated individuals felt the same way about George W. Bush; he wasn’t in their group, and therefore wasn’t regarded as intellectually up to the task at hand. His presidency was viewed as illegitimate by nature of his implied incompetence, regardless of the issue.

Relating is relating, period. The principle applies to religion as well, since compelling evidence is no match when pitted against the will to believe. Our propensity for relating can seldom be overstated, nor can its impact on society and matters of politics in particular. Now that President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, those who can’t relate to him are scrambling for another cause to prove his illegitimacy.

If we are in the middle of a revolution of consciousness, as Brooks suggests, one can’t but wonder when we will begin to reap the rewards of this amalgamation of research. In The Social Animal, Brooks does something daring. He admittedly sets out to emulate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile by creating fictional characters to show how our minds are influenced by our biology and the environment. Now, anyone who does this sort of thing risks a great deal of criticism because the possible options for such characters are infinite and author bias is detectable. Some of the simple-minded reviews of The Social Animal on Amazon bear witness to the subjectivity of the enterprise and the very imperfection of human emotions that Brooks writes about. The Social Animal is not the answer to all of our social problems, and Brooks makes no pretense that it is. His intent is to start the conversation, and in my view he does so in elegant fashion.

The recent revelations from research about human behavior are not totally unsuspected. Astute observers have for centuries noted that we readily gravitate toward group allegiance at the expense of our reasoning facilities, that we make frequent use of self-deception for self-serving purposes, and that our moral sense is hardwired and seldom influenced by reason. This tendency for developing an allegiance to our respective in-group is deeply imbedded in our nature. Our relationships trump our beliefs; they cut to the core of religion and our universal sense of belonging to anything and everything. Studies show that we humans relate to the notion of God precisely as if to another person, and thus it’s not surprising that the particular beliefs of a religion are treated as being much less important than the belonging itself. People join a church and then accept that church’s beliefs, not the reverse. Moreover, the threshold for believability knows no bounds because credulity is far less important than membership.

Brooks doesn’t deal at length with the dark side of our emotional predispositions, but I find them extremely important. Our human groups come in all sizes and shapes, but most embody a ready-made template with all of the useful traits of a psychopath, ready at a moment’s notice to deal with the sudden appearance of too much otherness. And all that’s necessary to put our psychopathic capacity to use is to summon enough contempt among members to override our ability to feel empathy. Indeed, in most humans there is a tipping point—too much otherness and our mutual contempt will take over. Then the spreading of our scorn will become the social adhesive that further bonds our association. We are readily equipped to dehumanize those whom we perceive as adversaries. If our respective in-group applies the right political pressure, we can shift into a dehumanization mode as fast as a new Mercedes goes from first to second gear.

As anyone who pays close attention to political debate already knows, the subject of debate is much less important than whose side is being represented. In so many cases, the position of a particular subject is not the issue. Who is presenting it is what matters, and the participants are apt to switch sides over the argument at hand in the flash of an eye, if it is to the advantage of their group to do so. Relating is easy; we do it by default. Reasoning objectively is difficult, but we can do it if we have the resolve, especially if we are aware of how easily we tend to let our emotions tune out what we would rather not hear.

Ideally we are able to fill the crevices of our differences with the knowledge that derives from a munificent liberal education, and in this way the humanities have much to offer in helping us to be human. Knowing that others are as we are helps to dissipate our anxieties over differences that appear much more pronounced that they actually are. If a person’s only knowledge of the world revolves in its entirety around one’s local allegiance, then an us and them mentality is all that can be expected. But, as David Brooks makes clear, we are social animals, and being aware that we are is the best hope for our species. Human flourishing is contingent upon whether or not we begin to understand the nature of our behavior, especially our penchant for conflict.

Simply being aware of insightful revelations about human behavior is meaningless unless we put it to practical use. If nothing else, reading The Social Animal should make us pause over those things in life that require deliberative reason instead of emotional reactions. Strong emotion feels like reason precisely because it is so strong. But, as many behavioral scientists point out, the fact that our unconscious emotional predispositions steer our behavior does not mean they are destiny. We can still override our unconscious predilections, provided we are aware of their existence and have the will to do so.

How disturbing a notion that many of our daily behaviors are reliably predictable. How disappointed would you be to discover that some scientist could study the details of your life and then accurately predict the things you will do or say in the near future? The disappointment, I suspect, would derive from the fact that we could not predict these things ourselves. And if we could not, what would this suggest about whether or not we are in control of our lives?

The first step to gain better control is to learn more about the recent scientific revelations that guide our behaviors. David Brooks offers an inspirational way to begin.

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Letter from Birmingham Jail: Reading As a Remedy for Racial Bias

2011-01-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

Many years of voracious reading have taught me that reaching a truly objective level of understanding about reality is unlikely. Still, even though I think the chances for complete objectivity are slim, my enthusiasm for pursuing impartiality remains intact because the persistent searching prevents rigidity, complacency, and cynicism. Sometimes real progress is measurable, and the quest is exhilarating.

Elsewhere I have written that books are but perspectives—the more of them you read, the larger your own perspective becomes. I maintain that the very quality of the future depends upon our ability to achieve a perspective of maturity, and this is a fundamental requirement for getting beyond racism. First, let me provide some history.

I grew up in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1940s and ’50s. In those days, the cultural expectations of what a person was supposed to do in life were simple. They were immediately apparent when your behavior was in some way unacceptable, but vague when you considered all of the possible things you might do, given talent and opportunity. But bias and blatant racial and ethnic prejudice were so ubiquitous in the communities where I lived that a social climate existed analogous to a thick fog of contempt for differences or otherness, especially racial differences.

I use this analogy to make the point that a lifetime of reading can be, in essence, a lifting and thinning of cultural fog and a platform for inclusiveness. While we can never rid ourselves completely of our cultural upbringing, nor would we likely want to abandon everything about it, the perspective made possible by reading is such that civilization itself could be said to depend on the kind of thinking that reading accomplishes.

Cultural expectations in our youth are so pervasive that we remain unaware they even exist; they seem merely to reflect reality—the way things are. As we age, we are able to see farther, primarily from our depth of experience. The first dissonant clues about our cultural reality arise when we begin to realize that the grownups in our midst, namely our parents and grandparents, are mere mortals, subject to the same human frailties as the rest of humanity.

Then, in time, if we are truly observant and reflective, we begin to apply the same critical lens to the groups we belong to and to our respective political and geographical allegiances. Traveling the world is a big help to gaining perspective, but nothing serves us better than extensive reading and reflecting on what we’ve read because of the thoughtfulness involved in the process.

It’s far too easy to learn to inhabit a local worldview—a narrow outlook that is familiar, dependable, and comforting but ultimately destructive to the very idea of expanding human relations. Thus, for many fearful people it becomes necessary to maintain a restricted viewpoint that requires avoidance of outside opinion and a distrust of change and uncertainty. When the citizens of any culture become uneasy about gaining knowledge, new information is subject to being censored, ignored, or banished. That’s why anti-intellectualism is ubiquitous.

I grew up with a sheltered worldview much in agreement with the same politics and prejudices of my community. It was a world of black-and-white notions of morality, and it was a literal interpretation of racial superiority that white was right. I experienced my first serious dissonance to this rigid ultraconservative worldview when I joined the Marine Corps in 1960. It was a subtle unraveling over a four-year period of service in which I was witness to young men of all races and from all regions of the country and from all sorts of backgrounds, many of whom, in spite of conventional stereotypical assumptions of inferiority, proved to be natural-born leaders. Black, white, brown, red, or yellow—race just didn’t seem to matter. Individual character did.

After four years in the Marines, I joined the Dallas police department, a bit more open-minded about race than what I had grown up with, but still far from being free of racial bias. The next cultural dissonance I recall was the result of reading sociology texts in a college class on police science and administration. The fog was still thick, but beginning to lift as I entertained other viewpoints, many of which seemed superior to my own.

A few years later, I read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant and The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler. I was so taken with these works that I read each one several times in quick succession. By then, the fog was really thinning. Durant’s book put my regional outlook into a global perspective with ideas so profound that they made the whole range of my prevailing cultural assumptions seem arbitrary and ill thought-out. For Toffler, it wasn’t the accuracy of his observations about what was going on in the world that I found compelling so much as his ambition to explain it in big-picture fashion.

It was about this time that I read Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, which I still view as one of the most dissonant and stunningly insightful moments of reading I have ever experienced. King’s letter, laying out the absurdity of the tired old argument that always claims it’s too early to push for desegregation, shattered the remains of my regional worldview and its justification for racial segregation. Since then, I have been a ravenous reader.

Ironically some of the writers I admire most warned obsessively about being overinfluenced by books, while being careful not to reveal that they were themselves voracious readers. In my view, the point of reading is to move beyond the works one is reading to an enriched perspective that will equal or surpass the author’s, and not to become so enamored with a work that it blots out the need for further inquiry. Frequently I encounter individuals who don’t read very much and thus become overly influenced by a particular book simply because they have too little to compare it to.

One of the important lessons I’ve learned about reading is the value of rereading. Every time I reread a book that I once felt was very important, the effect is startling. It happens without fail, and yet I always wonder why it took me so long to do it again. The books that are important to reread are the ones we thought were profound and that influenced us the first time we read them.

Rereading after some years have passed is doubly rewarding for reasons I’ve seldom heard discussed. But to me it seems evident when you consider that long after we have been moved by new ideas, our subconscious continues to kick them around and to ruminate on them for years as they become a part of our repertoire of comprehension. With regard to racial prejudice, in particular, the best part is that, if you have made genuine progress in learning about the absurdity of such behavior, the rereading will make you wonder how you were ever naïve enough to have held such views in the first place.

Reacquainting ourselves with the original presentation of an idea is an invitation to the subconscious to make our quiet deliberation become clear to us as never before. All we needed was the right kind of reminder, since the first time we encountered these ideas, we were barely ready for them. That’s why they impressed us in the beginning.

As we begin the new year this January, we can let Martin Luther King’s birthday on the 17^th be the day we resolve to rid ourselves of the reflexive bias that we unwittingly internalized growing up without realizing we have done so. A good place to start is with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

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Meat: Politics and Perspective on Steroids

2010-12-12T14:58:00.000-08:00

Human consumption of animals for food is an issue that seldom gets much media attention, except when it enters the political arena. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin recently accused Sarah Palin of killing animals for fun or political gain, and now the subject is hot.

First, let me be clear that as a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, I view Palin as a local and a national embarrassment unworthy of the relentless media attention she gets. I consider her a well-meaning but deeply ignorant human being who attended four colleges and obtained a degree but escaped without an education. I don’t, however, think she kills animals for fun. Hunting game animals in Alaska is a tradition more honorable by leaps and bounds, in my view, than factory farming. That said, Palin is enormously talented at turning tradition into ridicule and time-honored custom into propaganda. Seeing the flippant way she treats practically any subject she talks about, I can’t blame Sorkin for his assumption. I would also add that anyone who can’t shoot better than Palin should not hunt any animal, period.

The topic of killing animals for food can be likened to perspective on steroids. It’s a matter most people purposely avoid for purely selfish reasons: we don’t want to hear about things that make us uncomfortable, especially if it seems we are powerless to do anything about them. Now, before I go any further, let me clarify that I’m not a vegetarian, nor will I likely become one at this age. I’m not going to try to talk you into becoming one either. And for the record, I do hunt moose.

I’ve written before about the value of using dissonance as a guide for purposeful exploration in the pursuit of objectivity. When new information comes in that conflicts with what we perceive to be true, we’re forced to either deny the facts or adjust our thinking. One possible exception is the arena of politics, where factual information doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as association and whose side one is on politically. But if we can put politics aside, the discomfort of dissonant information has something to teach us, and this applies to all of the subjects we encounter in life, not just emotional affairs of state.

One of the easiest ways to kick up some dissonance about the fragile notion of objectivity is to examine the subject of our dietary habits. Few of us give much thought to what goes on behind the grocery store shelves, especially the meat market. But, to my mind, no other subject puts ideology and the desire to be protected from reality—or to choose one’s own reality—in clearer perspective than the treatment of animals bred for human consumption.

When we put aside the moral issue of eating meat from domestic animals and examine it strictly as a matter of environmental economics, we can easily apprehend the egregious inefficiencies in sowing grain to produce meat. Sixteen pounds of grain plus an enormous amount of water are required to produce one pound of beef. It’s also clear that the world is losing topsoil at an alarming rate, making global famine a frequent occurrence. Thus we can conclude that the health of the planet and of human beings would be much improved if we dramatically reduced our consumption of red meat.

In his eloquent book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Charles Patterson makes a compelling case that the indifference we exhibit toward the needless suffering of animals breeds inhumanity among our own kind. Such suffering occurs on a scale so grand and so horrific that it’s almost incomprehensible. I will spare you the vivid daily details of factory slaughterhouses and the depraved indifference and abject cruelty that happen routinely behind those closed doors, but it’s not hard to find if you’re interested. (The movie Food Inc. is a good place to start.) I will, though, ask you one question that interjects morality back into this subject. If you were told that a particular furry mammal’s flesh tastes better when the animal is subjected to a rush of adrenalin just before it is killed, would you approve of burning it alive or beating it to death to improve the flavor? I didn’t think so. But it’s naïve to think this hasn’t happened in the past, doesn’t happen in the present, or won’t in the future.

If you feel you have thoroughly examined the morality of being a carnivore, and that no further reflection is necessary, try a simple thought experiment: Imagine you are sitting on a hilltop overlooking a canyon below and that before you is a seemingly infinite stage as far as the eye can see. Upon this stage, facing you, is every animal whose flesh you have personally eaten. You have to work at this for a while to get your mind around it. All of these creatures could and did feel pain.

Chances are, if you are a senior citizen like me, you can remember when livestock and farm animals had something of a life before they were slaughtered, but that was before industrial, assembly-line farming took over. Currently many creatures live in such tiny spaces that throughout the whole of their lives they don’t even have enough physical room to turn around. When we consider how many cattle might be represented in all of the hamburger we’ve consumed in the half-century or more that we’ve lived, you have to wonder if it’s even possible to position the stage in our thought experiment to include all of these animals without blotting out the earth and sky.

No, I’ve not adopted the vegetarian lifestyle, but I do intend to pay more attention to food choices and to speak up about the maltreatment of animals who suffer needlessly on industrial farms for the sake of expediency and profit—or for the sake of Sarah Palin’s reality television show. I do agree with Sorkin that Palin would kill damn near anything for political gain.

But back to factory farming. The ubiquity of supermarkets has had the effect of anesthetizing the general public from the inhumane realities of industrial farming. There is something deeply offensive about sending five-day-old calves to slaughter because it means veal will be slightly more tender. I’m reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “no view of life is valid that omits the odious facts,” and factory farming is the epitome of odiousness and thoughtlessness.

The stress we encounter in life is escalating exponentially, and the hidden immorality of it all may be in the realization that much of the food we eat represents the epitome of stress that could be avoided for pennies on the dollar. Surely the thoughtfulness required to kill animals humanely could ripple though society as a measure of unspoken respect for the sanctity of life itself and ultimately make the world a better place.

Think about it this way: If stressed people live on a diet of animals rife with stress hormones, what is the biological consequence for human health? What does this say about the quest for civilization? I believe the indifference that Patterson writes about leads to a kind of insensitivity that feeds on itself, dulling our senses and closing down our natural predilection for empathy. Moreover, this general disregard is fertile ground for arousing political contempt with a vengeance—something Sarah Palin is very good at.

In her book Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin lets us off the hook a bit when she writes about her own cognitive dissonance. Because she cares strongly about the well-being of animals, one would expect her to agitate against the slaughterhouse industry instead of working for it as she does. She describes watching cattle going to their death, in an assembly-line system of her own design, when suddenly she began to cry. Then it occurred to her in a flash that without the industry itself, none of these animals would have ever existed in the first place. Moreover, when she considered the harshness of the order of life and death in the natural world, a humane death in a slaughterhouse seemed almost preferable. That said, Grandin has worked tirelessly for the humane treatment of animals raised for food.

Learning more about this subject is the only way to break the seldom acknowledged codes of the ideologies that bind us together and pit us against one another. There are three books on meat for human consumption that I recommend highly: Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I encourage you to read more about factory farming and to take the same approach with any subject that you have treated till now with only superficial knowledge, especially those you consider very important.

Too many of us have adamant opinions on subjects that, for all practical purposes, we know very little about, and this applies doubly to politics and supermarket food. On the latter subject Sorkin quotes Palin as having said, “Unless you’ve never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation.” Having worked in the oil industry for more than thirty years, I use a similar rationale that people who ride in automobiles, fly in airplanes, and use commercial products should save their condemnation of the use of fossil fuels as well. Nevertheless, I’m all for reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and exploring alternative energy, just as I’m all for treating the creatures we raise for food in a manner that enhances their brief well-being and fosters our humanity.

Reading and asking questions can take us beyond the deceptively antiseptic and seemingly benign shelves in our supermarkets. Yes, we may have to contend with some dissonance along the way, but if objectivity is the goal, it seems a shame not to follow that course. Indeed, that’s what books are for, except maybe for Sarah’s. But of course she doesn’t write her own books, she just poses for them. Metaphorically that’s all her political gesturing amounts to: an ideological pose and a shallow one at that. Here again I agree with Sorkin that The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself, but not simply because of Palin. Their lineup of new programming is an insult to education.

In her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Kathryn Schulz writes about three tacks we most often take toward people with whom we disagree: The ignorance assumption, the idiocy assumption, and the evil assumption. People have in the past and will in the future accuse me of claiming Palin is ignorant because she doesn’t agree with me. And to that I say, you betcha. But Palin jumps to the third tack, which Schulz argues is the most dangerous, namely that the people who don’t agree with her are evil.

As those who participate already know, the greatest lesson of all of self-education is that things are seldom as they seem. Examining the food industry is good way to prove this to yourself. Then apply what you’ve learned to politics. The world could be a better place if more people would do this.

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September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life
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Discombobulated Wingnuttery

2010-10-15T16:12:00.000-07:00

If you can think of a better description than discombobulated wingnuttery to describe today’s Tea Party politics, I would like to hear it. Their current level of political discourse is so deeply disturbing and so out of tune with our democratic ideals, that at times I have trouble believing my eyes and ears. For more than thirty years I have been engaged in a serious effort of self-education. I’ve studied and continue to study myriad subjects, with the experience being its own reward. But now I find it increasingly the case that the position of ignorance from which I began to study three decades ago has become something of a Tea Party platform: a surplus of Stone Age contempt is aimed at all perceived manifestations of otherness, and the world is divided into every possible avenue of identity to reflect an ethos of us versus them, while reason is overwritten by a form of destructive passion driven by existential anxiety.

The Tea Party platform is in large part a political stance that professes to be proud of our Constitution and our philosophy of “We the people,” but it is motivated to a significant degree by politically contrived hatred for all that we do collectively in the name of government. The exception, of course, is military action, which very often gets enthusiastic support. You see, government-sanctioned war is a means of redirecting existential anxiety—anxiety that could and would dissipate through a serious effort to understand the complexity of our political circumstances at any given time. But in a world existing largely of us and them factions, war is the only thing that really makes sense, so we shouldn’t be surprised that so many people embrace it with enthusiasm. It makes sense because hatred as Eric Hoffer observed is one of the most effective unifying agents available to ideologues.

It’s difficult to describe the depth of disappointment I feel when people carry signs that depict the president of the United States as Hitler or Stalin. Or of people whose overt racism is so obvious that only psychopaths could fail to detect it. I suspect any well-educated person returning to America today after being absent and out of touch for many years would be stunned at the pervasive level of ignorance being passed off as patriotism and a defense of the Constitution, when it is anything but.

During the past two decades, revelations in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience have granted us precious insights into human behavior. We know more than ever before about bias and how it works. We also know why practicing democracy is so incredibly difficult. It’s because our default nature is to act tribally, especially under duress. Only now are we beginning to understand the psychological difficulty of maintaining our reasoning abilities when we discuss hot-button issues. For a couple of centuries we have thought of ourselves primarily as rational creatures. But we most assuredly are not. We default to an emotional level while still feeling that we are being perfectly rational. We imagine ourselves far removed from tribalism, but we practice it daily.

Consider the explosive success in social media with groups such as Facebook and Twitter. We instinctively relate to members of our group, and we are equipped with a hardwired expertise for detecting otherness. We are so good at it that it requires an extraordinary amount of attentive awareness just to catch ourselves doing it. Relating to members with whom we identify is so emotionally satisfying that we tend to regard the process as that of reasoning. In other words, strong emotion, because it is so powerful, feels precisely like reason ensconced in righteousness and thus, this sentiment is an integral part of our identity.

We still relate better to small groups of people than to large ones. Because of our tribal temperament, many of us intuit a tipping point where overt differences begin to bother us. Psychological research clearly demonstrates that dissimilarity past a certain point can become tangled up with our sense of mortality—we can become fearful of too much otherness because it is related to change and, subconsciously, it reminds us of our demise. As a result, many individuals become fanatical about preserving the status quo, present inequities and all, because it feels safer than coping with an uncertain future or with people whose differences make us existentially uncomfortable.

I can find no way to be charitable about the pseudo- conservative political ideology touted by placard-wielding Tea Partiers, and yet I can’t help but feel some sympathy for people who look up to the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as great leaders. In my view, this amounts to one of the greatest examples of educational failure in America. A person of any political persuasion left, right, or center, who cannot deconstruct the incoherent nonsense of Palin and Beck as being just that—nonsense—cannot be considered to be sufficiently educated to think independently about politics.

The validity of their arguments aside, it’s not uncommon for Beck and Palin to contradict themselves profusely in the space of a few sentences. Neither of these individuals is knowledgeable enough to discuss any subject with any degree of complexity in a public forum, and yet they have become wealthy doing so. Astronomer Phil Plait, who writes for Discover magazine, stated it perfectly in a recent blog when he said that, given Beck’s intellectual capacity, “he shouldn’t even be allowed to rant in public parks to passing squirrels.”

Moreover, Alexander Zaitchik’s book Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance shows that because of his depraved tactics to improve his ratings in talk radio, Beck may very well be one of the most unscrupulous individuals in media, and yet he passes himself off as a person of great virtue. Indeed, his rally in Washington D.C. in August 2010 was supposed to be about rediscovering honor. But how does that work exactly? How does a dishonorable person help others find honor?

Both Palin and Beck have achieved their fame and notoriety, not by expressing a sound political philosophy, but by pushing people’s hot buttons. Indeed, they have perfected the technique of tribal relating to such degree that their very presence makes reasoned discourse unnecessary. They have become relational icons for a sector of society suffering a deeply disturbing form of existential anxiety. In an appearance on C-Span2’s Book TV, Zaitchik described Tea Party discourse as being sub-rational, which is precisely what it is. So, how do we get beyond discombobulated wingnuttery? How do we educate so that relational nonsense doesn’t substitute for democracy?

Elsewhere I’ve written extensively about the need of every citizen for an existential education—based in part on the premise of being familiar enough with literature and the humanities to be able to cope with one’s own existential anxiety without becoming so unnerved as to lose the ability to use one’s reasoning faculties effectively. When that happens, the default position is to find someone to blame for one’s own misfortune regardless of the cause. I advocate existential education fully aware that our emotional self and our reasoning self are one and the same; they are so interconnected that treating them as separate and independent functions is a deceptive oversimplification.

In The Happiness Hypotheses, Jonathan Haidt describes the human psyche as being made up of reason and emotion—expressed metaphorically as rider and elephant. Reason, as the rider, can ride the elephant, but never completely control it. The elephant has a mind of its own, the larger part of which exists as the subconscious—inaccessible to the rider. An existential education can make a crucial difference because it can enable us to get better and better at influencing the elephant as we age. Moreover, it helps us to understand that the human race is made up completely of riders and elephants. If we know we don’t have total control over our own emotions, then why must we feel it necessary to characterize everything we can’t agree with or relate to as evil?

Civilization requires that we explore and negotiate methods to keep our political dialog on a rider-to-rider basis. Our elephants can relate to one another emotionally when provided with some guidance from the riders, but there is no avenue open to resolving emotional differences with emotion alone except violence. The slippery default that occurs when we encounter people with whom we disagree is that if we view them as the other, we don’t even hear their reasoned arguments when they speak, we simply tune them out. Research in neuroscience reveals that unless we are very careful when our hot buttons are pushed, we misrelate by flooding our minds with emotion, essentially blocking our ability to reason effectively.

Democracy is undoubtedly an idealistic aspiration. But if you buy into the idea that democracy is a legitimate method of governing, then our reasoning abilities must take precedence over our tendency for tribally motivated relating. Otherwise the actual practice of democracy is a misguided objective. This is not rocket science. It is, instead, a commonsense notion that seems to totally escape the Tea Partiers because the movement at its core is an extreme example of tribalism: you are with us or against us. And thus, it comes down not to democratic differences about governing but to a battle of good versus evil. When our relating becomes overly tribal, we leave the discussion to the elephants and the best they can do is stampede or trample our best intentions.

Emotion is an essential part of our humanity and a vital ingredient of reason itself, but when we let our emotions dominate, our democratic aspirations are moot—there is nothing to negotiate because our reasoning ability becomes inaccessible. The result is anger, rage, and outright hatred. We have to be very careful when it comes to politics, or our elephants will take control of the conversation. When this happens there is little to do except butt heads and trumpet. People ignorant of this reality grow angry at one another with ever-increasing fury; educated people—existentially educated people, that is—are able to calm themselves down, keep their emotions under control and talk, rider to rider. Otherwise, when elephants run wild and attempt to turn all that is political into emotion, the result is discombobulated wingnuttery and it leads us ever closer to the abyss.

The sad but profound truth seldom discussed for fear of offending a significant percentage of our population is straightforward but so politically incorrect that it’s nearly unthinkable to mention. Still, it needs to be said. If a person is uneducated to such a degree that articulating their political views rationally and coherently is not possible, then emotion is all they can bring to the table. If a person knows little of history and little of the dynamics of human behavior and politics, then any and all arguments that they don’t fully understand are perceived as an assault on their identity. When this is the case, the only avenue they have for a defense is to demonstrate their loyalty to their kind by showing contempt and anger toward those who are viewed as the other.

Thus, without an educated citizenry, democracy is untenable and we are stuck with discombobulated wingnuttery. Citizens politically left, right, and center must care more about discerning the better argument and be willing to reason it into existence, or democracy is doomed to the ash heap of dead ideas.

My latest books:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

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