Horgan is a writer for “Scientific American,” and approaches the question of whether war can be ended as a scientist. It’s all about research. He concludes that war can be ended, has in various times and places been ended, and is in the process (an entirely reversible process) of being ended on the earth right now.

The war abolitionists of the 1920s Outlawry movement would have loved this book, would have seen it as a proper extension of the ongoing campaign to rid the world of war. But it is a different book from theirs. It does not preach the immorality of war. That idea, although proved truer than ever by the two world wars, failed to prevent the two world wars. When an idea’s time has come and also gone, it becomes necessary to prove to people that the idea wasn’t rendered impossible or naïve by “human nature” or grand forces of history or any other specter. Horgan, in exactly the approach required, preaches the scientific observation of the success (albeit incomplete as yet) of preaching the immorality of war.

The evidence, Horgan argues, shows that war is a cultural contagion, a meme that serves its own ends, not ours (except for certain profiteers perhaps). Wars happen because of their cultural acceptance and are avoided by their cultural rejection. Wars are not created by genes or avoided by eugenics or oxytocin, driven by an ever-present minority of sociopaths or avoided by controlling them, made inevitable by resource scarcity or inequality or prevented by prosperity and shared wealth, or determined by the weaponry available. All such factors, Horgan finds, can play parts in wars, but the decisive factor is a militaristic culture, a culture that glorifies war or even just accepts it, a culture that fails to renounce war as something as barbaric as cannibalism. War spreads as other memes spread, culturally. The abolition of war does the same.

Those who believe that war is in our genes or mandated by overpopulation or for whatever other reason simply unavoidable or even desirable will not be attracted to Horgan’s book. But they should read it. It is written for them and carefully argued and documented. Those who, in contrast, believe it is as obvious as breathing air that we can choose to end war tomorrow will find a little sad comedy in the fact that the way we get people to choose to end a long-established institution is by rigorously persuading them that such choices have been made before and are already well underway. Yet, that is exactly what people need to hear, especially those who are on the edge between “War is in DNA” and “War is over if you want it.” Most human cultures never produced nuclear bombs or genetically engineered corn or Youtube. Many cultures have produced peace. But what if they hadn’t? How in the world would that prevent us from producing it?

Evidence of lethal group violence does not go back through our species’ millions of years but only through the past 10,000 to 13,000. Even chimpanzees’ supposed innate war spirit is not established. We are not the only primates who seem able to learn either war or peace. Annual war-related casualties have dropped more than ten-fold since the first half of the twentieth century. Democracy is no guarantee of peace, but it is allowing people to say no to war. Of course, democracy is not all or nothing. Some democracies, like ours in the United States, can be very weak, and weaker still on the question of war. What allows nations’ leaders to take countries into war, Horgan shows, is not people’s aggressiveness but their docility, their obedience, their willingness to follow and even to believe what authorities tell them.

Mistaken theories about the causes of war create the self-fulfilling expectation that war will always be with us. Predicting that climate change will produce world war may actually fail to inspire people to buy solar panels, inspiring them instead to support military spending and to stock up at home on guns and emergency supplies.

I wish Horgan had looked more at the motivations of those in power who choose war, some of whom do profit from it in various ways. I also think he understates the importance of the military industrial complex, whose influence Eisenhower accurately predicted would be total and even spiritual. It’s harder to work for the abolition of war when the war industry is behind your job. I think this book could benefit from recognition of the U.N. Charter’s limitations as compared with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in its acceptance of wars that are either “defensive” or authorized by the United Nations. I think Horgan’s view of the Arab Spring and the Libyan War is confused, as he thinks in terms of intervention in countries where the United States had already long been intervened, and he frames the choices as war or nothing. I think the final chapter on free will is rather silly, confusing the philosophical point of physical determinism with how things look from our perspective, a confusion that David Hume straightened out quite a while ago.

But Horgan makes a key point in that last chapter, pointing to a study that found that when people were exposed to the idea that they had no free will they behaved less morally, choosing to behave badly, of course, with the very same free will they nonetheless maintained. Being free to choose, we can, in fact, choose things that most of us never dare imagine. Here’s John Horgan’s perfect prescription:

We could start by slashing our bloated military, abolishing arms sales to other countries, and getting rid of our nuclear arsenal. These steps, rather than empty rhetoric, will encourage other countries to demilitarize as well.

Or as Jean Paul Sartre put it — (Look, ma, no research!):

To say that the for-itself has to be what it is, to say that it is what it is not while not being what it is, to say that in it existence precedes and conditions essence or inversely according to Hegel, that for it ‘Wesen ist was gewesen ist’ — all this is to say one and the same thing: to be aware that man is free.

It’s not to say that it is an entirely terrible thing that much of this seems ready to topple. We’ve been complacent and ugly in the protection of our way of life. Even if we don’t make the cruel decisions, much comfort is derived at the expense of others. A mounting debt, not of the fiscal kind, swirls on our horizon. Oddly our way of life really doesn’t seem to make us anything but medicated, fat and plastic. And then shocked into a stunned puddle as it is inevitably stripped away, one by one — lay-off or medical bill — chose your middle class poison. Deeply felt emotions are difficult to mine these days unless they are rage or crippling depression.

Flirting notions of change could lead to a world more of our making — or an explosion of all that we find stifling and unholy. Collective hearts beat in unison, but we mistake the sound as being ours alone. I’m scared and I know others are too, even if shaded by a ridiculous attempt at immortality via consumerism, our version of mummification. Encase yourself in purchased crap, live forever. Canopic jars encase us while alive. But they were purchased at Pottery Barn 1/2 off!

In this year we have seen previously inconceivable issues like the indefinite detention of Americans being considered and soon likely implemented. The last pretense of a government for the people was dissolved. They no longer even feel the need to maintain the fairy tale notions. It’s quite clear now.

A nation striving towards a linear future, one of growth and enlightenment is now fully evident as shadow and lie. Those paying attention knew this prior, of course. Exponential growth is not possible, and there is no linear movement of humanity as our descent into unhappiness and continuous strife prove. We are not a nation that looks to the sky, we look down to our wallets. We allowed them to tell us that things like income or credit scores measured our true worth in these last decades. We wasted time listening to people like this, and some planned careers to fulfill artificial ideals of success. This will ultimately prove to be as valuable as how many hearts the Aztecs carved out on a particular day so long ago. And now, those that fall to the side are thought to be weak, thought to be lacking, when really they just scare everyone… that unguarded moment of compassion allows our collective roots to be felt. It’s but a blink of the eye. We are here, but they distract us from that fact and keep us in line, raging tickers flood our minds with nonsense.

We don’t voice love to each other even when we feel it as strongly as a knife. Some may say that it has always been so. That humans will always fall to the base of their nature and we are the culmination of this imperfect death impulse. The sleepwalk to doom is the easier path.

But when asked “What was the first sign of civilization?” Margaret Mead answered “A healed human leg bone.” So where was the profit in that? From these healers we find our ancestors. Cooperation without which we probably wouldn’t be here. There are still healers in our nature, but they have been hiding. We feel a need to be punished and the new year looks poised to do just that.

A clown show of politicians, ready to be popped out of the Mattel box will bleed us as they smile this coming year. Whether it will be the fraudulent hope in place or a new fraud matter little. The reality is such that they will continue to pull against humanity and the veil is certainly not lifted for most. The Occupy movement is a luscious and beautiful spark, but it’s not evident yet if it has the power to unravel so many years of propaganda, so many years of greed. This nation started with a premise — that of individual enrichment and worked backwards with philosophies to support that. It’s a tall order to dismantle a framework of bones such as that.

But it’s not to say it’s impossible. Truth and beauty have a power of their own, and this leaves me wondering. What is possible? Our mere existence is improbable. We are facing the end of an Empire, the end of easily obtainable resources to power it all. Though we aren’t there yet, I suspect those in power are anticipating the upcoming difficulty in obtaining valuables like fresh water and fossil fuels and they are trying to solidify a feudal world before the fact. It’s likely we will know by the end of 2012 if they are going to easily obtain this goal they seek. How easy will we make it for them?

With fear, love and solidarity I wish you the best of 2012. Because like a stand of Aspens, we all hold the same fate — our roots locked in embrace during our shared moments of this short life. Let us be brave and kind through this New Year, whatever it may bring.

The urgency of these issues has caused an unprecedented reaction — a global uprising. It was called The Arab Spring when initiated in Tunisia last December and quickly spreading to Egypt and beyond. It’s called Occupy in the US, Europe, and much of Asia. There are protests and citizen repression in almost every nation-state on the planet at this time. And with good reason. Our governments have almost universally failed us in favor of colluding with corporations to form a kleptocracy. This arrangement not only funnels our money to the 1%, it destroys lives, communities and ecologies with impunity. It is this kleptocracy that we intend to dismantle. As this energy of Global R-evolution has bubbled up over the last several years, so has the idea of World 5.0.

I stumbled on the idea seven years ago, and have developed the idea in light of Life, the experience of being we have in this moment. Indeed, the central premise of World 5.0 is that ‘Life Is This Moment.’ The past is gone and tomorrow never comes. Our experience is always Here, unless we’re so caught up in our thoughts and feelings that we don’t recognize Life Here. Living in a bubble has that effect, and so was standard procedure in the World4 culture.

Prior to the failing Industrial Age we find ourselves in currently, we’ve had three previous ages: Neolithic, Agrarian and Medieval. We were hunter/gatherers for long centuries, maybe 150,000 years. 10,000 years ago we began farming with hemp and 1,000 years ago we learned to make machines. It was but 200 years ago that we developed engines, ushering in the Industrial Age. With World4 crumbling around us, the emerging global operating system is World 5.0.

Occupy begins to understand that we require not just a less corrupt world, but a new system entirely. We require a new level of integration, based on ethics and principles like peace and love. Indeed, we can say “we intend to replace the system of globalization built on the corruptive power of money with a system of ethics that supports Life based on the power of Love.” More simply, “we intend a world based on the power of Love instead of the power of money.”

This is not so hard to understand, unless you hold allegiance to the Kleptocracy, like corporate media outlets. Their difficulty is not understanding, it lies in trying to spin something so powerful, honest and peaceful that it is difficult to undermine.

There is much we can do already. World 5.0 encourages localism, spending our money with local purveyors of goods and services instead of global behemoths like Walmart and McDonalds. We can make efforts to grow and buy local food, and encourage organic food production instead of the polluting agribiz model. We can take steps to increase our personal and local energy sustainability, foregoing fossil fuel use as much as possible. We can engage in local civic actions to improve our communities and begin the process of reconstructing government.

The farther reaches of World 5.0 call for a World 5.0 Certification Process, whereas small businesses and organization are easily certified unless they act out of alignment with ethics and our principles. Corporations will typically find certification more challenging. This simple process takes us from a ‘buyer beware’ culture to one of trust in our spending decisions.

World 5.0 seeks to establish a ‘Constitution for the Earth,’ creating a document that enshrines protections for Earth’s ecologies and requires a system of ‘Natural Capital’ so that harvesters of the Earth’s resources, whether mineral, plant or animal, must pay for their extraction and for any negative effects on the system due to that extraction.

Indeed, with World 5.0 we seek to replace the extractive nature of the Industrial Age with the generative energy of Occupy and World5.

With the understanding that World 5.0 provides a ‘core idea’ to Occupy, we further our efforts at positive change  tremendously. First, we clarify by an order of magnitude what Occupy is about. Indeed, World 5.0 provides the context of us living as evolutionary creatures finding our shared identity for the first time in our history.

Second, we codify what Occupy already knows — that corporations are the central problem in our culture today, especially in using their vast wealth to undermine government’s inherent responsibility to meet the needs of their citizens. In the book, World 5.0: Healing Ourselves, Our Earth and Our Life Together, I explore the roots of the Limited Liability Corporation, and the long history of collusion with governmental entities, and how that process has lead to Disaster Capitalism and the general disaster we face today.

Third, we find areas of focus that can be personally implemented at once. These same areas of focus can be used to take on our largest challenges, like an end to war and corporate personhood

Fourth, we find a new awareness in living in this moment, awakened from the bubble of personal thoughts and feelings that cannot be shared. We connect with all we come into contact with, and honor and respect each other.

This allows us to get past long-standing hatreds, controversies and problems based on false ideas of reality and relationship. We are all here together, and the more quickly we understand this, the happier we find ourselves.

Fifth and finally, we create a path forward for the peaceful and agile transition from the Industrial World4 to our new home in World 5.0. We design and build systems that are life-affirming. We create infrastructure, buildings, homes and gardens where artistry is ingrained in the process. We nurture Life as best we are able, and in doing so nurture and restore the Earth. And we find each other as citizens, beloved sisters and brothers who understand our place, and are passionate about healing ourselves and our Earth. And so it is indeed Here we find ourselves. Our civilization is broken, and this global uprising creates an incredibly powerful force for change. Which begs the question, “What sort of change do we want?” Which begs the answer, “World 5.0.”

Today, Engels says (he means the 1870s in Europe  but his comments are still as true now as then) there is a growing sense that something is basically wrong and unfair in how our national and international economic system operates. It can’t employ all who wish to work; millions of people are living in poverty; famines, droughts brought about by human activity engulf large sections of the globe and hunger stalks the streets of many of our largest cities. Families are homeless and uprooted, and our schools and colleges fail to properly educate the youth to understand the world they live in. Yet a very small group of wealthy people grow richer and richer while the vast majority of humanity suffers and wastes away.

This shows, according to Engels, that new ways of production and distribution have evolved and that the social order we live in has not kept up with these developments. In fact, our social order has become dysfunctional and is holding back all the possible potential improvements in human welfare that the new productive and distributive powers could provide. It is the task of socialists to discover and point out the current impediments which prevent the productive system from reaching its full potential and to discover the means of benefiting all humanity rather than just a small portion. And, he says: “These means are not to be invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the existing material facts of production.”

Our present society is the creation of a class of people consisting of merchants, shopkeepers, owners of small manufacturing concerns, all those who made their living either by buying, selling, and trading commodities, small farmers who trucked their product to market and those who ministered to them (doctors, lawyers, teachers and preachers). Underneath this class was a class of laborers who made the commodities, or helped in their storage and distribution, upon which the former relied for their income. This latter class became the working class of today and the former the class of people living off of the surplus value created by the working class. Marx and others referred to them as the bourgeoisie or capitalists.

This mode of production, the creation of commodities for a market, has come to be called capitalism. The first capitalists found themselves subservient to a powerful ruling class of nobles consisting of feudal lords and (mostly) hereditary monarchs who lived by means of agricultural exploitation of serfs and taxation of the income of the developing bourgeoisie. This ruling class stifled the productive capacity of the bourgeoisie and prevented it from reaching its true potential. In other words, the bounds within which the feudal system restricted the capitalists were incompatible with that class’s growing mode of production and so, Engels says, the “bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society.”

Once the feudal bonds were broken (the French Revolution was one of the most dramatic instances) the capitalist mode of production flourished and developed the productive forces of society to unprecedented heights, only in its turn to find that its own associated method of distribution contradicted its mode of production. The social product is a collective creation of working people in all the branches of production but it is appropriated by a small number of capitalists who own and control the means by which this social product is created. The social product is then distributed in a way that increases the social wealth of the capitalist class at the expense of the well being of the working people, ultimately leading to their impoverishment. The only way the working people can free themselves from the exploitation of the capitalist class is by uniting together and abolishing it.

This conflict is waged daily in every work place, factory, field, and mine where the capitalist mode of production holds sway. This very active and real class warfare is a feature, 24/7, of daily life in almost every country on the face of the earth, and just like high blood pressure (the silent killer) it is going on and even intensifying whether the people involved are aware of it or not.

Engels says, “Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.”  The fact that in many countries many, and even most, working people are lacking this “reflex in thought” is testament to the power of the capitalist class, through its mass media and control of the education system, means of entertainment, and professional sports, to fill the heads of working people with illusions and a false sense of reality.

How did this class warfare between workers and capitalists begin?  It was not to be found in the Middle Ages because the peasant farmers and handicraft men, or their families, made their own necessities by and large, and the products of their labor belonged to them. They could use them themselves or take them to market as commodities or pay their taxes and feudal dues in kind or exchange them with one another.

With the progress of invention it was possible for a person to set up shop with, say, many looms, and put many hands to work side by side with the peasant with his own loom in his hut making products for himself. Now the product of the man with many looms belonged to him and loom workers were given wages.

Engels says the old division of labor of the peasant village with products being exchanged in kind began to break up as this primitive factory system began to evolve. “In the midst of the old division of labour, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production.” Planning locally, and eventually central planning, was a major feature of the success of capitalism. Whatever the problems of 20th century socialism were, they did not result from the use of central planning, per se.

As the capitalist system evolved it eventually replaced individual production with social production but kept in place individual appropriation of the products that were produced – thus creating a new class of exploited human beings that became known as the proletariat who soon began to stand outcast and starving amid the wonders they had made, which wonders were now the property of the bourgeoisie.

As production for a market became more and more wide spread it was soon discovered, Engels points out, that: “Anarchy reigns in socialized production.” This is because no one can really tell what the fate of the commodities they are making will be.  Will there be a demand for them? Will they be sold at a profit or loss? Even with the planning involved in setting up the factory system there always remains this risk factor under capitalism.

Capitalism thus finds itself subject to the laws of EXCHANGE (“the only persistent form of social interrelations”) which manifest themselves in competition. The anarchy became exacerbated since capitalism destroys competing modes of production and will not co-exist with them;thus handicrafts were replaced by the system of manufacture and manufacture by steam powered machinery.

This all happened under pressure of the age of discovery, starting roughly with the voyages of Columbus, and planting of colonies which vastly increased the number of markets and sealed the fate of the handicraft system which could not keep up with demand. It also led to the outbreaks of wars between nations fighting for market share — a form of anarchistic behavior that still marks the world capitalist system.

It is at this point that Engels turns to Darwinian images to describe the relations of capitalists to one another. Both Marx and Engels were very impressed with The Origin of Species but neither were so-called “social Darwinists.” Nevertheless, today’s globalization is simply an extension of the world market of the nineteenth century that Engels described as a universal struggle of existence between different capitalist elites and whole nations and those who fail are “remorselessly cast aside” — unless, of course, they get government stimulus money and bailouts.

“It is,” Engels says, “the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence.” Capitalism reduces humanity back to its natural animal form of existence. This is the result of the intensification of the contradiction between socialized mode of production and the private capitalist appropriation of the social product.

One of the results of the unfettered competition between capitalists is that they lose control of their own economic system, as we see going on at present, and as it crashes the anarchy of production (which also reigns in the financial sector) forces “the great majority” of the people into becoming “proletarians.”  The current Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWSM) reflects the fact the “middle class” (actually a better paid strata of the working class mixed with small business people and professionals) is being forced into lower paid jobs, unemployment, bankruptcy, and debt and sees no way out for itself in this economy. They are becoming part of the surplus population (from the point of view of the capitalists) and don’t like it. They have yet to fully realize that this is the natural outcome of capitalism and their only hope for a better life is to support socialist economic measures.

The OWSM is a natural response to what is the latest breakdown in the capitalist system. Engels dates the first general breakdown to the Crisis of 1825, caused by over- speculation by the banks (esp. the Bank of England) in unsound investments in Latin America (esp. Peru). Just as our current crisis, investors were given misinformation about the soundness of their investments and when the market collapsed were left holding bag. The banks use the term “asymmetric information” to note that what they know about the investment and what you know is different. The term “fraud” would be more to the point. In 1825 France bailed out England.  In our current crisis the US taxpayers bailed out the banks.

These panics used to occur about every ten years but there was some stabilization after World War II and we had about 60 years of minor panics and recessions before this current world wide ongoing economic crash of the capitalist system with no end in sight. However, for Engels, what looks like a financial crisis is really a crisis in production. Socialized production has made too many goodies for the markets so factories laid off working people who then could not pay their bills — esp. the fraudulent mortgages. Since the financial sector had cooked up so many mortgages based on “asymmetric information” the whole economy began to fall apart.

So many factories remain closed or under-utilized that unemployment balloons, and the great productive forces available to our economy are dormant until the capitalists can figure how to get them going again in such a way that they, not the American people, can once again appropriate the wealth that will be created by the workers. The added twist of our day is that capitalists, their industries having become unproductive during the down turn, add to their profits by getting out of paying taxes, by adding fees and surcharges to service products, and by hiking interest rates to private borrowers (credit cards, for example) even while commercial interest rates are held low by government intervention via the Federal Reserve.

As the corporate world flounders, as the auto industry recently did, it relies on “its official representative”; namely, the state, to come to its aid. It should be obvious to all that the state which Lincoln called “of the people, for the people, by the people” is now “of, for, and by the corporations”. It is their referee.

Engels says that the state will eventually be forced to take over the commanding heights of the economy simply because the capitalists can no longer control them due to the growing contradiction between the socialized productive forces (masses of workers united with or without unions in the creation of the social product in factories and industries and subject to increasing unemployment and poverty) and the private appropriation of the social product by the 1 to 10% of the ruling class and its top functionaries. The tipping point has not yet been reached, but it is coming.  If not in this crisis, then the next it will present itself.

This state takeover under capitalism is not yet socialism, Engels tells us, even though the commanding heights will have been converted into state property. However, the takeover reveals that all the functions of running the economy can be taken over by state “salaried employees”. Since the “modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine” as it is forced to nationalize failing industries “it actually becomes the national capitalist.” The state directly exploits the working people having done away with individual, and incompetent, private capitalists (done in by their own creation).

This is not a stable situation and in a democracy it cannot last. The contradiction between the state and the people brings “to a head” the capitalist relation between people and their government and this must “topple over.”  State capitalism is not, therefore, the answer to the class conflict, “but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements” leading to that answer.

Once the people understand the source of their problems is the private appropriation of the social product, then the 99% can really set an agenda to put the 1% in their place. Here is what Engels thinks should happen. The people should set about ” the harmonizing of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange.” Hopefully they can do this through political action and the regulation of the three modes. Engels says “it depends only upon ourselves to subject them to our own will” and if we don’t do so, these forces will continue to work against us and to master us. State capitalism will be transformed in the direction of socialism.

The greatest challenge is to become conscious of the need for what is to be done especially when that need is the take over of the economy by the people because “this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders”; i.e., the capitalists, the major political parties, the mass media, the mainstream churches, and the public and private education systems as well as the leadership of most unions and mass organizations as presently constituted.

Nevertheless, according to Engels, as the crisis deepens this consciousness will begin to develop in all of the above institutions except for the capitalist class itself and those completely dependent upon it. The working people and its allies and friends, the 99%, will have to take political power out of the hands of the corporations and their flunkies, if they have not already been nationalized, and turn the current privately held means of production into state property.

A by product of this action, the abolition of private property, is that the 1% will no longer have the means to dominate the 99% — all people will be equally working for their own and the common good. This is what Engels means when speaking of the ending of classes and class exploitation.

An even more startling consequence, to both his own time and ours, is Engels’ (and Marx’s) belief that the state will disappear. Even the most jaded Libertarian or demented tea bagger could never hope to get government reduced to zero. But Engels points out that throughout history the role of the state has been to control the 99% in the interests of the 1% — be they slave owners, feudal lords, or capitalists. This role will no longer exist in a society where everything (economically speaking) is owned and managed by the people collectively at the points of production and distribution. There will still be planning commissions and civic associations, but the state, as we know it, will be superfluous.

This doesn’t  mean that the state will be formally abolished by some sort of declaration or proclamation. It will just slowly wither away over time as its functions become moribund. At least this is the ideal that Engels has in mind for it; perhaps like “liberty and justice for all” it will remain an ideal that every generation comes closer to but never 100% attains. Then again maybe Engels will be right.

We must be mindful that all of this speculation about the coming to power of the working people, the disappearance of the 1%, the transition to socialism, etc., is dependent on the development of the productive forces of society to such a high degree of perfection that they can eliminate scarcity and there will be the possibility of abundance of food and other necessities and luxuries for all and that the only reason for poverty and suffering is the control of society by the 1% in its own selfish interests.

In the language of philosophy this means that Sartre’s proposition in the Critique of  Dialectical Reason: “Scarcity is a fundamental relation of our History and a contingent determination of our univocal relation to materiality” leading to his assertion “There is not enough for everybody” does not hold, it has been overcome and negated, for our world. Indeed, Engels thought it did not hold even in the nineteenth century. We have the productive capacity but we cannot use it due to the capitalist framework within which it exists. It is as the sick person — the medicine exists to cure him but he hasn’t the money to buy it, so he dies.

If this is ever done, and it is a big IF, the world humanity will find itself in after the passing of the capitalist mode of production will be very different from the world of today. Commodity production will cease as there will be no market and no anarchy of production. Objects with use values will be made according to a central plan and they will be made to satisfy human needs not to be sold for profit. There will be no more struggle for existence as all humans will be provided for and, Engels says, for the first time humanity will live as humans should and not be subject to an animal existence. For the first time humanity will control the laws of its own social existence and economy and not be subjected to them. The pre-history of humanity will be over and the true history of humanity will begin. It will be the beginning not the end of history. It will be the leap of humanity “from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”

Well, as the Chinese say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, I hope we have made that step on September 17, 2011 a few blocks from Wall Street in Liberty Square. But even if we haven’t and Engels was at heart an utopian and his vision of the future a dream, still a dream, if that is all it is, can, as Martin Luther King, Jr.  taught us, inspire people to fight for a better world.

Then he asked us to take a few minutes to seriously consider what our favorite celebrity would have to do—what egregious crime they’d have to commit, what disgusting character flaw they’d have to expose—in order for us not to “like” him or her anymore.  According to the professor, the object of the exercise was to “explore the boundaries of tolerance.”

I chose Bob Dylan.  Looking back on it, that choice now seems ridiculously trivial.  In my defense, let me say that it didn’t have to be Dylan.  Even at the time, I realized it could just as easily have been one of 50 other people, drawing from artists, writers, philosophers, politicians, as well as other entertainers.  I could have picked John Dewey, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, Hunter Thompson, Eugene McCarthy or 50 others.  I could’ve picked David Hume or Marlon Brando.  The list was endless.

But I picked Dylan.  I picked him not only because I liked his music and had fallen under his spell, but because I knew a considerable amount about his personal history.

The classroom discussion that followed was very revealing.  In fact, it’s fair to say it was mind-boggling.  Unless that whole damn class was lying, it soon became apparent that there was virtually nothing any of our “cultural heroes” could do wrong that would change our opinion of them.  We liked who we liked….and we were going to keep liking them.  No matter what.

Part of the classroom exercise was to bring up all the hypothetical crimes and character defects we could think of to talk ourselves out of it.  What if, for example, our heroes were alcoholics or druggies?  What if Albert Einstein was a heroin addict who sold drugs to teenagers and turned kids into dope fiends?  No, the class more or less agreed that that wasn’t a good enough reason to give up on him.  The relativity theory is still the relativity theory.

What if James Madison was found to have been guilty of spousal abuse?  What if it turned out that he used to beat the living tar out of poor Dolly?  Nope….he was still a great man.  What about cases of flagrant racism?  No.  Sadism?  No.  Fascist tendencies?  No.  Embezzlement?  Child molestation?  Cruelty to animals?  Armed robbery?  Nope.  None of the things we brought up could pry us off our favorites.  We were mindlessly loyal.

Students pointed out that even though many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners, it shouldn’t mean we can’t respect or revere them for what they contributed to the formation of the country.  And let’s not forget that the same Earl Warren who stripped Japanese-Americans of their property and interned them in concentration camps was the same Earl Warren who led the fight for Brown vs. Board of Education.  And Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  Etc.

But what about murder?  Surely, that would matter.  Wrong.  Murder didn’t necessarily tip the scales either.  A student who had named Mozart as his “all-time favorite person” was asked by the professor if his appreciation of the great composer would be diminished if he learned that Mozart had, in fact, been a serial killer—that he had roamed the streets of Vienna committing Jack-the-Ripper-style grisly murders of young women.  The student answered that it would not. “I’d like to think that I’d be able to separate the man from his art,” he said proudly.

As for myself, would my opinion of Bob Dylan have changed if I’d found out that he’d killed a man, or that he was a wife-beater, or that he used the term “nigger” in private conversations?  Would I scratch him off my list of cultural heroes….or would I take a deep breath and find a way to “separate the man from his art”?

Which brings us to patriotism.  It’s easy to see why we have no difficulty reconciling our country’s sins.  Whether it was the extermination of native Americans, support of rightwing tyrants who uttered those three magic words (“I hate Communism”), the devastation of Iraq, or the killing of civilians in Afghanistan, we seem to have little capacity for self-recrimination.  American exceptionalism is alive and well.

During this period, what arose was a romanticism for nature (hence, perhaps, the popularity of evolutionary theory at that time), and the belief that, if only man could be freed of the corruption of society and its contrived conventions—of the state, of the clergy and, for some, of matrimony and of private property—then man, therefore, would be poised to achieve heights undreamed of hitherto.

It was these conditions which gave rise to the French Revolution, which, ironically, came to depend on the keystone mechanism of the State—violence—and gave way to a period during which France conquered swathes of Western Civilization. Still, from 1770 until 1914, many have argued that a culture of staunch self-reliance generally attitudinized Western Civilization, sometimes summarized by the concept of laissez-faire.

Much of this self-reliance held that, if society is evil, then the State—which is merely the organized vertical force of society—is doubly evil. If man is innately good, then he ought to be completely freed from this coercive power of the State. Indeed, nineteenth century Liberalism believed man should be freed from all coercive power, among which might be included the church, army and other institutions. Society, in this case, would have little power other than the power required to restrain the strong from oppressing the weak.

The idea of a “community of interests” was also very strong during this period. This “community of interests” was a realm in which what was good for one was good for all. Somewhere, according to this belief, there did exist a reality where everybody would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this pattern could be achieved over time. In it, each person could fall into that place in society best suited to his abilities. Implicit in this belief was that human ability is innate and can only be suppressed or altered by social discipline and that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest.

In 1880, the belief that the current generation, and indeed all generations, was the culmination of a long process of history. Oftentimes, this long process is referred to as progress, a phenomenon that had lasted millennia and would continue forevermore. This belief ran so deep that progress, by many, was seen as inevitable and automatic.

These nineteenth century epistemes have, in the twentieth century, been considerably modified—or so it would seem at first glance. Wherefore such a change? Four traumatic decades at the onset of the twentieth century, and five decades of intense militarism by two premier Empires, led to a perceivable sea change in the disposition of men. Included in these shattering experiences are the First World War, world depression, world financial crisis, and the Second World War. These were then followed by the Cold War.

On the byway of these traumas, major adjustments were made in the western brain. Men now had viable reason to doubt their entrenched belief in the innate goodness of man. Evil was no longer merely the absence of good.

In the course of these events, millions were killed and billions of dollars wasted. Impossible to comprehend for most, such a blow altered man’s disposition on their own species. The First World War was seen as an aberration—and one from which they must quickly move on and forget.

For ten years a façade was created, a lie. In 1929, the stock market crashed. World depression ensued, and was followed by financial crisis. In the late thirties, sabers rattled as rearmament and aggression.

After 1945, a new world was evident. Opposed with the nineteenth century view of man as innately good and society as corrupting, increasingly the belief that man had a seemingly infinite capacity for untold evil insinuated itself into the minds of men. Without a society—that is, large institutions designed to quell man’s beastly desires, to nudge them towards desired beliefs and behaviors—man would certainly destroy himself. Efforts hinting at such a belief can be seen in the attempted erection of the League of Nations after the First World War, and the establishment of the United Nations (UN) after the Second World War.

The former western belief that human philosophies and abilities are innate and should be free from social duress in order to display individuality was replaced by the idea that the personality is a result of social repetition and training and must be coerced to socially acceptable ends. The laissez-faire economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be replaced by social discipline and central planning.

The “community of interests” of the free market would take backseat to the welfare community, which must be organized by wise-men. An intellectual environment would arise friendly to assertions of some sort of “de-evolution” or social retrogression or human extinction. Democracy would now be replaced by authoritarianism, and the laissez-faire Capitalism by State Enterprise or command-and-control.

Now, here in the twenty-first century, it has grown clearer that progress is not a steady force with inevitable outcomes. Rather, man’s social development can be seen as a more anarchic, spontaneous process, no matter how much rulers attempt to ensure things remain predictable. These same notions are increasingly amending Darwin’s theory of evolution, or progress, towards more perfect forms.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century were schizophrenic times, as has been so much of human history. Nationalistic tendencies undermined royal empires, and out of this flux came a vibrant forum of idea sharing. Thoughts of a laissez-faire lifestyle wherein individuals were freed from the European caste system led to the mythology of the New World, even if the New World only reflected such a lifestyle pre-Constitution, and scantily so.

A way of understanding that was promoted, if too often implicitly and not explicitly, by eighteenth and nineteenth century sentiments, holds that the natural ought to be esteemed before the political. Even today, too often do our philosophies on how life should be grow politicized, thereby undermining their original power. Humans are not political beings. They are natural beings. The questions of how we should live our lives are unanswerable by politics, for politics is merely a means of ordering life by way of the state or government. The questions of how we should live our lives are answerable only by naturalism; that is, by recognizing that which makes us humans.

Our consciousness blossoms as a beautiful aberration from other life in the natural world as we know it. The cognitive niche, inherited from nature, that we inhabit gives us an axiom from which our understanding of the world stems. This can be easily interrupted and distorted by the data and information we are fed. Whether it be outright war, depression or manipulative fiction on television or in the movies, we are all easily victimized by the campaigning of pathological behavior by the trendsetters; that is, the ruling class—and our peers who follow. They have adopted the cynicism passed down by a century marred by two Great Wars, a deep depression, and a long standoff between two nuclear powers.

The cynicism bequeathed unto us by a violent twentieth century has led us to the belief that we need centralized governments and rulers to keep us from doing violence to one another. But what we see are large institutions, instead of keeping people in-line, projecting violence down civilization’s ladder, and turning individuals against themselves, thus creating the precise environment people hoped they would prevent. Indeed, they were all along the impetuses of the bloodletting and carnage people were attempting to escape.

Unless the Occupy Movement contains the roots of real behavioral change it will be a flash in the pan.  People will become excited by the possibility of regaining control of the forces that surround them, but unless they are clear on what is required, they will, of necessity, fall back into the behaviors that support the economic elite rather than discover the actions that will chasten them.

Being heard is not winning.  The plutocrats know that the masses are being abused; they are the abusers, for Christ’s sake (take that last as you will).  These are not people who are unaware of the consequences of their actions; they do not care that hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of people’s lives are damaged or destroyed: they do not care!  Their behaviors will not change if their actions are pointed out to them.

The plutocracy is concerned that their behaviors might become generally known to an increasingly informed populace, but only in the sense that they would then have to own-up to being an aristocracy, a nobility, that can more easily do as it wishes when the people are ignorant, but just as willing to exercise its power directly over the people if it has to.  The Occupy Movement may be effective in exposing power relationships, but without its own participants’ willingness for personal changes, there will be no greater result.

If the goal of the Occupy Movement is the resurrection of the American Dream and the Great Middle Class, it will fail fast.  The economic elite owns that road and controls all the tollbooths.  They are wired into that path like the brain is wired into the muscles.  No; the elite must be starved out by the formation of self-sufficient heterogeneous human communities all over this country and the world who are willing, even desirous, to live a simpler life, a life in which the economic elite and their tollbooths can be avoided.

We have no targeted  “antibiotic” for the disease of plutocracy. Like pre-penicillin medical “cures”, the pathogen must be attacked with a poison, designed in its dosage and application to kill it, before the patient is too seriously damaged.  That is where we are now in our understanding and capacity to deal with the machinations of run-away economics and growth.  It is now time to take our medicine, though there is very little likelihood that we will, preferring rather to die of the disease.

As long as each person absolutely has to sell some large bit of his or her life and labor in order to not die, the world will always turn out as it has.  As long as food, shelter and other essentials for life are obtainable only by purchase using money gained with labor sold to someone else, no governing design, no system of laws will support the masses, but will always become the tools of enslavement to an elite who will use the masses as instruments for their desires.  This is quite independent of any ‘ism’ under which the people labor.

The selling of labor must, at some level, be voluntary for human societies to be both stable and healthy.  This means that real viable options for satisfactorily meeting essential needs be part of the “ecology” of the society.  When ‘work’ that no member of a society will do voluntarily becomes necessity, especially for some members, then a few must be forced to do it.  Patterns of social conflict, slavery and war – the stuff of our human history – are the result; patterns that we can no longer afford.

The mass movements evident around the world, of which the Occupy Movement is a part, are possibly the last chance that the species has to make adaptations to our real situation on the earth before the biophysical processes that support the present structure of life are so perturbed that ecological collapse is inevitable.  If the energy of these movements is devoted solely to wresting power and wealth from the present elite, which would be most easily facilitated by starting a struggle to gather wealth and power into the hands of a new elite, then the pot will have only been stirred with no change in our actual circumstances.

What we require may be impossible, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t require it: a drowning man requires a breath of air; the degree of need doesn’t determine that he will get it.  Rather than uncritically redistributing wealth and power in some manner acceptable to the ‘movement leaders’, these instruments of human maladjustment must be redefined as community and environmental property.  This redefinition must happen in the minds of the people. The Occupy Movement cannot, in its heart of hearts, have as a goal that “the people” will take over power from the elite, but must understand that the present forms and structures of power will only create, in no time, new elite communities that are just as mad and self-serving as the present ones.

It must be recognized and acted on that the human unit is the heterogeneous human community; the economic and power elite form or buy “communities”, but demand that the masses confront elite collective action as individuals without power, like a single person confronting a street gang.  We see this everywhere: the company “bargains” with the employee or with the customer; the petty criminal confronts the police, the DA’s office and the court; the home buyer is delivered the developer’s covenants, the speeder talks with the cop representing ‘The Law.’  Collective action that does not support elite community needs and desires is co-opted, marginalized or criminalized.

As long as a critical mass of the masses desires to have what the economic elite has, as long as they honor the result of elite behavior, then they will be ripe targets to be persuaded to support elite methods.  Belief that individuals have the right, even the responsibility, to collect excess wealth into their absolute control is a destructive insanity; any unbiased look at history associated with competent reasoning demonstrates the consequences.  And when a society makes the individual collection of excess, not just desirable, but essential for both safety and acceptability in that society, there is no other outcome than the one we currently face.

The Occupy Movement and the other mass movements worldwide challenge status quo beliefs and habits; this is the best possible time to begin planting the seeds for the beliefs and understandings that just might allow the species to get out of the trap we have constructed.  It is almost certainly too much to ask that the movement message include a major shift of societal story; so much simpler to stay with the same story and only attempt to reassign the players. But the effort must still be made.

Here are three, somewhat overlapping, lists of changes in thinking that need to begin to percolate into the new societal story; all more fully explicated in previous essays posted on the Dissident Voice site.

A new Seven Deadly Sins:

1) Progress

2) Economic growth

3) Property

4) Excess

5) Censorship

6) Repression

7) Religion

Five foundational beliefs and actions to replace our current hodgepodge (from What We Must Do):

1) All life is important.

2) The value of a life is in the daily living of it, not in the tallying up of duration.

3) No one is to live from the fruits of another’s labor.

4) We must not make the assumption that the ‘life style’ (really level of consumption) that is average for the highest consuming population is the one we should adopt as our standard.

5) We must finally come to a socially and intellectually mature relationship with our “religious instincts.”

Eight foundational beliefs and understandings to replace our current hodgepodge (from Extremism in the Defense of Survival)

1) Humans are animals that must integrate their behaviors into ecological processes.

2) Nothing can be owned by anything; all claims of property and ownership are relationships in which one party is arbitrarily devalued based on short-term power imbalances.

3) Wealth accumulation is an aberrant behavior – a form of psychopathology.

4) The measure of normal in the world must be from places and processes that are uninfluenced by human action.

5) There are no normal or natural human behaviors, group or individual, of any scale remaining in the human repertoire.

6) Humans are a community-based organism.

7) Our understandings of and relationships to health, illness and death have become terribly distorted.

8) Our spiritual understandings and habits are the distorted products of the pre-scientific forest life made to serve the interests of kings and other authoritarians.

I add this final thought:

Individualism is the opposite of valuing individual human beings.  Individuals are supremely valuable and that value is only formed and sustained in community.

After all, we don’t just give such things away in today’s society — everyone’s supposed to make their own living and pay for their own things, including shelter. We exist in contradiction. Many of the values we hold dear and try to instill in our children, such as the value of sharing, are devalued in the way we actually live. We remind our children to share their toys while, at the same time, we demonstrate with our actions that “greed is good;” that we highly value private, guarded cocoons nestled away from the troubles of others; and that individual accumulation of material wealth is the mark of success. A natural world of plenty made this ethic of greed possible — but this world is changing.

Resource depletion and scarcity may drive us closer to cooperative ways of living and away from the cultural impulse to compete with each other. We may have to share our tools and our toys, our knowledge and our time — our very lives may depend on it. We’ll need each other to provide shelter from the environmental and economic storms that are brewing. This notion is a frightening prospect to many of us, but if we face coming challenges together, we may have more to gain than to lose.

Sustainability as Relationship

Environmental economist James Pittman defines sustainability as “the long-term equilibrium of health and integrity maintained dynamically within any individual system (organism, organization, ecosystem, community, etc.) through a diversity of relationships with other systems.” In other words, sustainability is about healthy, long-term relationships that are mutually beneficial, among people and between people and nature. Seeing sustainability this way makes a lot of sense and gives us a solid foundation for action.

In a world of rapidly depleting fossil fuels and other resources, we won’t have the luxury to go it alone. We’re going to have to learn to share. Every household won’t be able to have its own extension ladder, its own snow blower, its own truck for hauling, its own mower, and many other tools marketed to individual families. In the shrinking economy that fossil fuel depletion will bring, some of us will be moving in with relatives and friends, as is already happening as a result of the Great Recession, an economic event driven at least in part by high fossil fuel prices.

In our hyper-individualized world, we’re taught not to depend on anyone. Having to do so means we’re somehow inadequate when, in actuality, community interdependence is the heritage of all people everywhere. We would not have survived and thrived in communities and as a species without it. Community interdependence is human. It also forms a crucial foundation for relationships that can and must be maintained over the long haul — if we are to survive and prosper in an age of material limits.

Humans aren’t meant to go it alone anyway. We’re highly social creatures, a trait that is fundamental to the meaning of our lives and our success as a species. Without powerful social learning processes, we wouldn’t have been able to develop the technologically advanced societies we have today — ironically, societies that have come to use technologies in ways destructive to the natural world that is the basis for our very survival.

But our sociality hasn’t always been, and currently isn’t always, turned toward destructive ends. In many traditional and indigenous cultures, selfishness and hoarding are not considered pathways to a prosperous and fulfilling life. One’s livelihood and wellbeing are intimately tied to the livelihood and wellbeing of everyone within the community. A diffuse reciprocity is the currency of the community. People give to others and know that they can count on the community in times of need. The relationships that grow from this interdependence embody a form of social security not based on money. In this time of great economic and monetary instability, we may come to find sooner rather than later that our relationships of interdependence are our most stable and immediately available form of social security.

And this change could bring us good things. We know that the relentless drive for economic growth is quite literally devouring the natural world and leaving behind a long term legacy of poison and waste. If we can find security and fulfillment through healthy, reciprocating relationships with one another and the places we call home, we just might avert the worst of the disasters that surely await us if we stay the present course.

We also might find that we don’t feel so alone and empty. We might live more meaningful lives because everyone’s efforts, knowledge, and talents will be needed as we collectively move through a period of great turmoil into an era of natural limits. In a future where our relationships truly matter, we can belong and we can matter in profound and immediate ways simply through playing our humble parts in our families and communities.

I don’t wish to imply, however, that relationships are easy, especially given our social training in the modern age. Insecurity and neuroses are consciously and continually instilled within us by powerful business interests that see us primarily as consumers to be targeted with advertising. We’re told over and over again in the barrage of corporate messages we receive that we’re not lovable and that we need ever more products to overcome our inadequacies. We’re also taught to consume shallow forms of entertainment that divert our time and attention from our important relationships. Radical individualism, rampant personal insecurities, and defensiveness will prove to be very challenging obstacles to community building.

What’s more, in today’s world, we gain our security primarily through making money rather than forming lasting bonds with others. Our attachments are often purely emotional and highly changeable. If we have a conflict with a person, we can simply write that person off because we don’t perceive him/her as crucial in some way to continuing our way of life. We can find other friends. Our relationships tend to be transitory and shallow. We feel we don’t have to put up with anything from anyone, and our cultivated intolerance keeps us from getting to know others deeply in both their positive and negative aspects, a requisite process for intimacy. It seems the shelter we won’t give — or get — is not only physical, but emotional and spiritual as well.

We currently face, therefore, not only the extremely pressing challenges of environmental damage and destruction, but the social challenges of rebuilding community. Still, I believe that rebuilding community is not only possible but required for sustainability. I believe that, through rebuilding community, we can individually and collectively come into our own. If ever there were a time to shine a light on what is humane in ourselves and to bring those values into the work of community building, that time is now.

But we will need to develop relationships that go beyond our human communities if we are to live sustainably. We will need to repair our relationship with nature.

The Realm of Sustainability: Community, Nature, and Place

If there’s one relationship that’s suffered perhaps more than most in the modern world, it’s our relationship with nature. And yet, we depend on nature for literally everything necessary to our physical wellbeing. Nature gives us fresh water to drink, we engage with nature to obtain our food, and we breathe the air that nature provides.

We also draw emotional and spiritual sustenance from our relationships with animals (perhaps most notably from our relationships with our pets) and from the time we spend in our gardens and parks, near streams and rivers, and gazing at the stars or a summer sunset. I would be hard pressed to find a single person who has not perceived him- or herself as having a deeply meaningful relationship with at least one aspect of nature: a farm, a trail, a city park. I include these “human” spaces within our discussion of nature because we, like all living creatures, are part of nature. It is with nature that we co-create the spaces in which we live and produce our food.

If we are part of nature and nature is within us, we imperil ourselves in our neglect and abuse of the environment. It is in healthy, reciprocating partnership with nature that we must rebuild and reinvigorate our communities, especially if we are to live in a world with much reduced and much slower travel options, a world in which going elsewhere and shipping in abundance from afar simply are not options.

In his insightful book Community and the Politics of Place, political scientist Daniel Kemmis reminds us that even people who have lived in challenging environments have often been able to maintain healthy, long-term relationships with nature without extensive monetary resources. These societies have developed effective social learning and support networks that have allowed them to survive — and even at times thrive.

According to Kemmis, people who are rooted in a place for cultural or economic reasons — people who must survive where they are — don’t have the luxury of separateness or simply moving on to greener pastures. In such a community, if a good barn is necessary to survival and someone needs a new barn, everyone in the community must help build it, whether or not all parties “like” one another. They have to help because mutual aid is quite literally required for their survival. If the networks of mutual aid and assistance are not carefully and consciously maintained, all will suffer, and the consequences could be devastating or even fatal.

These requisite networks of mutual aid and assistance, according to Kemmis, are the basis for what he calls “public values” — a set of beliefs and practices for living well in a place that is shared among all community members regardless of their personality differences or their minor grudges and gripes. These values, according to Kemmis, also form a foundation for building deep and abiding relationships across difference. They can also help prepare a community to address social and environmental challenges.

Strengthening social learning and support networks is therefore a vital strategy for community resiliency. And when the notion of community is contextualized to our places and extended to nature more generally, strengthening these networks is also a highly appropriate strategy for sustainability in challenging times.

We should aim to create a stewardship of intimacy with each other, the land, and nature with reciprocity as our grounding principle. If we do, we just might build the shelter we need.

• This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

The essay argues that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is not working because the movement has no clear message and is not demographically representative of those who are affected most by the current economic problems.  While Ellis does raise important points about movement-messaging and political representation, she in no way tries to understand the internal logic and outward expression of OWS.

Ellis’ conclusions center around four main points: that OWS’s “kitchen sink approach” is a form of ineffective messaging; that the media’s focus on the police brutality distracts from OWS’s main message (or lack thereof); that the hacktavist collective Anonymous inhibits the OWS movement; and that the OWS participants are the “usual suspects” of “dreamers.”  In what follows, I provide counter-arguments to each of Ellis’ points as an attempt to flesh-out some of the philosophies, practices, and communicative strategies of Occupy Wall Street.  I want to note that I am not seeking to attack Lauren Ellis in any way.  Instead, I am trying to demonstrate why her arguments—representative of many like-minded skeptics—are insufficiently substantiated.

1. Kitchen Sink vs. Multi-Issued Messaging

It is common practice to critique festival and carnivalesque protests (and radical social movement overall) as lacking coherent, effective messages.  I agree that protesters and social movements (of all kinds) bare the responsibility of effective messaging.  But we must realize that OWS does involve a rhetorical logic.  OWS is not lacking a coherent message; instead, its message is multi-issued, politically complex, and systemic: economic inequality, layoffs, house foreclosures, bank bailouts, million dollar bonuses, overpriced health insurance, cuts to social welfare, credit card debt, the student loan industry, tax breaks for the rich, under-funded schools, climate change, genetically modified food, the burgeoning prison-industrial complex, war, as well as racism, sexism, and homophobia are interconnected issues.  None of these occur in a vacuum; instead, each contributes to, and affects, the others.

One of the root causes of “this current system” is corporate dominance.  Most (if not everyone) can agree that corporations control this country.  Political, educational, prison, mass media, and military systems are dominated by the corporate will-to-profit.  Even the production of culture is a corporate manufacturing of brands, logos, jingles, and cradle-to-the grave advertising.  How many people identify themselves by the brands that they wear, consume, and purchase?  How much material support is given to independent artists, musicians, and film makers?  How many words within the collective lexicon—like Google, Xerox, and Coke—are actually corporate titles?  Corporate dominance is not the only root cause of these interrelated issues, but it is a good place to start.  Protesters are thus occupying Wall Street because it is the epicenter of corporate dominance and condenses all of these issues into one symbolic force.

2(a).  Police Brutality Stealing the Spotlight vs. Political Theater

It is also common to critique mass arrests—and the direct actions that usually spur those arrests—as another form of ineffective messaging.  But people must realize that direct action and civil disobedience are forms of messaging, albeit, forms of embodied messaging—the action is the message, with the assumption that observers will have the wherewithal to understand this form of messaging.  Just as audience members “read between the lines” to understand the actions that occur on a theatrical stage, observers must also read between the lines to understand the actions that occur on a politically occupied street corner.  This is not a lot to expect given the fact that we are all actors and audience members, every day and all day.  Each of us is a walking embodiment-and-expression of our roles, beliefs, values, perspectives, and philosophies.  We are all constantly performing for one another, continually expressing and reading-and-reacting to one another’s embodiment.  This inter-subjective and reflexive process often occurs subconsciously.  But direct actions and mass arrests call us to attention: politics is an embodied phenomenon.

Occupy Wall Street is therefore a message about reappropriating our political agency:  The business of greed, hyper-competition, private gain, casino capitalism, and political corruption must stop immediately, and people are willing to put their bodies on the line to make this happen.  And if that message is too long and complicated, here’s an easier one:  Our current system of profit before people is inhumane and unjust.

2(b).  Police Brutality Stealing the Spotlight vs. Journalistic Integrity

Arguing that direct action and mass arrests distract from the main message implies that the protesters are to blame for how the media portrays the situation.  Again, every protester has some responsibility for rhetorical effectiveness.  But in this case, we should be blaming the mass media rather than the protesters.  There are a million ways to cover a story and a million details to focus on.  But much of the mainstream coverage focuses on the cop vs. protester scenario.  Why?  Because the public has become accustomed to want such time-tested, politically vapid narratives.

As the saying goes, if it bleeds, its leads.  This is a problem of journalistic integrity, not of ineffective messaging by the protesters.  I find it hard to believe that reporters and journalists are incapable of properly deciphering the basic message of Occupy Wall Street.  At the very least, one could interpret the occupation as “Wall Street equals Bad.”  I would assume that an honest, hardworking reporter would want to understand why this message is being communicated with such passion, dedication, and urgency.  If that were to occur, then perhaps mainstream media outlets would actually air open and honest debates about the merits and pitfalls of the Occupy Wall Street message.

3. Anonymous vs. Anti-authoritarianism

Occupy Wall Street is structured around anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchical principles of decentered organizing practices.  Unlike older models of, say, the civil rights movement, OWS does not offer up a single spokesperson standing on a well-defined stage articulating one clear message.  Instead, there are many people on many stages offering up numerous-yet-interconnected demands, goals, and/or outlooks.  The point is to resist a top-down approach and to invite, instead, a diversified, bottom-up, directly democratic approach.  No model of organizing is ideal, and neither is this one.  But this helps explain why particular groups—such as the Anonymous hacktavist collective—will appear to simultaneously champion and distance themselves from OWS.  It’s like a kaleidoscope: different groups and causes will appear and disappear depending upon when and how you look at it.  Such a structure allows people to enter, exit, and contribute on their own accord.  In many ways, then, the anti-authoritarianism of Occupy Wall Street is about radical immediacy: the immediate evocation of one’s desired reality.  That immediate evocation is partial and incomplete, but that is true for all human-created realities.  We are finite and fallible creatures always working from partial histories and moving toward unpredictable futures.  Occupy Wall Street is no different.

4.  The Usual Suspects vs. The Radical Imagination

It is too easy to reduce Occupy Wall Street to a rendition of the radical 1960s.  Such a reduction commonly occurs any time a radical movement emerges, as if political radicalism began and ended with the hippie counter-cultural movement.  Radical social movements—along with anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate sentiments—play an intimate role throughout American (and world) history.  I agree that OWS began with a small group of people that may not have accurately represented the overall demographics of “middle-America.”  But OWS is consistently gaining sympathizers and momentum.  According to occupytogether.org, approximately 130 cities across the United States are now organizing events and actions.  Similar events are being organized in Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Australia.  Given these numbers, I find it hard to believe that OWS is just another wannabe revolution put on by the usual suspects of hopeless idealists and out of touch day dreamers.  Instead, OWS advances a tradition of radical immediacy that is invigorating the collective imagination.  That imagination envisions a world that exists beyond corporate dominance.  The many steps to get there are still unknown.  But a first step is being offered up by Occupy Wall Street.

He hoisted her a little higher on his back. …

If only Mother had followed Sister’s counsel about the pumice stone—or had allowed Sister to use the stone on her (and to trim her long toenails, as well!)—her calloused heels would not be chafing his ribs and hips through the thin fabric of his summer yukata.

But, she had always been a stubborn, proud woman; and in her youth she had been considered a bijin—a beauty—who had held her head high among the courtesans—the first wife of the Lord’s First Minister, with her own retinue of servants in the apartments near the Daimyo’s own.

But, that was long ago, and he could hardly remember now, as he carried her, like a sack of rice on his back, up the winding hill, this hot and humid and forlorn day.

Crows cawed above, as if in warning. For what? More calamities to come? Could there be any more in these wretched times? Even Nature had turned against the land, with earthquakes and typhoons rattling and lashing the little wooden homes and shrines, scattering them like chopsticks, and even the stone ojizo that guarded the children’s graves—even these small and tender Buddhas were cracked like eggs.

Everything changed when the wars began, and now his childhood seemed a dream he dared not, for the sake of sanity, indulge.

What had his father done to lose his place among the ministers—what errant word or glance, or mis-advice had caused him to lose favor? Hadn’t he chanted the Lotus Sutra every morning and every evening to secure his family’s place in the Pure Land?

Posh! What nonsense! Yorifumi thought now. So much mumbo-jumbo—incantations to the wind!

Crows cawed, and he half-smiled, half-grimaced at the rumors spread in the villages that even the crows were spies now, that they had been trained to see and report transgressions—and special handlers could decode their messages!

He felt his mother stirring on his back, felt her small breath a little cooler on his neck, knew she was awakening again.

“Son, son… why are you taking me up this hill? I know where we are going! Let me rest. Let me pass water, Yori-kun. Do not shame your mother!”

So he put her down in a shady spot on the trail and he turned his eyes away as she crouched, passed water, wiped herself with some leaves.

“Let us go back,” she said softly. “Not up the hill.”

“There is contagion in the village,” he explained again. “The children are dying… and the old people. … It is as I told you. … As we ascend, the air will clear, you can breathe deeply again, and the clean air will purify your lungs and make you well.”

“I am not well with this world, Son. … And with the lies we tell ourselves… and others.”

He looked into the blackness of her eyes, and felt himself falling into a dark and bottomless well. “I cannot rest too long, Mother. Or, I shan’t be able to go on.”

“Rest, then. Rest long.”

He crouched beside her. Gently he said, “Come, Mother. Climb on my back now. My legs are not so strong as they once were. I, too, feel the weight of these sad years. We must do what we must do.”

His legs were strong enough, but his back ached. Decades of bending over to plant the tender rice stalks, decades of pulling carts like a rich man’s ox, had bent his back and tightened the muscles in his legs.

Meekly, like a child, dutifully, as one who has seen better days, his mother climbed on her son’s back. “Oi!” he cried as he straightened as much as he could. Then, one straw zori after the other, he dug into the upward trail.

2.

Once he had dreamt of being a scholar, studying the sacred texts, decoding the mysteries. Now, every nerve and muscle in his 40-year old body strained under the weight, in the heat, as he proceeded steadily, surefootedly, uphill.

He remembered the lessons of his school days–the golden days of Court and castle–before the clans had broken the peace and plunged the world into hell. The crows cawed, and he heard his teacher’s voice in his mind:

“Rising with first light, the common people wash their faces, gargle water, then bow in six directions—east, then west; south, then north; above, and then below. They make obeisance to the six directions, praying that no misfortune will come from them.

“But Lord Buddha taught us how to bow to Truth; and, behaving wisely, and with virtue, that we could thus prevent misfortune.” The Scholar had turned his gentle eyes on him, nodded his glabrous head. “Yori-kun, can you tell the class the difference between the common man’s understanding and Lord Buddha’s teaching?”

He rose, and, in spite of himself, he felt a little pride, for he had thought about the difference all that evening before when he had read the lesson. “It is the same as when the Compassionate One spoke to Ananda, his favorite disciple; when, near dying, he said, ‘Be a lamp unto yourself.’”

“Expatiate, young sir.”

The other students honored him now, honored him with their attention. “The common people,” he continued, “put their faith in rituals—cleansing themselves and bowing to the six directions. … They think strength lies outside of themselves; they hope to placate the gods and demons. … But, the true disciple knows—this world is an illusion. … Fortune and misfortune are two sides of the coin. The discriminating mind is constantly dividing. … But the mind that is enlightened sees the wholeness of the moment—even as it’s passing. That mind perceives the truth of transitoriness. Its strength is its integrity-honed clarity.”

Even the venerable Scholar could not suppress a smile. And he—the fourteen-year old prodigy—wondered where the words had come from. He had never spoken so eloquently before, never thought such thoughts before. The classroom hushed in silence. …

“Yori-kun,” griped his mother now, “I am tired. Let us rest again.”

“Not yet, Mother.”

“Did you bring the mung beans?” she asked him. “Did you bring the onigiri?”

He reached into the pouch at his belt and handed her mung beans and a rice ball filled with dried fish over his shoulder. Soon, she wanted water, so he handed her the gourd at his belt and she gulped twice noisily. She was quiet for a while and he thought she slept, but soon she was murmuring to herself. “I know where we are going. My own son is taking me, my second son, now that my first son has died in the wars.”

“That was long ago, Mother.”

“No…, it was yesterday,” she said. And then she slept.

3.

He had watched his wife wrap the onigiri rice balls with dried seaweed and a little vinegar in the first light of dawn. Neither of them had slept well, knowing what must happen.

“There is no other way,” she had told him yesterday evening. “It has all led up to this… since the edict.”

They had discussed it before, two months earlier, when the edict had been published and the literate men had read it and discussed it, then broken the news to their wives.

“Fumiko is with child,” his wife had said. “It is either grandmother or the baby. Our daughter has had two sons already, one still-born. If she has a girl baby now. …”

She did not need to finish. In adjacent provinces, hunger and starvation had spread like wildfires, parents had begun to smother the girl babies. Now, hunger lurked in the eyes of the watchers in his own village. Their hollow, sallow cheeks reproached the elderly: why do you cling to the tatters of life like withered leaves on a cloven trunk? No one escaped the watchers.

That was the stark choice. … And if not his daughter’s baby girl, then someone else in the village. There was no longer food enough for all, especially since the taxes took so much for war.

That was the essence of the edict they called “Solving the Poor.” He wondered what minister of the Court, what word-mincer, what officious, sycophantic imbecile had dreamed up such a title? Not, “Solving Poverty”—ending the wars and the taxation that took the best of their labors to give it to the courtiers and superfluous ministries, and then to feed the soldiers who no longer worked in the paddies or fished the seas and rivers. “Solving the Poor,” they called it! By destroying them!

He watched the bandy-legged man descend the trail above him. The man’s face was grim, hard-set, his eyes fixed. He thought he recognized him from years before—someone from another village. But the man would not acknowledge him, would not acknowledge anyone. “He and I are the same man,” Yorifumi thought now. “He has done his work already… and I am nearly done.” The man’s rigid expression chilled him.

A cool wind blew through the bamboo copse at the side of the trail, rustling and clicking the tall stalks. When he was a child, his mother had told him, “If an earthquake comes, go to the bamboo copse, for the roots are knitted together there, underneath, where we can’t see them. The earth may crack around the copse, but there the earth is sewn together. There… is safety.”

But no place was safe in the days of the marauders. The soldiers invaded all the refuges. Minamoto or Taira—it did not matter what they called themselves, whether they fought for the Lord of the allied provinces or against them. All the earth quaked under the war horses’ hooves.

Across the western sea, in the land of Ch’in, in ancient times, they had fought four hundred years. … How long would the wars last now, he wondered. …

“Son, I am tired,” his mother murmured. “Let us rest again.”

“We are almost there, Mother. … At the resting place.”

Bamboo could knit their long, green fingers reaching for the sky—but men could not! No bamboo stalk begrudged another’s height or heft… but men made wars for straws.

“Another onigiri,” his mother begged now.

“Soon, Mother, soon.”

He had asked his wife to add a little rice wine and the last of the dried fish they had. He had hoped the wine would make his mother sleepy. And the fish… because it was the last they had!

Now the crows were circling and cawing. He remembered when he had come upon the hanged man in the tree, how the crows had perched on his shoulders, and how they ate the man’s eyes like a jellied delicacy.

The scrawny stranger was a runaway from another village, another province. Now he swung and turned slowly, suspended from a branch of cryptomeria. They learned later that he had murdered his girl baby. And then his wife. And then went mad.

He set his mother down upon the ground. She could barely stand on her spindly legs. He turned her to look at him, away from the precipice. Looking beyond her, he saw the tattered rags of the corpses.

How beautiful she had been in that other world—before the wars, before the devastation! How proud and dignified his father had been before losing favor at the Court, before his seppuku.

And now her hair was gray and patchy, and her skin bronze and leathery.

“Think not that this world is meaningless and filled with confusion,” the Scriptures taught. “Taste the way of Enlightenment in all the affairs of this world.”

She stood at arm’s length from him, sad and frail as a scarecrow. She sniffled and smiled weakly at him, understanding.

He meant to touch her shoulder gently, as he had when he was a boy. He could not do what had been ordained—edicts be damned.

He bowed to her, touched her gently to reassure her, touched her gently as a falling leaf alighting on her shoulder.

But she fell over backwards, tumbling down the ravine, breaking her neck as she fell. The crows swooped up and down in a storm of wings.

His knees buckled under him on the trail, and he hit the hard ground with his bony rump. He heaved for air. Then the floodgates of his tears were opened, and could not be closed.

It’s not hard to see her point. By and large Jacoby’s book was aimed at what currently passes for conservatism, religious or otherwise and ‘folks’, however much some may identify with a Joan Baez or an early Bob Dylan, qualifies as an inherently conservative word (actually just one letter off from the Volk so prominently employed in Nazi mythology).

A basic dictionary definition for ‘folks’ leads off with: “The common people of a society or region considered as the representatives of a traditional way of life and especially as the originators or carriers of the customs, beliefs, and arts that make up a distinctive culture.“

Common, traditional, passive — that’s certainly the vision which the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin indulge in with their endless exhortations for “the Folks”. Outrage about such shady sentiment can easily be mocked with a wink and dismissed as intellectual elitism, thereby only further reinforcing the folk imagery.

Phillip Roth aptly captured this point in his novel The Plot Against America when the newly elected isolationist Lindbergh administration, through an agency called the Office of American Absorption, introduces a program called Just Folks, “a volunteer program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life”, causing the narrator’s Jewish father to think that the whole idea is to separate Jewish children from their families and convert them into honorary conservative WASPs. His concerns were harshly dismissed by his enthusiastic son and sister-in-law, who typically accuses her brother-in-law of fearing that “his children might escape winding up as narrow minded and frightened as he was”.

Again the Orwellian paradox:  serious and obvious skepticism set against folksy populism with the aw-shucks defense always available should the inquiry grow too serious. Plus as Roth demonstrated, the issue of race is a factor that screams off the page no matter how much America’s first black president goes out of his way to placate both Wall Street and the heartland. White nationalists and the like have always called themselves the only real Americans, a factor that will only bubble to the surface more prominently as the white majority continues to dwindle rapidly in the coming years.

Of course, it’s not only Republicans and conservative blowhards that employ such rhetoric. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both oozed with it. Recently it was Barack Obama, a Harvard graduate, speaking at a rally in Minnesota, who drove the point home almost too perfectly:

You’ll hear a lot of folks, by the way, say that government is broken. Well, government and politics are two different things. Government is our troops who are fighting on our behalf in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s government.  Government are also those FEMA folks when there’s a flood or a drought or some emergency who come out and are helping people out.…Government are our firefighters and our police officers, and the folks who keep our water clean and our air clean to breathe, and our agricultural workers. And when you go to a  national park, and those folks in the hats – that’s government.

There is something particularly grating about the bipartisan tactic of American politicians going out of their way to intentionally sound more stupid. It may not have an equivalent anywhere in the world and it is an easy temptation to view the decline of the U.S. through the decline of rhetoric, as if it, in a nutshell, reflects the staggering numbers of Americans who believe the world was really created in seven days or that humans and dinosaurs once shared the earth. Yet the main impetus for any American decline was summed up nicely by Matthew Continetti in The Weekly Standard some time ago.

In declaring Sarah Palin as the possible heir to the American populist tradition he identified with Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, and Ronald Reagan, Continetti demonstrated the trajectory of American politics. Jackson and Bryan, despite some major transgressions (Jackson for his callus treatment of the Cherokees, Bryan for his sneaking sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan), would still be considered by humans to be at least somewhat on the Left, while Reagan, president almost a century after Bryan’s unsuccessful campaigns, fell squarely on the Right. That the same is true of Palin (or Michelle Bachman) shows both the slippery nature of populism as well as the way it has slid. Continetti puts it like this:

Over the last century, the popular energies that fueled Jackson and Bryan shifted to the right side of the political spectrum. Increasingly, the public directed its animosity at the bureaucratic and governmental elites who robbed ordinary folk of liberties in the pursuit of “social justice.” At the judges who designed busing schemes that disrupted neighborhood schools. …For the last quarter century, right-wing populism, often infused with social conservatism, has been the most demonized force in American politics–and also the most interesting and dynamic.

It is in this populism, under the diverse guises of the great white backlash, the war on drugs, welfare reform, American Exceptionalism, all aligned with corporate power, that the Left can’t seem to put a serious dent; this, despite increased poverty, unemployment, and declining infrastructure, not to mention massive plundering by the upper class. In the closing pages of The Populist Persuasion, published more than a decade ago, Michael Kazin argues persuasively that some form of leftist populism is necessary to break the anomie that continues to dominate left wing politics. It simply leaves a large remnant of the masses open to reactionary populism. Kazin’s words echo even louder today:

To move any closer toward redistributing wealth and revitalizing mass democracy, intellectuals have to take part in social movements that knit such people together…Otherwise, we risk spending the future as spectators to the endless competition between spin doctors and copywriters, captives to anyone who seems to make the old rhetoric sing again, if only for one acceptance speech or thirty-second spot.

Only a fool would expect the Democrats to contribute to any such thing. The time for accusing them of selling out has long passed; in fact, the charge misses the point entirely. The party is simply a vassal for Wall Street money. Still history offers a shield against hopelessness. There was a time when places like Nebraska and Oklahoma were bastions of populism and socialism (Oklahoma, along with Milwaukee, was the center of American socialism with more Socialist Party members than any state). Kansas once housed Appeal to Reason, the muckraking weekly that serialized Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Even today poll numbers show that most Americans are less conservative than the beltway when it comes to things like health care and unions. There is plenty of room to maneuver with legislation like the Employee Fair Choice Act which makes it at least a little easier to organize unions and it should be easy to point out that those who spout such reactionary populist rhetoric aren’t in it for love of mother and country but just the opposite: disgust and hatred of fellow citizens.

If Richard Hofstadter was right when he wrote the United States itself was doomed to be an ideology, at least in the sense that the meaning of being American will always be cherished and debated, then for the Left to have a chance it will have to revitalize its own American-based populism. That can be a tedious and risky fight, but it is a necessary one.

For someone as myself coming from a deeply fractured and messed-up society steeped in violence, unrest and social injustice, the material and moral ‘superiority’ of liberal-secular societies in the Northern-Western hemisphere is often referred to as an enviable standard and veritable benchmark. The reckless frequency of the usage of loaded terms like ‘advanced’, ‘developed’, ‘progressive’, ‘civilized’ for specific social contexts rooted in Enlightenment positivism suggests an unquestioning and facile acceptance of an ascendant social paradigm that draws power from the political-historical narrative — following the Fall of Egypt in Napoleon’s wars in the East — of the superiority of the post Enlightenment ‘West.’

Societies are shaped by underlying intellectual, philosophical and moral traditions that shape social phenomena and direct social change. The 18th century Enlightenment with its structuralist underpinnings is the predominant factor shaping the social lives of individuals in communities belonging to Europe and North America. The Structuralist sociological perspective conspicuously marginalizes non materialist phenomenological and interactionist elements of sociological thought and those that take a critical view of Structuralism. According to Structuralist-Functionalists, a consensus around values is vital for social order and stability. This implies general agreement among the large majority of the members of a society over its basic values. Speaking of societies in Europe and America, this stabilizing consensus is developed around Utilitarian values that promote ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’, while the Positivist-Structuralist premise defines this ‘greatest good’ in material terms — economic good, incomes, jobs, health insurance, education, benefits, pensions, etc. –the boons of the modern welfare state.

Structuralism, concerned with social structures and institutions rather than individuals, has an inbuilt majority-oriented outlook. What is ignored out of the neat formula for happiness is the not-so-great number of those who do not constitute the favoured and dominant ‘majority’ and therefore do not pledge loyalty to the values that create a system which does not offer them dividends in the same measure as significant others.

Consensus on values comes about when individuals benefit as members of a society and are socialized into it to the extent that they learn to desire only that which the society provides. However, the socialization process for creating value consensus is not always neat and perfect, and cracks do appear. In Utilitatian-materialist societies, economic crises, inequalities, etc. weaken the socialization process so that some individuals identifying themselves with minority groups do not rally around the society’s core values to generate the value consensus considered necessary for stability and order. Hence they experience alienation. Given the rising incidence of racial profiling and ethnocentric calls for ban on immigration by racist-supremacist groups like the English Defence League, the alienation gradually turns into an ‘otherization’ of members who do not smoothly and naturally merge into what is classified as the ‘majority’ — white, British, urban, middle-class.

The ethic of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ leaves marginalized minorities out of the bigger picture. This also explains the attempt by disgruntled minorities to make their sense of alienation be seen and heard by asserting it in spectacular ways. The unsuspecting shock and horror over the events also exposes the extent of unawareness of, and insensitivity to, the raw sentiment that festers in multiracial, multiethnic British society. Tony Blair in his article. “Good Headlines but Bad Policy” (The Guardian, August 21), carefully reminded us of the horrific events being the acts of a “minority”.

Without contesting this fact, it may be argued that the tenor and the overall meaning of the writer was a subtle trivialization of the tremendous street sentiment at the heart of which lies the deep social alienation, resentment and discontentment of a significant minority. In an attempt to salvage the narrative of the high moral ground of secular-liberal British society, the counter narrative of a marginalized and restive minority is slighted. While the ‘majority’ cleaning up the clutter, as Blair points out, reinstates hope, yet ignoring, trivializing or slighting the almost palpable existence of pent up frustrations among a sizeable section of British population is a grave mistake and shows we learnt little from the events.

However, even a Blair, desperately trying to save the face of British society, could not altogether brush under the carpet the real issues that stare Britain in the face: “the country’s problems stem from too many dysfunctional households… this is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. You find it in virtually every developed nation.” However, an insightful approach into understanding the collapse of the family in Western society and the discrediting  of the family as an institution is necessary, of which not much has been said other than attempts to highlight the general decadence and its origin in dysfunctional families. It has a lot to do with general moral decline and an inadequacy of the education process (whether by families or by schools) that carries the ideological baggage of positivist Enlightenment thought and has discarded the universal moral premise considered sacrosanct in traditional societies.

Saeeda Ahmad is an inspiring social entrepreneur and social activist in UK. As a Muslim, she looks at the riots with rare insight through her faith. She writes:

This year has indeed been a year of much reflection and big change in a very short space of time where civic participation, ethics, Islam, Muslims and many other things have affected us not just as British Muslims but Muslims internationally. From an Islamic perspective some of the key tenets in our faith can help understand the riots: Self accountability, gratitude, hope and aspiration, self responsibility, social and civic responsibility, Defence of others people and property.

These are subjects in their own right but need to be adequately addressed. A different poverty in the UK and in the developed world exists than that in poor countries. It is the poverty of spiritual values. In a developed secular country there may be a state that caters for people’s need. It does not replace the human requirement for accountability, hope and compassion towards others. The idea of ‘don’t worry, social services will bring you a meal if something happens to you (as long as you meet their criteria) doesn’t make me feel great and excited for my old age.

Also valuable is a critical outlook afforded by alternative social theory. Interactionists have something to say on the matter as they emphasize that the tenuous stability that Structural-functionalists imagine through the generation of value consensus is a blinkered view. Society is not an objective entity ‘out there’, nor is it a monolith. To understand that every individual relates to society based on his individual subjective social experience is essential. For those who lead wretched lives in the streets, Britain may not be the egalitarian welfare state committed to social justice even in the presence of voluminous statistical data to verify that. When this individual’s authentic subjective experience of society is slighted as an aberration and not understood as deserving of serious redress, it will seethe as frustration, anger and even violence.

Marxists offer an insight into the false and deceptive nature of Functionalism’s “value consensus”, which they see as imposed from above — from the privileged, empowered class. The compulsive acceptance of the same by the lower classes guarantees a perpetuation of the privileged status of the moneyed elite. The stability this creates is false, privileging a section of the society over and above another, creating an exploitative stratification. However, this will inevitably give rise to frustration and discontentment as “class consciousness” gradually develops. Any event, even small, may then trigger off a string of events till the false order collapses like a house of cards.

As an important ‘Aside’ from the sociological discourse the dramatic events stirred, mention must be made of the strong case for religious faith that has powerfully asserted itself. It perhaps lies beyond the pale of this debate but provides some important keys to a deeper and more insightful understanding of the issues at hand. When human life and human society is centred around the utilitarian-materialist premise that is the legacy of the Enlightenment’s positivist enthusiasm; when the resultant definition of happiness is considered the be-all and end-all of life, the lack of material security or a drop in material benefits takes away all meaning and worth from life.

A N Wilson, in an important article “Legacy of a Society that Believes in Nothing”, (The Daily Mail, August 13), mentions the case of popular British showbiz icons who, at the height of popularity, ended their lives out of a deep sense of inner emptiness and meaninglessness; he also comments on the morals of a society that reveres their degenerate private lives.

When it is understood that the truly valuable things in life are those you can never buy (in a cutthroat consumerist culture), deprivation, suffering and injustice seen as part of a larger Pattern no longer devastate and madden. They are gracefully accepted even as the right to protest and claim legitimate rights is asserted. This is what was so beautifully and powerfully demonstrated by Tariq Jehan, father of Haroon Jehan,  one of the Birmingham youth of Pakistani origin crushed to his death as he defended his people. Jehan’s simple yet resounding statement in the wake of his personal tragedy strikes at the heart of the matter. Until the secular-materialist pretense is shed off and the ascendant positivist underpinnings of society reassessed giving due recognition to the “feeling in the heart” and the “moral law within”, a true qualitative improvement and meaningful, all-inclusive progress in our individual and social lives will remain a distant, elusive dream. As Pascal said, “above the logic in the head is the feeling in the heart; and the heart has reasons of its own that the head cannot understand”…

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

– Baruch Spinoza

Daniel Cohen (fictitious name) is deeply admired by many. He is a humanist, an anti Zionist and he is also a man of great integrity. A week ago, Daniel decided to challenge my views, and launched a courageous debate. Being a gracious man, he might have hoped to open my eyes to some ‘categorical mistakes’ he believed I was making. For my part, I was very open to his criticism and engaged in the dialogue.

Daniel was not happy with the way the exchange has evolved. Though he circulated his comments and my interventions to his close Jewish friends, he made it clear that he wanted to stop the exchange at a certain stage. Daniel was very angry with me. He also made it clear that he did not want me to publish the exchange of views. As I always do in such cases, I suggested that together, we should edit the debate, but he refused. Respecting Daniel’s request for anonymity, I have now re-edited the text myself, concealing Daniel’s real name, removing all sections and biographical references that could reveal Daniel’s identity. Occasionally, I have re-phrased Daniel’s comments for purpose of continuity and clarity, but I have faithfully retained his meaning.*

Unlike Daniel, I believe that issues to do with Jewish history and Jewish ideology must be discussed openly and without fear.

Questions You Should Never Raise

Daniel Cohen: Dear Gilad, we certainly share many ideas and thoughts. We both oppose Zionism and Israeli policies, however, rather, too often, you fail to be careful enough with your formulations, and this gives room for some misunderstandings. You seem to challenge some issues to do with the Holocaust, and history in general. It seems to me as if, often enough, you raise questions to which various sufficient answers already exist.

Gilad Atzmon: I can already tell you, at this stage, that I have a slight problem with your approach. To start with, as a philosopher, I am far more interested in the art of asking questions. I leave the ‘answers’ to politicians. Moreover, the relationship between questions and answers is paradigmatically oriented. A sufficient ‘answer’ within one paradigm (or discourse) may as well be totally inadequate or irrelevant within another -a certain ‘answer’ within Aristotelian physics may well be within the realm of the inexpressible within a ‘Newtonian’ paradigm.

DC: If you ask, for instance, why were the Jews repeatedly hated in so many places along their history, as you do in some of your texts, you create room for anti-Semites who may say it is because they are intrinsically evil.

GA: To start with, as a thinking being full of curiosity, I do not take instructions from anti Semites or Zionists or Jewish anti Zionist campaigners. I instead follow my instincts and go along with my sincere ethically driven truth-seeking adventure. Also, I believe that the answer you attributed to anti Semites can be easily addressed. Jews cannot be ‘intrinsically evil’ because Jews do not form a racial or ethnic continuum. Any racial attribution to Jews is clearly wrong and silly.

DC: I actually do not agree with your approach. The appropriate answer to the above question is that in the Middle Ages Jews were barred from many professions except money trade and peddling, two professions which could easily arouse disdain and hate.

GA: Dear Daniel, with all due respect, such an answer is far from being sufficient. In Europe at least, Jews have been emancipated since the French Revolution. By the end of the 19th century most European Jews enjoyed equal rights. And yet, something went horribly wrong in the 1920s-30’s. Our duty then, is to understand, what was it? Why did it happen? Why do Jews encounter resentment all too often and in many different places?

I don’t know whether you are aware of it, but the reasoning you suggest here is very similar to the Early Zionist mantra. Borchov and Katznelson were also convinced that Diaspora conditions were responsible for ‘Jewish deformed cultural identity’. They believed that on a land of their own, Jews would be able to re-invent themselves and become ‘people like other peoples’.

As you and I agree, Zionism is a complete disaster. The Jews are hated in the Middle East. And as Shahid Alam suggests, Zionism did not really solve the Jewish question; it only re-located it in a new place (Zion).

The answer to the question is actually very simple; as long as Jews operate politically, culturally and socially within exclusive racially oriented cells, be it Israel, Zionism, Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist networks or even ‘Jews only’ football clubs , they will encounter problems.

But let us go back to issues of whether some ‘questions that should never be raised’. For me, to be in the world is to live through changes, to allow meaning to be in flux and to let ourselves be transformed accordingly. I could never accept the Idea that some questions have sufficient and firm answers. In fact, I oppose any form of dogmatism.

DC: But, in your text ‘Truth, History & Integrity’ you go as far as asking “why Auschwitz’s (Jewish) prisoners didn’t wait for the Red Army ?” Do you think that this is an appropriate question to ask?

GA: Sorry Daniel. I have to stop you there, I believe that in order to address this quote, I must first re-locate my words in the right order, and within the appropriate context. In my paper ‘Truth, History & Integrity,’ I quote Israeli Holocaust historian Israel Gutman, who suggests that Auschwitz prisoners (or at least some of them) joined the Death March voluntarily (“I then decided to join [the march] with all the other inmates and to share their fate”).¹ Following Gutman’s quote, I then presented the following inference:

“If the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?”

What we see above is a clear inference (rather than a mere question). It seems to me that it is there to suggest that further research is needed. As opposed to the historian who searches for a narrative, as a philosopher, I am there to question what the word ‘narrative’ actually stands for, or in Kantian terms — what are the conditions of the possibility of a historical narrative. In my relevant paper, I do not attempt to provide an answer — I am not an historian. My primary issue is concerned with the freedom to wander/wonder, and to raise possible dilemmas without being terrorised by the ‘Holocaust censorship police’ or any other form of thought dictatorship.

DC: But, can’t you see that with such a manner of behaviour you provide Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites with ammunition? They can so easily misuse your words.

GA: Dear Daniel, I do understand your concern, but with all due respect, I have been writing for some years now, and, as far as I am aware, anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers do not seem to misuse my words. I have been quoted by some so-called anti Semites, some of whom liked me, whilst others hated me, but they appear to quote my ideas within context and seem to be faithful to the original meaning and intention of my writing.

But — let me tell you, I have seen many Zionists and ‘anti’ Zionists systematically misquoting me, misrepresenting me, forging my statements, and taking my words out of context, all willfully done to create the most awful impression of my work.

DC: But let’s return to your earlier statement — can’t you see that the inference you are making here is that Auschwitz was not a death factory, which to me, comes near to denial.

GA: No, I do not agree with such an interpretation of my words. In my article, you will notice that I refrain from suggesting any answer. I would argue instead that raising the right questions is far more important than repeating the ‘right’ answers. The same applies to the 911 Truth Movement. Whether someone manages to come up with the right explanation of this peculiar chain of events is one issue, the fact that so many people suspect and challenge the official narrative is clearly a revelation or at least very positive sign. Furthermore, I also find the notion of ‘denial’ rather problematic. Instead of denial, I would prefer to emphasise the fundamental and ethically grounded right to revise, re-visit and re-view. I believe that to be tolerant is to agree not to agree, and also to respect others when we don’t agree.

Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness

DC: I want to say that I am also troubled with your attitude towards Judaism and Jewish religion.

GA: Actually, you will notice when you read my work that I tend to avoid dealing with the Judaism (the religion), and I also avoid discussing Jewish people as an ethnic or racial group — instead, I prefer to elaborate on ‘Jewishness’, Jewish ideology and Jewish political identity.

DC: But for me, there is no such a thing as ‘Jewishness’ — there is only Zionist Ideology. I do not accept at all the notion of Jewish ideology or Jewish political identity. I am only willing to deal with the Zionist political identity.

GA: I am absolutely fine with that – I am familiar with, and respect your views, which are common amongst Jewish anti Zionists. Unfortunately, my way of ‘perceiving the universe’ is somewhat more complex and I am far from being proud of what I see. It seems to me that you are missing a crucial aspect of the whole debate – You do not seem to realise that Zionism is just part of the problem. The notion of Zionism no longer actually means very much to Israelis anymore. Hence it falls short of explaining Israeli collective barbarism. Once Israel was founded, the Zionist dream had fulfilled itself. Zionism is now largely a Jewish Diaspora discourse, and therefore, falls short of explaining Israeli politics and Israeli brutality in particular.

Israel defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’, and it drops bombs on innocent civilians from airplanes that are clearly and unambiguously decorated with Jewish symbols. Israel commits horrendous crimes—‘in the name of the

Jewish people’. In ‘my universe’ then, I am more than entitled to ask what Jewishness stands for, and I repeat, that Zionism is just one manifestation of Jewishness.

The next stage is surely to define what Jewishness is all about.

I say again, that in my writing I differentiate between ‘Jews’ –the people, Judaism–the religion, and Jewishness the ideology. I avoid the first two categories almost entirely, and I focus on Jewish ideology. I admit that such an approach issue can lead occasionally to some misinterpretations – but as far as I am able, I do try to be clear about it, as much as I can.

I do not consider the Jews to be a race, and yet it is obvious that ‘Jewishness’ clearly involves an ethno centric and racially supremacist, exclusivist point of view that is based on a sense of Jewish ‘chosen-ness’. Zionism too, is a clear manifestation of such an ideology. But, tragically enough, the Jewish Left happens to be of a very similar tendency. Like Zionists, the Jewish Left are also interested in notions of being ‘racially’ or ethnically exclusive. For instance, Hamed from Gaza would not be able to settle in Tel Aviv — but surprisingly enough, he may also find it very problematic to join IJV (independent Jewish voice) or ‘Jews for peace in Palestine’.

DC: But you have to bear in mind that in sharp contrast with the multifaceted religion of Judaism, Zionism is completely monolithic in that it can be defined as having just one single goal: maximum surface in Palestine (for the Jews) with the minimum number of Palestinians on it.

GA: I am sorry but here again, I find myself in a slight disagreement with you. Zionism and political Zionism are dynamic movements, and subject to constant metamorphic changes. They change their goal all the time. It is even very difficult to define what is the ‘exact’ role of Zionism after Israel has been founded. I think that your definition of Zionism is basically a very good description of Israeli policy (“maximum of surface in Palestine with the minimum number of Palestinians on it”). However, and I re-emphasise, Zionism should now be considered to be largely a Diaspora discourse. It means very little if anything at all to the Israelis.

Zionists cannot even decide whether they want to schlep world Jewry to Zion, or to leave them in the Galut (Diaspora) so they can campaign for Israel forever.

DC: But wouldn’t you agree that Zionism is chauvinistic, racist, expansionist and colonialist? It is imperative to be very careful in distinguishing between the words Judaism and Zionism.

GA: I largely agree with the above. However, in my work I never tie the two together. Yet, I do allow myself to argue that if Israel defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’ we must surely be entitled to wonder what Jewishness stands for.

Holocaust religion vs. Judaism

DC: Gilad, you write about Holocaust religion. Yet again, in very sharp contrast to Holocaust religion, Judaism has taught the world how to differ in opinion and how to debate. Judaism is non-dogmatic and since the destruction of the second Temple everyone over 13 years of age is entitled to take part in debate and discussion, provided he has good arguments.

GA: I am not so sure that I agree with you here. In theory you may be right, that on the face of it, the Talmud is indeed part of an open debate and a search for conclusive and rational ruling. However, there is another aspect to Rabbinical thinking, and that is the notion of Herem (ex-communication) to give just one example. Rabbinical Judaism is very dogmatic and extremely intolerant towards dissidence. The cases of Spinoza ex communication and the brutality towards Uriel Da Costa seem to be to be crucial for an understanding of Judaism. I want to remind you that Israeli PM Rabin was assassinated following a Halacha ruling (Din Rodef).

DC: However, Holocaust religion is the opposite. It is very dogmatic and forbids practically any discussion.

GA: I obviously agree with you here, but given your opinion here, then I would expect you to support me asking all those earlier questions that to me, appear to be totally legitimate.

DC: But surely you agree that you cannot debate with people who deny the Holocaust as a historical fact. And why should one raise questions where answers are already known to all?

GA: Dear Daniel, I would prefer to engage in a preliminary discussion here. I think we should be careful in the way we use the word ‘fact’. A given Historical chapter is not solely a fact but a narrative composed of many ingredients such as: facts, personal testimonies, prose, culture, emotional contents and so on. The narrative is the mortar that bonds all the different ingredients by means of reasoning. It allocates events with meaning and direction. This applies to the Napoleonic wars as much as it does to the Holocaust, or indeed, any other historical chapter. The Holocaust should not be regarded solely as a rigid set of ‘facts’ but rather as a very complicated historical narrative, a compound of very many things including facts (of course). I believe that once we allow the Holocaust to be treated as a historical narrative rather than a religion or a ‘fact’, none of us would be under the impression that every doubt may endanger the entire historical narrative or even our existence.² For me, openness and integrity when we study historical events is far more important than any ideology or a given party line.

DC: I could not disagree more. History is indeed very complex but past historical research has given us quite a good picture and understanding of what actually happened in Europe between 1933-1945.

GA: Daniel, you are a very educated man, would you allow yourself to say the same thing about science? Would you dare saying “Chemistry has given us quite a good picture of what is happening in the world, so we may put an end to our research right here”? I don’t think so. And this is where integrity comes into the picture.

DC: But , surely you see that to reduce the Holocaust into a narrative or even a number of narratives is a personal insult to every Jew.

GA: OK I can see where is the problem here. In fact, I do not ‘reduce the holocaust into a narrative’, because every historical chapter is a narrative. The Nakba is a narrative, Zionism is a narrative, and the Napoleonic Wars is a narrative. Narrative is not a secondary quality. Narrative is the attempt to string (factual) events into a story with a direction and reason. The narrative furnishes the fact with sense. The Narrative is actually a dynamic notion. It allows us to shape and revise our vision of the past as we proceed in time. The Nakba, for instance, was hardly discussed in Western media until recently. Do you know why? Because we are now understanding the 1948 Zionist crime through our current notion of Israeli brutality. This is the true meaning of historical thinking; we move forward and backward. This is the deep meaning of the narrative and this is also the meaning of temporality-‘to be in time’. We are subject to constant changes.

The past becomes a meaningful event once it reflects on our present and future. The past becomes a vivid form of knowledge when it conveys a prospect of a better future, when it becomes as elastic as the now and ‘things to come’. In order to achieve such a goal we must allow ourselves to visit, re-visit and re-vise our visions of the past as we move along forward towards the unknown (future).

For me the meaning of temporality is the free bouncing between past and future, between the memory and the unknown. Any attempt to seal a chapter in our past, is for me, an attempt against humanity. I will never support such an approach and I understand that this is enough to make me a hate figure in the Jewish world. I can take it.

DC: I am very displeased with the result of our discussion. It has led nowhere, and I am saddened by it.

GA: I think that I understand your frustration. However, unlike you, I actually think that this was an amazing discussion especially because we do not agree. I myself have learned a lot.

1. “One of my friends and relatives in the camp came to me on the night of the evacuation and offered a common hiding place somewhere on the way from the camp to the factory. The intention was to leave the camp with one of the convoys and to escape near the gate, using the darkness we thought to go a little far from the camp. The temptation was very strong. And yet, after I considered it all I then decided to join (the march) with all the other inmates and to share their fate.” (Israel Gutman (editor), People and Ashes, Auschwitz — Birkenau, Merhavia 1957).”
2. Many of those who identify themselves politically as Jews happen to believe that any doubt concerning the Jewish historical narrative is nothing less than questioning Jews’ ‘right to exist.’

Since 2001, a group of scholars and intellectuals (for simplicity, and in line with current labels, we will call them the “New Atheists”) have become college campus celebrities for assailing the “irrationalism” of religious belief; some, like Daniel Dennett,¹ Christopher Hitchens,² and Richard Dawkins,³ already possessed laudable resumes, and some, like Sam Harris,⁴ rose in fame primarily because of their passionate pleas against faith in the immediate post 9-11 milieu. Although these thinkers differ in their analyses, their main theme is similar: religious faith is irrational and should eventually be discarded like a child’s toy by mature citizens in a modern, secular era. Although their arguments have not gone without criticism (see Atran⁵,⁶; also, see Hedges⁷ ), a healthy number of self-designated “free thinkers” have praised their work and continue to impugn the supposed benefits of belief. At times, this criticism can be healthy and productive; at others, it can be destructive and can devolve into ugly and uninformed attacks against Islamic civilization. At bottom, however, the most egregious problem with such attacks is that they ignore the real veil that distorts most people’s perceptions of reality, diverting attention from real political issues that affect millions of lives and convincing many intelligent college students that the chief problem in the world today is irrational religious conviction.

The New Atheists believe that they are carrying out the once stalled project of the enlightenment (See Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason and Science Mission.⁸ ), of freeing minds from the shackles of religious fundamentalism and superstition so that they can perceive the unadulterated “scientific” truth about the nature of reality. This is a noble desideratum; the problem is that the real shackles of the mind–at least in the Western world–are not chained to religion but rather to mainstream political narratives. During the enlightenment, thinkers like Jefferson, Diderot, and Voltaire assailed religion and the churches that propagated it precisely because it was a dense and powerful curtain that was drawn over the eyes of humans. In the contemporary United States, however, the church is no longer an inordinately powerful institution and religion, even among believers, is not the most potent mythology. The most potent mythology is neoliberal nationalism⁹,¹⁰ and the most powerful institution is the corporation. In other words, the New Atheists have retained the outdated substance of the enlightenment but have left its vital spirit behind, have, as it were, mistakenly dragged a 200 year old corpse into the modern world. This would not be lamentable were it not for the profound influence that the New Atheists wield among intelligent and open minded students and intellectuals, the very students and intellectuals that progressives require to form a broad and effective coalition that can challenge the unprecedented power of corporations.

In this article, we will argue that that New Atheists are not heirs of the enlightenment and do not fundamentally challenge existing power structures and narratives in modern American society; instead they distract attention from important issues and scurrilously attack narratives that provide meaning for millions of people.¹¹ We will first look at the interaction between human nature and political structures and how that necessitates the development and propagation of political/religious narratives. We will then trace the decline of religious narratives and the rise of secular narratives, focusing on the modern American political narrative. We will end by criticizing the New Atheists–particularly Sam Harris–for contributing to the West’s growing Islamophobia while ignoring issue of much greater political significance. In part II, we will examine the true legacy of the Enlightenment and those who continue its mission.

Human political nature

In the wonderful book Hierarchy in the Forest anthropologist Christopher Boehm argues that humans possess strong proclivities toward egalitarianism and autonomy.¹² These tendencies, Boehm argues, do not lead to abhorrence of hierarchy but rather to a fondness for a “reverse” hierarchy. A reverse hierarchy is a system where political power is distributed among many people and despotic upstarts are thwarted by large groups of people. According to Boehm, however, humans are ambivalent and possess an undeniable potential for creating a tyrannical political system and submitting to it—especially if rapacious upstarts are not checked by the power of the many. These proclivities are illustrated by the palette of emotions humans possess and emit during perceived political events. Humans, for example, freely confer status upon certain individuals,¹³ submit to them,¹⁴ and often revere them; however, humans also detest individuals who appear despotic,¹² ridicule and scold them, and sometimes even assassinate them.¹⁵ Desirous of status and power but abhorring and envying those who possess it, humans are therefore in a precarious perch between despotism and egalitarianism.

Another important human political proclivity that influences the balance between despotism and egalitarianism is the creation of ingroups and outgroups.¹⁶ That is, humans tend to form coalitions that are based on perceptions of common interests. Originally, these were based on bonds of kinship;¹⁷ however, coalitions were soon created and maintained using the bonds of “fictive kinship”¹⁸ or “imagined communities.”¹⁹ So, whereas the first coalitions were units of blood relatives, later coalitions grew larger and more complicated and included entire territorial swaths like “the Roman Empire.” A member of the coalition “Roman Empire” felt him or herself to “belong” to a large unit of people through the use of collective narratives and symbols.²⁰ This coalitional tendency is important because it drastically affects the way humans perceive and treat each other. Perceived ingroup members, for example, are accorded respect and moral dignity, while perceived outgroup members are often accorded the status of “competitor” and extended little respect or moral dignity.²¹ The slaughter of outgroup members, if functional, is often lauded and outgroup suffering causes little guilt or compassion.²² As coalitions become larger and more complicated, they tend to “nest.” For example, a modern citizen of the United States might consider herself a member of the large coalition “U.S. citizen,” the smaller coalition “Democrat,” the even smaller coalition “Detroit Tigers fan” and the even smaller coalition “Member of the Pronin family.” Which coalition one emphasizes depends on social identity and environmental contingency. At a Tigers’ game, one would probably emphasize the “Tigers fan” coalition, but if a political debate broke out, one might emphasize the “Democrat” coalition. Coalitions often gain power through efficient coalitional nesting and networking and control of institutional structures.

The rise of states and the evolution of political narratives

Although scholars debate the details of the evolution of human societies, a general and useful framework organizes societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states, with the belief that societies evolve from bands into tribes and then chiefdoms and finally into complicated states.²³ According to scholars, bands are mostly egalitarian organizations of family units; leaders are not formally elected and their power is limited and ephemeral. Put in Boehm’s terms, the reverse hierarchy maintains a diffusion of power and overarching political narratives are not necessary because there isn’t intense conflict between competing political coalitions. Tribes are more complicated, generally egalitarian, units of organization; leaders are not formally elected, but there is a more palpable status order. Although there is still a healthy diffusion of power, there are narratives about family ancestors and more formalized “political” ceremonies. Chiefdoms are the first form of society where lineages are ranked and where hierarchies become formalized; status inequalities are hereditary and legitimizing narratives are needed to explain the inequitable distribution of power. These narratives are generally religious and most chiefs are recognized as “divine.” States are complicated congregations of peoples, with loose kinship bonds, and extremely formalized hierarchies of political power.²⁴,²⁵ Unlike other forms of social organization, states are territorial units; ruling elites have a monopoly of violence and require sophisticated narratives of legitimation. Historically, states were legitimized by a priestly class which acted as the guardians of state power.²⁶

There are a variety of reasons why religious narratives were the first and perhaps most powerful deployed to maintain social order and legitimize state power.²⁷,²⁸ Despite their power and efficacy, however, religious narratives in the West were eventually countered by currents of growing secularism. During the renaissance, for example, a number of thinkers began to emphasize the impressive power of human reason and began to analyze political order from a “proto-scientific” perspective, independent of references to religion (See, for example, Machiavelli²⁹ ). The seed of this style of thinking gradually blossomed into the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment and led to the decline in prestige and effectiveness of religious justifications of power.³⁰ Thinkers like Voltaire and Dennis Diderot assailed the abject subjugation of reason to dying dogmas; eventually, other thinkers like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, attempted to extend the skepticism of the enlightenment to institutions like monarchy. Paine, in particular, was scathing in his assaults on anything that enslaved humans and defied the principles of reason.³¹ However, given the two important truths about human political nature addressed above, society did not become drastically more equitable or just³²: coalitions still competed for political power, resources were still unequally distributed, and such inequities still provoked outrage from those who did not benefit from the “new” and “enlightened” social order. New narrative themes were necessary.

The most prominent of the new secular themes was liberal nationalism, or the idea that the nation state formed a coherent coalition and that the interests of the state were the interests of all citizens.³³ This theme was buttressed with other themes about “freedom” and “equality” for all citizens; although it must be observed that some citizens were more “free” and more “equal” than others. Furthermore, unlike most religious narratives, which promised individuals happiness in the hereafter, liberal nationalism promoted the secular eschatology of progress, i.e. living conditions were improving and would continue to do so indefinitely.³⁴ Importantly, these new myths obviated the need for religious myths and replaced them with equally non-empirical but rationally effective myths about nations, replete, even, with mythical stories of founding heroes, like George Washington, who were almost supernatural in their ambition, altruism, and moral character.³⁵ Although purportedly “objective” and devoted to the “interests of all,” these narratives, like the earlier religious narratives, continued to serve the interests of the powerful and did little to mitigate the suffering of the less fortunate.

The modern American political narrative (refining the concept of narratives)

Marshal McLuhan, the famous media analyst, once noted that the last thing a fish would recognize in its environment is water.³⁶ Like the fish, the last thing a human recognizes, if at all, is the cultural/political narrative that surrounds her and shapes her thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and attitudes about the world. Although the New Atheists are often presented as a scientific vangard who have peered behind the painted veil of mythical illusions, they have left the West’s (and for purposes of this article, America’s) primary narratives alone, unanalyzed–instead, focusing on more obvious and less interesting religious narratives. Consider J. Anderson Thomson & Clare Aukofer’s (Thomson is a trustee of the Dawkins Foundation) passionate assertion: “We owe it to ourselves to at least consider the real roots of religious belief, so we can deal with life as it is, taking advantage of perhaps our mind’s greatest adaptation: our ability to use reason.”³⁷ Perhaps true enough, and a number of serious scholars have already done so–much more effectively, it should be added, than the New Atheists.³⁸,³⁹ On the other hand, how much more vital is it, then, to “consider the real roots” of policy in America, “so we can deal with” the political and economic world “as it is”? That is, instead of criticising the crippled institution of the church, responsible intellectuals should attack centers of concentrated power and the narratives that they propound. (We do not want to be misunderstood. Centers of power certainly use religious beliefs when they can; however, attacking religion qua religion ignores the larger point and leaves the more powerful political narratives and institutions alone.) To return to the fish, if we want to change our environment, we have to learn to recognize the water that surrounds us.

It is almost a truism that those who wield political and economic power also wield the power to choose which narratives get propagated into society. It is therefore important to understand not just the history of political narratives, but also the composition of power in America and how that shapes and determines the substance of political narratives. So what coalition or collection of coalitions, wields political power in America? The answer, it turns out, is simple enough: Those who have money–or own the means of producing income. This includes, the upper class, the corporate community, and the policy planning network.⁴⁰ (see figure 1)

Figure 1. The Power Elite

Taken from Domhoff, G.W. (2005). The class-domination theory of power.

The basic goals of this group of “oligarchs” (or “power elite”) are income accumulation (or more broadly, resource accumulation) and protection of gained income from taxation (income defense).⁴¹ Since the power elite are composed of roughly the top 1% (to use a conservative estimate; the truth might be closer to the top 1/10 of 1%),⁴² the accomplishment of these goals will often necessarily conflict with the interests of the majority of the people. The only concrete way for the power elite to achieve their goals is through the creation of favorable political/economic policies; however, because of human egalitarian and coalitional proclivities (“our coalition deserves better”), such policies would be decried by most people. That is, a member of the power elite cannot simply assert “we are creating policies that benefit only the top 1%, while the rest of the people’s wealth stagnates or declines.” As we have noted, religious justifications of massive resource inequality have lost prestige and efficacy; therefore, modern power elites have had to use the basic enlightenment narrative, adjusted, of course, to account for historical developments (e.g., the rise of corporations and the development of state subsidized capitalism). The outcome of this adjustment is America’s most salient political narrative: “neoliberal nationalism.”

The basic principle of neoliberal nationalism is that there is a unified coalition called the “United States” that is historically exceptional and that all members of the coalition share a preponderance of interests. (see figure 2)

Figure 2. The Neoliberal Nationalist Ideology

From this principle, it naturally follows that American foreign policy is based on noble intentions, and that its only faults stem from beneficent motives sometimes gone awry due to incompetence or misunderstanding and a propensity to “judge” itself “by higher standards” than the rest of the world.⁴³ Domestically, neoliberal nationalism propounds the idea that America is a free market country and that free markets promote happiness and justly recompense citizens for their economic behavior, or, more elegantly and oleaginously “free-market capitalism is far more than an economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility — the highway to the American Dream.”⁴⁴ This is coupled with the idea that America is a democracy that allows each citizen to have equal input into policy formation to create a “fairness” narrative that justifies the current state of affairs by noting that “free markets” are just and that all citizens have equal political say.

From these principles, a number of corollaries follow. For example, the idea that the mainstream media presents an accurate picture of political reality because all voices are allowed equal access to the media and are weeded out through the just and fair mechanisms of the free market–Fox, on the right, is balanced by MSNBC on the left. Or, the idea that the government should intervene only sparingly, if at all, into the operations of the market. This last notion, although accepted on faith in modern times, is rather strange and affords insight into the ways in which political narratives are tailored to interact with pre-existing human proclivities. Throughout the seventies and eighties, the government and its employees were depicted as “outsiders” or people who did not share interests with the majority of “real” Americans. The government was, in other words, an alien and hostile coalition working only to engorge itself on the wealth of regular Americans. As Larry Kudlow succinctly put it when discussing Obama’s campaign proposals on the economy, “This isn’t free enterprise. It’s old-fashioned-liberal tax, and spend, and regulate. It’s plain ol’ big government. The only people who will benefit are the central planners in Washington.”⁴⁵ (Notice that this is complicated: the same ideas about government were not extended into the realm of foreign policy.) In this way, Americans were/are taught to fear the tyrannical power of the government and to side with “benevolent” free market institutions like corporations. This also means that taxes are terrible because they pilfer money from average people and give it to government bureaucrats.

This narrative serves two important functions for the power elite: 1) it constrains cognition and 2) it narrows the range of acceptable debate. It constrains cognition because it literally makes it difficult to contemplate the world outside of its framework. Just as a religious person cannot think of reality outside of the framework presented by his or her theology, so the average American cannot think of politics outside of the framework presented by the neoliberal nationalism narrative. And it narrows the range of acceptable debate because discourse that does not accept the narrative’s basic principles is misunderstood and ridiculed. The bounds of acceptable debate, in other words, are determined by its principles. One can argue, then, that America’s war in Iraq was “dumb” or “rash”; one cannot argue, however, that America’s invasion of Iraq was a massive war crime, no different in motive from the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.⁴⁶ Or, one can argue about whether or not the mainstream media are “too liberal” (meaning, too far to the left of the accepted narrative) or “too conservative” (meaning, too far to the right of the accepted narrative), but one cannot not do a straightforward institutional analysis of the media and American foreign policy without being labeled a “Marxist” or a “conspiracy monger” (see for example, George Shadroui’s screed against “anti-Americans” such as Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson).⁴⁷ In other words, this narrative shackles the mind to a superstition every bit as powerful and quite a bit more pernicious than religion; and it does so in a way that benefits elite coalitions at the expense of the majority of the peoples of the world.

The New Atheism as a betrayal of the enlightenment, focusing especially on Sam Harris

Voltaire once sardonically noted that “the human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”⁴⁸ Although certainly true, the goal of enlightenment thinkers–like Voltaire himself–was to make those reasons more difficult to find, and, in a sense, to make humans face the truth about themselves more directly. It is even more important to accurately perceive the motives and behaviors of powerful people because their actions entail greater consequences. Certainly, there will never be a paucity of justifications for the even the most rapacious and brutal of behaviors; however, if we strain to see beyond the webs of an erroneous narrative, we can at least grasp at political reality and attempt to guide political policy in a more salubrious direction. This makes the New Atheists all the more disappointing. Instead of using their considerable intellectual talents to deconstruct the powerful myth of neoliberal nationalism, they waste them on attacking various religions, most of which have little direct influence on the welfare of American citizens. Worse still, some, like Dawkins and Harris, use their talents to disparage Islam, blaming the tragedy of 9-11 on “Islamic fundamentalism,” despite evidence that such blame is an extremely simplistic footnote in a much larger story.⁴,⁵,⁴⁹,⁵⁰

While Dawkins seems to believe that superstition can compel all kinds of horrific atrocities, and therefore that all religions have the capacity to compel horrendous acts of terror, Harris deserves special ridicule for his singular and anti-enlightenment insistence on attacking Islam and making baseless assertions about ethical and political issues, while sedulously avoiding anything too critical of official state dogmas. While Harris does sometimes offer vague “support” for “moderate Muslims,”⁵¹ he more often than not denigrates Islam for being a violent religion, the very tenets of which “are a threat to us.”⁵¹ In fact, according to Harris, we are not at war with “terroism,” but rather with “Islam,” in a phrase that would no doubt impress the most fervent of religious votaries during the Crusades.⁵¹ For Harris, any kind of criticism of the ghastly and grisly effects of American foreign policy is essentially beside the point and can be dismissed, if he does not like it, as “leftist unreason.”⁵² To be fair, Harris follows a familiar script and concedes that the United States has been guilty of tremendous crimes in the past⁵³ but notes that such crimes would not be tolerated anymore. (This is a standard, “yeah we made mistakes in the past, but we have changed” statement. Notice this would provoke only laughter if made by an official enemy; so if Saddam had said, “We have done some horrible things but that is in the past,” before the invasion of Iraq, few would have taken him seriously.) Harris also parrots the neoliberal nationalist narrative, noting that we are, in many respects, a well-intentioned colossus;⁵⁴ apparently this means that our atrocities are “well-intentioned” and therefore superior to the “ill-intentioned” atrocities of others.

Harris professes to love science and reason and asserts that the time has come to “subject our religious beliefs to the same standards of evidence we require in every other sphere of our lives.”⁵¹ Unfortunately, Harris does not inform us what these standards are and judging from his writings, they are not very stringent. For example, the majority of his asseverations about the unspeakable evil that is Islam are made in an empirical vacuum. He often asks his readers to engage in “thought experiments,” surprisingly discovering that the answers he desires are the ones his hypothetical reader must have come to.⁵⁵ The reason Harris must resort to such tactics is that the precise causal links between religion, war, and terrorism are not well understood. As Harris must know, there is little extant empirical evidence on this complicated issue and confident pronouncements cannot take the place of rigorous research.⁵ Ignoring for the moment the geopolitical situation of the Middle East (see part II), what evidence we have suggests that Harris’ views of Islam are incorrect. For example, Arab opinion of the US is highly contingent upon perceptions of US foreign policy. When Obama was elected, the number of Arabs who viewed the United States favorably increased dramatically. However, as Obama’s policies unfolded, Arab opinion of the United States dropped to levels as low as during the last years of the Bush presidency. Most of this change in opinion was tied to dashed hopes. Arabs do not despise the United States because they consider it a part of “Dar al-Harb” but rather because they are against the continuing occupation of Palestinian lands and American interference in the region.⁵⁶ It is also worth noting that Arabs comprise less than 20% of the world’s Islamic population, in sharp contrast with common perceptions in the United States.⁵⁷ In short, the “religious war” that Harris and others persistently warn about is a figment of the imagination.

Turning to domestic issues, Harris is only slightly less confused but equally irrational. Dismissing other less obvious but more potent reasons, e.g., corporate owned media, Harris opines that “religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid.”⁵⁸ And he further laments that Obama’s candidacy is “depressing” because “it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence” has to feign religious belief to have a successful political career. Apparently Obama’s (and the Democrats in general) abject subservience to the corporate sector (especially Wall Street) and dedication to American imperialism are non-issues, but his feigned faith is tragic because it insults Harris’ reason.⁵⁹

Like the other New Atheists, Harris appears to possess an unhealthy fixation upon a peculiar notion of religious belief, betraying the spirit of the enlightenment, and attacking “the hideous fantasies of a prior age” while fully embracing the hideous fantasies of the modern age.⁶⁰ As such, it is not difficult to discern the reasons for Harris’ rise to fame in the United States. He has chosen the appropriate out-group to denigrate, while comforting powerful state and corporate coalitions. In the end, one is entitled to ask whether or not Harris “is ready for the audacity of reason,” or if he would prefer to continue his religious quest to rid the world of his accepted definition of “superstition.” One is also entitled to believe, as Voltaire did, that “an atheist who is rational, violent, and powerful, would be as great a pestilence as a blood-mad, superstitious man”– a statement born out by the many atrocities of our blood stained century.⁶¹

Conclusion: The true spirit of the enlightenment

As we have discussed, humans possess propensities for creating reverse dominance hierarchies and coalitions with sharp ingroup/outgroup divisions. These tendencies have interacted with technological, environmental, and ideological innovations to give rise to the modern state. Although humans can be egalitarian, there is a struggle against individual and coalitional upstarts; one of the most effective weapons that powerful coalitions wield against subservient and less organized coalitions is the legitimation narrative. Such a narrative attempts to convince the rank and file that their interests are identical (or close to identical) with the powerful; it also often prevents them from forming their own unified coalitional counterweight by fomenting strife between different groups (e.g. workers and immigrants, Christians and Muslims, Caucasians and minorities, et cetera). Enlightenment thinkers attempted to demystify the narratives of powerful aristocrats, monarchs, and clergymen because those were the most powerful coalitions (individuals) of their day and as such controlled the most powerful institutions (e.g., the church and state). The New Atheists have continued the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the value of religious skepticism, but have forgotten its purpose; they have consequently distracted attention from the real inequities of modern society. Instead of attacking the powerful and the narratives that they propound, the New Atheists have kicked up a cloud of confusing dust, impelling many to write passionate pleas from both sides of the faith divide that unfortunately amount to little more than a side show to real issues of political importance.

This article has focused on the New Atheists and the betrayal of the Enlightenment. In part II, we will explore legitimate heirs of the Enlightenment, focusing especially on Noam Chomsky and on how the praiseworthy goals of the Enlightenment can be accomplished in the modern world.

1. Dennet, D.C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. New York: Viking.
2. Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great: How religion poisons everything. New York: Twelve Books.
3. Dawkins, R. (2008). The god delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
4. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton.
5. Atran, S. (2010). Talking to the enemy: Faith, brotherhood, and the (un)making of terrorists. New York: Harper Collins.
6. An Edge Discussion of BEYOND BELIEF: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival, Salk Institue, La Jolla November 5-7, 2006
7. Hedges, C. (2008). I don’t believe in atheists. New York: Free Press.
8. The Mission Statement reads: “Support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”
9. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
10. Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit over people: Neoliberalism and global order. New York: Seven Stories Press.
11. We wish to note that the New Atheists are not a monolithic group and that Dennett in particular has expressed great respect for the accomplishments of religion. What we are attacking, to a certain degree, is the image of the New Atheists presented by the media and by many college campus groups with which we have had contact. It is true, however, that Harris and Dawkins, especially, have scurrilously and unintelligently attacked religious traditions in a way that appears mean spirited and short sighted.
12. Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
13. Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 165–196.
14. Mazur, A. (2005). Biosociology of dominance and deference. Lanham, MD: Rowland and Littlefield.
15. Boehm, C. (1993). Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy. Current Anthropology, 34, 227-254.
16. Berreby, D. (2005). Us and them: Understanding your tribal mind. New York: Little, Brown.
17. Geary, D.C. (2010). Male/female: The evolution of human sex differences (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
18. Atran, S. (2003). Genesis of suicide terrorism. Science, 299, 1534-1539.
19. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
20. Livy, T. (1962). A History of Rome (M. Hades & J.P. Poe, Eds.). New York: The Modern Library. Livy, for example, has this colorful quote about the origins of Rome:
    And if license is allowed any nation to exalt its inception and make the gods its sponsors, so towering is the military glory of Rome that when it avows that Mars himself was its father and the father of its founder, the races of mankind can submit to the claim with as little qualm as they submit to Rome’s dominion. (p. 18).
21. Gat, A. (2006). War in human civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.
22. Chagnon, N.A. (1988). Life histories, blood revenge, and warfare in a tribal population. Science, 239, 985-992.
23. LeBlanc, S. and Register, K.E. (2003). Constant battles: The myth of the peaceful, noble savage. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
24. Flannery, K.V. (1972). The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual review of ecology and systematic, 3, 399-426.
25. Carniero, R.L. (1970). A theory of the origin of the state. Science, 169, 733-738.
26. Fukuyama, F. (2011). The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
27. Wade, N. (2009). The faith instinct: How religion evolved and why it endures. New York: Penguin.
28. It is important, however, to note that religious narratives can also be used to attack state power, as is evidenced by the history of early Christianity and the subsequent developments of liberation theology; see, for example, Stark, R. (1996). The rise of Christianity: How the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the Western world in a few centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
29. Machiavelli, N. (1532/2005). The prince. New York: Penguin.
30. Hobsbawm, E. (1962/1996). The age of revolution: 1789-1848. New York: Vintage Books.
31. Paine, T. (1791/1984). Rights of man. New York: Penguin.
32. This is not to say that there was no improvement in social conditions. The extent that morality progresses is debatable, but we remain hopeful.
33. Hobsbawm, E. (1992). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. New York: Cambridge University Press.
34. Wallerstein, I. (1995). After liberalism. New York: The New Press.
35. Geary, P.J. (2002). The myth of nations: The Medieval origins of Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
36. Quote from McLuhan, M.
37. J. Anderson Thomson & Clare Aukofer (July 18, 2011). Science and religion: God didn’t make man; man made gods. Los Angeles Times.
38. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books.
39. Barrett, J.L. (2004). Why would anyone believe in god? Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
40. Domhoff, G.W. (2010). Who rules America? Challenges to corporate and class dominance (6th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
41. Winters, J. (2011). Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
42. Joe Stiglitz (May, 2011). Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. Vanity Fair.
43. Dinesh D’souza (April, 2002). In praise of American empire. Christian Science Monitor.
44. George W. Bush (Nov 13, 2008). Bush’s speech on the economic crisis, November 2008. Council on Foreign Relations.
45. Larry Kudlow (February 28, 2008). Obama’s Big-Government Vision. Townhall.
46. These words are taken from Obama’s supposedly devastating 2002 speech against going to war with Iraq. Since that speech he has, of course, “tempered” his criticisms. Note that he never once says that going to war would be a crime or an act of aggression. Rather, it would be rash and dumb. See, Barak Obama (October, 2002). Speech Against the Iraq War delivered at the Federal Plaza in Chicago.
47. George Shadroui (September 6, 2004). Dissecting Chomsky and Anti-Americanism. Intellectual Conservative.
48. Voltaire quote.
49. Richard Dawkins (September 15, 2001). Religion’s misguided missiles. The Gaurdian.
50. Ginges, J., Hansen, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2009). Religion and support for suicide attacks. Psychological Science, 20, 224-230.
51. Sam Harris (February 16, 2006). Who are the Moderate Muslims? Huffington Post.
52. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 138.
53. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 138-147.
54. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 142.
55. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 146.
56. Zogby Internationl (accessed July 21, 2011). Arab Attitudes, 2011.
57. PBS Caught in the Crossfire (accessed July 22, 2011).
58. Sam Harris (March 21, 2008). What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say. Huffington Post.
59. Paul Street (November 4, 2008). Barack Obama as a Ruling Class Candidate. ZNet.
60. Sam Harris (accessed July 24, 2011). Science Must Destroy Religion. Edge.
61. Sam Harris (December 1, 2004). Mired in a Religious War. Washington Times.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Our morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education.

– Albert Einstein¹

While at university, I was once required to write an essay on personal ethics to guide an educator. Of course ethics entailed respect for the rights of all humans, but mere respect for rights is insufficient.

Each person must decide on which principles they hold and abide by them as much as possible.

I propose the following as a simple basis for making decisions that have ethical consequences.

1) Respect that others abide by different principles. Therefore, before rendering any decision, the reasons held by others for or against any action must be heard and considered.

2) Principles must be open to scrutiny. If a superior conception of a principle exists, then an inferior principle must be abandoned.

3) Given that a principle is morally and logically sound, decisions should be rendered upon this principled basis.

4) Since mass participatory democracy is preferable to dictatorship, decision-making should be achieved, as much as possible, through a consensus.

As for my personal ethics, I hold that all humans must be not only regarded as endowed with equal rights but provided with equal conditions. The United States Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” This is factually inaccurate. We are all created unique, each person with his own strengths and weaknesses. From this mindset, how “we” value certain attributes determines how “we” view equality among humans. Society² values certain attributes more than others; consequently, individuals proficient in certain skills or possessing other attributes valued by society will be treated differently than individuals who do not possess society’s valued skills or attributes.

The phrase “all men are created equal” is obviously a platitude. It would have been much more honest to simply state that we are all different; nevertheless, we are all entitled to equal rights – and importantly, because it is not stated in the Declaration of Independence – equal conditions. (The Declaration of Independence undermines itself by referring to the Indigenous peoples of “America” as “merciless Indian Savages.” This is pertinent because it is a document held sacred by most Americans; and Americans and Canadians hold a similar — not identical — colonial origin and culture.)

That everyone is entitled to equal conditions is seldom stated as a principle in society. This is not surprising because it does not exist, and this is unsurprising because it thoroughly undermines all notions of equality in society. Canadian society is capitalist (with socialist elements). Theoretically, capitalist society is predicated on competition in the market, and current capitalist mythology holds that anyone with skills who works hard enough can make it to the top of society. There is a top and there is a bottom. That fact that there is a top of society, itself, refutes the notion of equality.

Yet, it is simple to demonstrate that equality of conditions is a sine qua non of a society where equality of rights exists. For example, very few people would argue that a 100-meter race where some runners start from positions far behind the start line is fair. It is axiomatic. Very few people would argue that a professional boxing match between a heavyweight and flyweight is fair.

Yet, many people — and most educators!! — think it is fair to grade children using identical parameters, despite the inequality of their conditions. In the education system, a child from a poor, single-parent family who is poorly fed, often going to school in the mornings with an empty stomach, and who must help out his parent will be assessed the same as a child from a wealthy, loving family where both parents are professionals and the shelves are filled with books and educational DVDs. Is this fair? I submit it is not, but the system requires educators grade regardless of conditions outside the classroom.

The obvious solution seems to recognize the inequality of conditions and reflect this in the assessment of students. Better would be to provide for equality of conditions.

Not only is a system of testing and grading unfair but it is inefficient, as study after study shows that cooperation is superior to competition in promoting achievement.

Cooperation is something that should be fostered in society. Therefore, the imposition of competitive grading should be eliminated and cooperative learning encouraged. It seems sufficient that students can decide upon their own goals and plan (with facilitation from a teacher/parent) their paths to their goals.

Yet education is fraught with authoritarianism, and one consequence of this authoritarianism is that learners are taught that it is normal in society to wield power over others, often without accountability to those the power is being wielded over.

Hence, a discussion of ethics in education is rendered moot because education (in the mainstream of the capitalist system) is flawed by an unethical foundation.

1. Albert Einstein: The Human Side, Helen Dukas and Barnesh Hoffman (Eds.), Princeton University Press, 1979: 83. The quotation continues: “The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.”
2. Here I am not referring to the masses in society because society is not governed by the masses; society is a function of agendas set by owners of corporations and their political faces.

Yet, even back then there was a nagging question: America was great, powerful and good, how was it possible that we should have so much, both material and security, and others be so deprived? In my childish simplicity it seemed that my country could, if not fix the plight of others, then improve the conditions of their lives.

As a child I moved to the rural south. There I saw that migrant workers lived in tiny one-room shacks with no plumping, no glass or screens on the windows, often no real doors; I could see thin stacks of cardboard partly covered with dirty blankets on the floors. Blacks lived in isolated “towns” off the main roads, really medieval villages, out of sight, out of mind.

I began to marvel more specifically at my good luck to be born in America as a white child to parents with enough money to buy a little land, build a real house and have a working car. I visited a friend’s house, a small frame place with only exterior covering, the framing still exposed on the inside. In the bedroom, behind a blanket curtain, I saw my friend’s uncle, a skeleton in a bed, skull face with wet searching animal eyes; a man with some terrible degenerative disease. I added to my list of marvels that everyone in my family, including myself, was healthy.

The Korean War (police action) was thoroughly terrifying to my nearly 10-year-old person. I added to my list that my immediate surroundings were not being overrun by millions of bloodthirsty Chinese in very scary quilted fighting suits. At about this same time the sanctity and security of my white, middle class, American, healthy, not in a war-zone life began to be challenged by the Russian Communists, who could, and perhaps wanted to, deliver and drop atomic bombs on my grade school. I felt completely out-classed by atomic bombs; that famous aerial photo of Hiroshima, ‘after,’ would dance up in my mind and I would search it for something that looked like my schoolyard.

Yet, even with all these things going on, the paradoxes of my safety and ease of life compared to those skinny farmers in India, their stick children trying to hide behind their stick mother or the naked little children of a Central American jungle village… I tried and tried to understand how they felt, how they might think about their world, what it must be like to be them.

My life remained remarkably easy by comparison: school, work, relationships; maybe not so much relationships, I wasn’t very good with relationships, but I was bright and quite attractive – like a shiny object that you want to pick up and play with until it proves not so interesting after all – and so always had people around. The rest of the world, on the other hand, also continued on with its incomprehensible inequities: Vietnam, South Africa, Central and South America, the Congo and a hundred other places where human life was not recognized as such or of any particular value by the powers-that-be there.

And the point of this little reconnoiter through personal reflections? It seems the usefulness of the social and economic structures that protected me and many millions more like me are coming to an end. I have come to understand that never was the “normalcy” of my life experience normal; it was a hiatus from the normal lived out in the momentum of a previous time. The experience of South Korean villagers driven from their homes by war was normal. The aboriginal displaced from ancestral lands (pick your country) was normal. The little 400 square foot apartment with 7 people and just barely enough food was normal.

The mineral and biological wealth of the North American continent, supplemented by the stolen wealth of the undeveloped world, was so great that just the splashes from the carrying bucket soaked the people. Those with serious psychopathic greed feverously gathered all that they could get, but were easily seen and somewhat easily constrained, though, perhaps more importantly, they needed the American people and, especially, they needed the people to need them. Not that they always remembered; it was possible to remind them.

But with the last half of the last century has come an explosion of transportation and communication technology, the imminence of peak everything, the obvious near-term end of population growth and consequential end of economic growth binges; it was becoming increasingly clear that the bubble of American popular sanctity and security would have to end for the psychopathically greedy and their attendants to avoid sharing.

And they are frantic to avoid sharing. If sharing were to start, even a little bit, then the gates would be torn open and, horror of horrors, the elites would have to begin to confront the possibility of normalcy. And living like the rest of humanity is not on the table, the options have been thought through and are being put in place. There is always the moment, as a plan begins to be implemented, when all the participants can see what is happening; we may not like it, may be in denial for a time, but we know.

As our certainty in our American greatness and personal safety begins to weaken we cry out our old phrases, the ones that we were taught by the economic and political elite: “economic growth, personal responsibility, free market, free trade, greed is good, pro-life, don’t tax the job creators:” like children who, when they suddenly feel out of favor and in danger of loosing parental protection, search for just the right thing to say and do to return to good graces. But these phrases are out of date, are of no interest. And we are bewildered: one says to the other, “I still love you.” and it is replied, “But, I no longer love you.”

The powerful no longer need us, at least not as they did in the past; the American people have become fungible. Germany still needs Germans; if all the Germans were to disappear there would be no Germany, but if Americans were to disappear they would just be replaced with new ones from all over just like in the beginning, and just like “in the beginning,” stubborn ones who stayed on would have to be reeducated into the new society. The economic superstructure has come not to care who is running around on the streets and fields below so long as the running around is in all the desired directions.

The good cop/bad cop routine of the Democratic/Republican party proves that the people cannot yet be completely ignored, but the time is getting closer when we, common folk in general, will have experiences like the people of Chile, Argentina, China, Kenya, Iraq, Egypt and dozens of other places where the elites don’t feel the need to hide their intentions.

My childhood conundrums have been largely cleared up. The “normalcy” of my youth and early years was really not normal at all, but life in a very special protected community, one over which I either never had or had given up influence. The American Dream of more and better every year should have tipped all of us off to the con game, that we were being used and that there would be a judgment day. All that was required was Life Magazine or National Geographic and a newspaper or a radio.

There is still the opportunity to remake the place that we live, this country; not into the country that it was (or what we thought it was), that was and is a lie, but into something more real. There is still great power in the people, great energy when the TV is turned off. There are ideas and many millions of available ‘man-hours.’ First, however, it is necessary to see ourselves with honesty and reality, and there is where I despair.

After the overthrow of Louis XVI and the abolition of the monarchical French state, a new state was constructed by the revolutionaries — one based on “eternal” reason and designed to be completely rational. The spiritual progenitor of this state was Rousseau’s book “The Social Contract”. But “eternal” reason turned out to be simply the explanation of existence from the point of view of the rising bourgeois class. The complexity of the new political reality they had created quite eluded them as the contradictions between their class and the newly conscious masses of the disposed poor of Paris and the countryside began to manifest themselves. The wretched of the earth exerted themselves and the bourgeois rational state fell apart and morphed into the Reign of Terror under which the masses, for a moment, gained “the mastery” and saved the Revolution.

With the abolition of feudalism the bourgeoisie had expected social peace but instead got a furious international response and the development of an intense struggle between the poor and the rich at home. After Robespierre and the Jacobins, representing the French masses, were overthrown on 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794) by the conservative bourgeoisie, the new ruling class lost faith in its own ability to rule. After five years of corrupt government under the Directory, they surrendered to the coup d’etat of Napoleon Bonaparte on 18 Brumaire Year IX (November 9, 1799).

All this turmoil was a reflection of the “development of industry upon a capitalist basis [which] made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society.” From the dispossessed Paris masses (the “have-nothings” and other disadvantaged groups the proletariat began to develop “as the nucleus of a new class.” However, at this time “the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very incompletely developed.” At this historical juncture the three “founders” of socialism appeared: Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen.

First on the scene was Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). The Revolution was supposed to be a victory of the Third Estate (production workers) over a ruling class of idlers (the nobility and the Catholic hierarchy and its priests). But, in reality, Engels says, the victory did not go to the Third Estate as a whole but only that part of it owning property, “the socially privileged part.” Saint-Simon saw the Revolution as a struggle between “workers” (anyone engaged in productive activity) and “idlers”– people living off unearned income. For him “the workers were not only the wage workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, and the bankers.” Science and Industry must move to the forefront and lead the revolution. The undeveloped nature of the class struggle within the Third Estate is apparent — the proletariat and the capitalists are in the same “class.” (I can’t say the vast majority of the American people have gone much beyond that stage of consciousness yet but it has recently began to dawn on them that class struggle is real).

Saint-Simon’s heart was in the right place as he wanted to improve the conditions of the lowest and greatest number of the Third Estate — what would become the proletariat and included the masses of downtrodden peasants, the most numerous and poor; Engels quotes him: “la class la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.” However, his socialism was utopian as he expected the bankers to lead the way into the new world! “The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit.” Ironically the bankers today, the finance capitalists, do control production but in their interests not those of “la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.”

Saint-Simon actually thought the rich bourgeoisie, bankers and manufacturers, would change themselves into public servants and use their ruling positions to help the poor and oppressed. But at least he realized the “poor and oppressed” made up the majority of “the people” (Third Estate). In fact, Engels credits him with understanding that the Revolution was a three way struggle — Nobility vs. the Bourgeoisie AND the propertyless masses even though there was a tendency to group the latter two together when contrasted to the Nobility. His greatness was in proclaiming that “all men ought to work” and recognizing that within the bourgeois revolution the Reign of Terror represented the power of “the toiling masses” against the haut bourgeoisie.

Engels quotes Saint-Simon addressing himself to the poor masses: “See what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.” The “they” are the bourgeois enemies of Robespierre and the rule of the Parisian sans culottes. Saint-Simon also saw a future where economics was more important than politics; i.e., the administration of things (planned economy) over the administration of people (the bourgeois state); i.e, he envisioned “the abolition of the state.”  We find in Saint-Simon the seeds, Engels says, of “almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic.”

Following on the appearance of Saint-Simon came the ideas of Francois-Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He contrasted the actual living conditions of the people after the establishment of bourgeois rule (“material and moral misery”) with the pictures of what life would be like painted by their pre-revolutionary propaganda and by the “rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time.”

In his first book, ”The Theory of the Four Movements” (1808) he wrote, “Social progress and changes of a period are accompanied by the progress of women towards freedom, while the decay of the social system brings with it a reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by women.” Therefore, “Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress.”

Engels says of him, with respect to the above passage, that: “He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.”

This not only tells us a lot about Saudi Arabia, but where our own society is heading with its failure to pass an Equal Rights Amendment and the movement to restrict the right to abortion, as well as the recent Supreme Court ruling that the women discriminated against for years at Walmart have no right to a class action suit to redress their grievances.

Fourier also divided the history of human development up to the present era into “four stages of evolution,” which were 1.) Savagery 2.) the Patriarchate 3.) Barbarism, and 4.) Civilization.

In this scheme “Civilization” appears with the development of capitalism in the 1500s and he says “that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal [and] hypocritical.” Engels says that for Fourier civilization develops along “a vicious circle” throwing up contradictions it cannot resolve and arriving at the exact opposite destinations that it wants to arrive at or at least pretends to want to arrive at so that, as Fourier writes, “under civilization POVERTY IS BORN OF SUPER-ABUNDANCE ITSELF.”

For example, the US, the richest country in the world, has 25% of its children at, or under, the official poverty line — a completely ridiculous society! One of the things Engels admires about Fourier is his masterly use of the dialectical method in his writings, which he compares to that of Hegel “his contemporary.” Engels also says something curious here. He says Fourier postulates the “ultimate destruction of the human race” which he introduced into historical science just as Kant had introduced the “ultimate destruction of the Earth” into natural science. But, in this pre-Star Trek world, Kant’s end of the Earth scenario would have entailed the end of the human race as well.

Saint-Simon and Fourier were products of the French Revolution but, Engels points out, at the same time over in England just as great a revolution was taking place. The whole basis of bourgeois society was being changed by the development of steam engines and tool making machines and manufacture (from the Latin “manus” hand) was being replaced by gigantic factories where machines tended by workers began to to turn out commodities rather than commodities directly made by them, “thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society.”

This industrial revolution began to divide society into a powerful group of capitalists on one hand, and propertyless proletarians on the other. The heretofore large and stable middle class began to break up and tended to be forced down into the lower class of workers — “it now led a precarious existence.” Sound familiar?

However, then the term “middle class” had a different meaning than it does now. Then it meant the class of artisans and small shop keepers who thrived in the era of manufacture. Now it is used to refer to an income group consisting of well paid workers and professionals whose wages were partially subsidized by the mega-profits of the imperialist international capitalist corporations who bought a modicum of social peace at home at the expense of the international solidarity of first world workers with third world workers and peasants by the creation of a labor aristocracy, according to Lenin, in the metropolitan countries. Professionals such as lawyers, doctors and the parasitical class of preachers and priests were also included.   With the decline of high paying production jobs in the West due to the rise of industry in the third world, among other factors, these high wage jobs are disappearing forcing the “middle class” down into lower paying jobs and so, as in the first days of capitalism, it now leads “a precarious existence.”

Another difference is that today we have labor unions, pro-working class political parties and associations, and growing class awareness which is developing into a major class battle for the protection of people’s jobs, life styles and incomes. This battle is just beginning and should grow as today’s world capitalist system proceeds further down the path of decay and self destruction.

But in the England of the early 1800s, capitalism was on the rise and not the decline. It was into this world that the third great early founder of socialism arose: Robert Owen (1771-1858). Owen was a materialist in philosophy and thought that humans were the product of their heredity (although at this time nothing was known of genes or DNA or any of the mechanisms of heredity) and their environment, most particularly their childhood environment. For 29 years (1800-1829) he managed New Lanark the large cotton-mill employing around 2500 “hands” in Scotland. And, Engels says, by “simply placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings” the workers lived in a society without “drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, [or] charity.” He sent all the children off to school at age 2, put the working day at 10 1/2 hours (not the 13 or 14 that was the norm) and kept everyone on full wages when there was a four month shut down due to a cotton crisis AND made large profits and doubled the value of the business.

Well, my goodness! Why didn’t all the capitalists follow suit? They didn’t follow suit, for the same reason Owen fought with the other shareholders at New Lanark — they didn’t like the extra expenses that had to be put out for “conditions worthy of human beings.” After Owen left in 1829 the community continued, in one form or another, under different capitalists, until 1968 when it went bust. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site drawing in around 400,000 tourists a year to visit it and the house where Owen lived.

In his work “The Revolution in Mind and Practice” (1849) Owen wrote he was unhappy with New Lanark because “The people were slaves at my mercy.” He pointed out that New Lanark’s 2500 workers, with steam power, created as much social wealth as it took 600,000 workers to create a couple of generations earlier. Those 600,000 had to be paid living wages just as the 2500 — so what happened to all the surplus wealth saved in wages that would have gone to 597,500 extra workers? It was pocketed by the capitalists.

This new wealth was being generated all over England. It was being used to wage the wars of the Empire and to maintain an oppressive aristocratic and bourgeois order at home. “And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.” Owen wanted this vast new wealth to go to the working class that created it for the building of a new society in which it would be, as Engels says “the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all.”

In his day, because of his reforms at New Lanark, Owen was considered a great philanthropist. He was lionized and respected and welcome at the tables of the rich and powerful. But as soon as he started talking about the working class creating all the wealth and how it ought to build a new society based on “common property” he was dropped like a hot potato, became persona non gratia, and shunned by official society. He therefore went to the working class and became a union leader and, Engels says, “Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen.”

Owen called for the overthrow of three great impediments to the advance of the working class and the reform of society along communist lines — private property, religion, and “the present form of marriage (Engels).” Marriage is going through some radical changes nowadays and it is certainly very different from the forms of marriage Owen would have seen in the early 19th century. But private property and religion (i.e., supernaturalism and superstition) are still major impediments that hold back social progress for workers.

The last few pages of this chapter Engels devotes to vituperative attacks against Dühring and his negative views of the three utopians compared to whom Dühring is a pipsqueak. Engels says Dühring displays “a really frightful ignorance of the works of the three utopians.” Their works are still worth reading (Dühring’s are not) and whatever limitations they have were the result of the undeveloped conditions of early industrial capitalism. But since the time of the utopians and today (the 1870s) “modern industry has developed the contradictions laying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable.”

Well, they may have been “palpable” to Engels, but capitalism is still around, sad to say. And once again the palpability of capitalist collapse is in the air. From the looming default of Greece, to the threat of defaults spreading to Spain, Portugal and Italy which will bring down the Euro-zone and mobilize millions of workers to take to the streets of Europe, to the failure of the recovery in the United States and the desperate turn to the Tea Party by big capital to nurture home grown fascism to attack the workers and their unions, the smell of capitalist decay is everywhere. Let us hope this generation of workers will pay due to the long ago optimism of Frederick Engels.

I have difficulty avoiding thought about the future because I have a picture of one of my granddaughters on my computer screen—a beautiful girl standing in Fall splendor on the Boston College campus. In addition, I have a picture of my other granddaughter—older, but also beautiful—on my mouse pad, sitting next to her handsome younger brother. (Another grandchild—to be a sister of the one in Boston—is due in about two months.) Thus, I can relate to Mark Hertsgaard, whose Hot¹ was written in part because he has a young daughter, and is understandably concerned about the sort of future she’ll be living in.

I should have started thinking seriously about the future much earlier. After all, in the late 1950s, while in college, I had taken a conservation course (which used a text by Raymond Dassman, and was taught by Dr. Jacob Shapiro, who taught the course with the fire of a Hebrew prophet). Around the same time I read Harrison Brown’s The Challenge of Man’s Future. In the early 1970s I read The Limits to Growth and E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. In the 1980s I read Catton’s Overshoot and Stephen H. Schneider’s Global Warming. In the 1990s I read Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance and Alan Thein Durning’s How Much is Enough? Several years ago I read James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, and Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. Etc.

Why, then, have I done so little in working for a better future? I would rationalize my inaction by referring to the fact that Madhu Suri Prakash (a contributing editor to Yes! magazine) recently wrote a letter to Wendell Berry, “proposing that he write an open letter to President Obama calling for funding to establish new small farms.”

Berry’s response, in part:

I’m not a leader. I am, above all, in no way comparable to Gandhi, who was an ascetic. I love the world’s abundance of ordinary pleasures. And he was a leader. I have neither the character nor the abilities required for leadership. And I want no followers. If I looked back and saw myself being followed, my only wish would be to escape. I am a mostly solitary man, always in need of quiet, who has written some essays inviting, not converts or followers, but honest judgment.

(Berry made the reference to Mohandas Gandhi because Prakash had written, in her letter, “Your long patience with all of us during the past half-century reminds me of the 50-year-old patience of Gandhi.”)

Just as Berry is “in no way comparable to Gandhi (so he claims, at any rate), I am in no way comparable to Wendell Berry.² Not only am I, like Berry, not a leader; even more like Berry, I am not an activist. I wish that I had the adventurist blood of some of my ancestors—such as Wolfgang Klingenberg (who around 1500 CE left the Constance area of Germany, and acquired a large property at the far end of Songefjord in Norway), Tjøstolv Torjesen (my father’s grandfather, who left the Tvedestrand area of Norway for Chicago in 1848), and Nonis Hasselquist, my mother’s grandfather, who was involved in the Nevada silver rush in the 1860s). But I don’t seem to have their “gumption.” (If I do, it hasn’t come to the surface yet!) In addition, I have been in the same boat as most others in our society: In being forced to “make a living,” I have of necessity been living in the here-and-now. It appears, then, that the most that I can do is to develop, and write down, some ideas, and then try to get them posted. That may be all that I’m “destined” to do.

I come to that writing with a very limited background in science. While in high school I limited my science exposure to Physics. While in college, my major was History, with minors in English and Geology—so that the latter was my only exposure to science. In graduate school my focus was on Urban Economic Geography, Economics, and Sociology, and over the years I have been an avid reader, but especially in the “social studies” area rather than science. Thus, my education in the area of “climate science” is a result of my reading “on the side” rather than course work. Given the newness of “climate science,” most individuals would, of course, admit the same thing.

In the case of a subject such as “global warming,” there are, it seems to me, four basic questions to ask:

• What is the course (over time and space) of its occurrence?
• Why is it occurring?
• What are the effects of its occurrence?
• Given those effects, how should we humans respond?

I have nothing to offer so far as the first three questions are concerned: As with most others, I must rely on others with the relevant expertise for answers to those questions.³ It is only the fourth question — which is one that involves opinion, but opinion based (one hopes) on objective fact — that I dare address because of a unique viewpoint regarding what we should do.

One way of perceiving my recommendations is to regard them as a sort of Sorelian myth. Georges Sorel (1847-1922), was a Frenchman who is usually categorized as a “syndicalist”; “Syndicalism grew out of trade union associations that espoused the utopian vision of one day controlling their industries and, eventually, the political state.” Sorel is most noted for having written Reflections on Violence (1908), a book in which he developed the “notion of the general strike as a mythic belief, the widespread acceptance of which would prompt collective action by workers as well as soften employers’ resolve against concessions.”

I have never read Sorel’s book (and likely never will — and I certainly do not advocate the use of violence, as did Sorel), but gather from reading about Sorel that he developed the idea of a general strike not so much as an event that was likely to occur, but as an idea — a “myth” — that, if accepted by people, had the capability of motivating people to take action. I refer to the recommendation that I will make in a later essay as such a myth because it is not so much as a serious recommendation as a set of ideas that have potential to motivate people. To motivate them to think about how to respond to “global warming,” and also motivate them to themselves develop “action plans” in response to the ideas that they develop.

It would be neither possible — nor even desirable! — for those recommendations to be followed to the letter. The recommendations should be perceived, rather, as some ideas intended to supplement the ideas of others, and specifically ideas having pertinence especially for the early stages of a process of societal change. If those ideas are implemented (along with other ideas from others), they will initiate a certain course of development; but that course will evolve in a way that none of us can predict at this time.

I begin by commenting on a relevant essay written by philosopher William James.

Part I: Introduction

So far, the fight against global warming has been conspicuously lacking in inspiration, perhaps in part because it has been conspicuously lacking in people who are willing to lay it on the line. Maybe the movement is still young or maybe the enemy is too diffuse.  Or maybe we just like the idea of living on a hotter planet.⁴

A little over a century ago (in 1906) philosopher William James delivered his famous “The Moral Equivalent of War” speech at Stanford University, his essay with that name (published in 1910) having been derived from that speech.⁵ It has been noted that James, in his earlier writings (e.g., the massive Principles of Psychology, 1890), had “sought to re-conceive the human mind as inherently purposive and selective”—a point of view that was in conflict with the dominant philosophical schools of the day. “Moral Equivalent” can be conceived as an essay exemplifying this point of view.⁶

James — who asserted “I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium” — began his essay, however, by recognizing that this “war [against war] is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.” Why? Because “The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.” (A statement that rings as true — unfortunately! — in our day as it did in James’s; see, e.g., Henry Giroux.)

James “admitted” (wrongly, it turns out): “We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history…. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our borne and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us.” He added: “Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which everyone feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority.” Therefore, “The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock—if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure species of perfection …”

One who believes (as did James) “devoutly in the reign of peace,” yet recognizes our (supposedly) natural proclivities for violent behavior, needs also to recognize “two unwillingnesses of the imagination, one aesthetic, and the other moral; unwillingness, first, to envisage a future in which army-life, with its many elements of charm, shall be forever impossible, and in which the destinies of peoples shall nevermore be decided quickly, thrillingly, and tragically by force, but only gradually and insipidly by ‘evolution,’ and, secondly, unwillingness to see the supreme theatre of human strenuousness closed, and the splendid military aptitudes of men doomed to keep always in a state of latency and never show themselves in action. These insistent unwillingnesses, no less than other aesthetic and ethical insistencies, have, it seems to me, to be listened to and respected. One cannot meet them effectively by mere counter-insistency on war’s expensiveness and horror. The horror makes the thrill; and when the question is getting the extremist and supremest out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious.”

How, then, does the pacifist (e.g., James) proceed? “Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.” For “So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.”

James put himself “firmly into the anti-military party,” and looked “forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.” But, he continued, “I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting [not in 2011! and certainly not in the United States!] we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly habitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement …”

He continued: “The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gain by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods.” For, after all, “Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are … only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form.” “What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.”

To be more concrete in making a recommendation: “If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population [of males] to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the [social] injustice [currently existing] would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes are now blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.”

Thus, by conscripting (male) youth, but for purposes other than war preparation, one could accomplish two goals at once: One could contribute to the development of a pacifist spirit in those conscripted, while simultaneously reducing classism in the society.

Those so conscripted would engage in a “war against Nature.” Specifically, they would be sent: “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.”

Such conscription should appeal to the military-minded, for it “would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which … [they are] so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousnous, authority with a as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as new, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life.” “So far,” James continued, “war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.” He added that “I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.”

James’s argument, in brief, was, then:

1. Waging a war against war will not be easy because war has been with us since early times.

2. The reason for that fact is that we are naturally competitive, and that natural proclivity has been expressed, in part, through militarism.

3. Some supporters of war argue that it preserves certain desirable personal traits in the population.

4. Other supporters argue that unless nations expand, they will shrink, and that they need war for expansion.

5. James asserted that until pacifists propose a substitute for war that has a disciplinary function that is military in character, they will be unsuccessful.

6. He added that military virtue provides a cement to a society.

7. He argued that our competitive nature needs to be expressed in a constructive way.

8. That way was a “war against Nature,” and he proposed that male youth be conscripted to engage in such a war.

Several comments are in order regarding some of the points in this essay:

1. I agree that there is a better course of action than one focused on militarism; for militarism not only results in loss of life (of our people, along with other peoples) and property damage, but is costly—directly and indirectly. In addition, our actions often result in terrorist reactions. Put another way—and more accurately—our terrorist activities result in “blowback” (a term associated with Chalmers A. Johnson) in the form of counter terrorist activities.

2. The assumption of an innate competitive nature was plausible in James’s day because Charles Darwin’s concept of “natural selection” assumed it (without, however, proving it).⁷ But anthropological research over the years,⁸ and recent observational and experimental research⁹ has made that viewpoint untenable.

3. A society likely needs some sort of “cement” (indeed, it’s hard to imagine a society that lacks one!), but the question arises: Can that “cementing” be accomplished by forcing certain actions upon individuals, even if that forcing involves selection from among a series of options? (My answer: I have my doubts!)

4. One might have expected James to have suggested sports as a suitable glue — the modern Olympics having been re-started (in Athens, Greece) in 1896: As a Green Bay Packers fan for the past 50+ years, such a suggestion highly plausible. However, James insists on constructive activities as necessary for providing the necessary “cement,” and insists on conscription. I concur with James on this point, and offer precisely that in this series. My view of what constitutes “constructive” differs, however, from that of James.

5. There are ambiguities associated with James’s list of activities. It’s not clear whether these would be public-funded activities, private ones, or some mix. If the activities included privately-owned organizations, there is the question of finding ones willing to participate with the program. And although those working for a public organization would be paid by the government, how would those working for privately-owned organizations be paid (assuming the involvement of such organizations)—and would any government supervision be provided?

6. James provided no assessment as to how practical his proposal was—how likely it was that the federal government would accept it. Indeed, one would need to admit that it has never been accepted. (One might argue that, e.g., the Peace Corps was inspired by James’s essay; if it was, it involved no conscription, and was not clearly a “war against Nature.”

7. Even had James’s proposal been implemented, it likely would have done little in serving a “cementing” function: It’s difficult to imagine how anyone could generate much enthusiasm for his proposal!

My proposal (discussed in Parts IV and V) responds — from a “Jamesian” standpoint — to René Dubos’s statement: “To long for a human situation not subservient to the technological order is not a regression or escapist attitude but rather one that requires a progressive outlook and heroic efforts.” And: “The impulse to withdraw from a way of life we know to be inhuman is probably so widespread that it will become a dominant social force in the future.”¹⁰

And to this statement by Paul Shepard: “There are many striking parallels between post-industrial men and hunter-gatherer men. They are both highly mobile, non-territorial, non-soil-working, nature-interested, much leisured, function-oriented, small-familied, and altruistic. The most modern urban men are ready to abandon, if they only knew how, civilization based on war and competition and on industry so heavy that the human personality as well as the surface of the earth is stamped with its obscenity.”¹¹

What, you may ask, do these statements have to do with “global warming”? — given that the only “environmental” reference here is to “the surface of the earth.” In Parts IV and V I will discuss their relevance; at this point I will simply note that a proposal that responds to the above statements of Dubos and Shepard would seem to have the potential of motivating people to act—in my case relative to “global warming” (among other problems, some of which are identified in Part IV).

The proposal that I put forward in this series has motivational capabilities because it:

• Addresses what is perhaps the major threat facing humankind at present, that of “global warming.”
• Simultaneously addresses many other important societal problems as well.
• Has plausibility — so that it should be capable of implementation (with the qualifications specified in the Prefatory Remarks above).
• Relies on a means that should be attractive to many in our society.

If December 21, 2012, marks the dawn of a New Age, perhaps this will be because what I propose in this series is acted upon!
There are many good ideas out there,¹² and I offer my proposal, not as one as providing THE answer to our problems, but as just another proposal.

1. Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. There is also, of course, James Hansen’s, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009.
2. I once heard him speak at a conference, but did not have an opportunity to speak with him. I had attended the conference at Paul Shepard’s invitation, and chatted with Paul briefly before his presentation, but not to any of the other of the speakers that day.
3. As a consequence, I will make no attempt here to rebut the arguments set forth recently on this site by Denis Rancourt in “The Lie of Climate Change Science.”
4. Jeff Goodell, “Time for Climate Activists to Get Tough,” June 30, 2011.
5. This epigraph (written by?) appears above the essay on the Emory University site: This essay, based on a speech delivered at Stanford University in 1906, is the origin of the idea of organized national service. The line of descent runs directly from this address to the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps to the Peace Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps. Though some phrases grate upon modern ears, particularly the assumption that only males can perform such service, several racially-biased comments, and the notion that the main form of service should be viewed as a “warfare against nature,” it still sounds a rallying cry for service in the interests of the individual and the nation.
6. Lee Harris, in his interesting “Why Isn’t Socialism Dead?,” relates the thinking of James to Georges Sorel, and Sorel’s thinking, in turn, to that of, e.g., Karl Marx and Eduard Bernstein
7. “Concept” rather than “theory” for the simple reason that it was not the latter. It was a concoction for which Darwin provided no empirical support—for the simple reason that it has little such support—and none in the case of humans. See my discussion of Darwin.
8. See, e.g., Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974; Robin Clarke and Geoffrey Hindley, The Challenge of the Primitives. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975; and Colin M. Turnbull, The Human Cycle. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.
9. See, e.g., Frans B. M. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; and Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
10. So Human An Animal. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968, p. 196.
11. The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973, p. 277.
12. See, e.g., the Hertsgaard book cited in endnote 1, his discussion of Ron Sims, for example (p. 78 ff).

The future leader of China, Mao Zedong, was either present at one of Russell’s lectures or read a detailed account of it in the Chinese press. The purpose of this article is to discuss Russell’s blueprint for Chinese liberation and compare it to what the Chinese, under the leadership of the Communist Party, actually did. Another purpose is to point out that many of Russell’s comments about the role of the United States, made over 90 years ago, as well as what was needed in China, are still relevant today.

A word of caution. Russell considered himself a radical and a “socialist”, perhaps even a theoretical “communist” (although he was hostile to many of the actions of the Russian Bolsheviks) at this time. After WWII and up to the late 1950s Russell was a cold war anti-Communist, though not a ridiculous mindless one a la Sidney Hook and those in his milieu, before coming to his senses in the 1960s. I am only concerned, in this article, with Russell’s political statements and opinions in the early 1920s. Some of Russell’s views, while commonly held in the 20s, are completely politically incorrect by today’s standards — I will note them with explanation marks (!!) but otherwise I will not address them or pass over them in silence. These are usually remarks dealing with the nature of the “Chinese mind” or “character” as if all Chinese think a certain way.

“Questions”

This article will deal with Chapter One of POC: “Questions.”

In trying to understand China, Russell thinks he is dealing with a totally alien culture. He is forced to ask himself  what his ultimate values are, what makes one culture or society “better” than another, and what ends does he wish to see triumph in the world. He says different people have different answers to these questions and he thinks they are just subjective preferences not amenable to argument. He will merely state his own and hope his reader will agree with him.  Russell is no objectivist in morals. The ends he values are: “knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship and affection.” He believes in the goals, if not   always the methods, of communism (although he is not a Marxist), and thinks a socialist society will best approximate the ends he wants. There are elements in Chinese culture that also reflect his ends better than they are reflected in Euro-American culture.

Russell thinks a nation should be judged not only on how its own people are treated, but also on how it treats others. He finds China, in this respect, better than the imperialist nations of the West. In the following quote Russell uses the word “our” and I want to stress that he does not intend to restrict its meaning to the British Empire but uses it inclusively to refer to the major imperialist nations of Europe and the English speaking world or even to “capitalist” nations thus including Japan.

“Our prosperity,” he writes, “and most of what we endeavor to secure for ourselves, can only be obtained by widespread exploitation of weaker nations .” The Chinese, however, obtain what they have by means of their own hard work. China is radically different today but  I think what Russell says about it is still basically correct and what he says about  “us” hasn’t changed very much at all.

What happens in China, he says, will determine the whole future course of world history. There are tremendous resources in China and whether they are to be controlled “by China, by Japan, or by the white races [!!], is a question of enormous importance, affecting not only the whole development of Chinese civilization, but the balance of power in the world, the prospects of peace, the destiny of Russia, and the chances of development toward a better economic system in the advanced nations.”

This remark is as true today as it was some 90 years ago. Chinese civilization, however, is now, at least, much more in the hands of the Chinese, the world balance of power remains in flux, the destiny of Russia is still undetermined, and a better economic system for the West (i.e., socialism) is still a distant dream but may be positively influenced by the economic development of China.

I didn’t mention the “prospects for peace” and that is because in the short term Russell was absolutely  correct: the civil war and revolution in China, World War II (in the Pacific), the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all had China, in one way or another, as their focus and the hope of eventually controlling her resources as a backdrop. Today, as well, many circles in the West, associated with international finance capital, see China as a future threat and the US military has contingency plans for a war with her. So Russell was quite prescient to see the economic resources of China as the focal point of contemporary history.

“Modern China”

Russell discusses the internal state of China, as he understood it in 1920-21, in his chapter “Modern China” in “The Problem of China.” He thinks there are only two ways the Chinese can escape from imperialist domination. The first way is for China to become a strong military power. Russell thinks this would be a disaster.

However, since “the capitalist system involves in its very essence a predatory relation of the strong towards the weak [a perfectly good Leninist proposition even if clumsily expressed], internationally as well as nationally” he proposes a second way for Chinese liberation. The foreign imperialist powers will have to “become Socialistic”. Russell thinks this is the only real solution for the Chinese.

It didn’t occur to Russell that China might free itself by military means and work towards socialism at the same time. It goes without saying that the Chinese would be waiting for kingdom come to be liberated if they had taken Russell’s advice and expected Europe and America to turn socialist.

Russell, as did many in his generation, expected a major war to eventually break out between Japan and the United States over which would be top dog in the far east, but did not see that war as an opportunity for the victims of imperialism to break free and become independent. At any rate, in respect to his “only” solution to Chinese liberation, Russell was wildly off the mark — despite his Leninist grasp of the nature of capitalism.

Russell did, however, urge progressives to support the fledgling government of Sun Yat-sen which was at this time battling the war lord system. No one at that time foresaw that the Kuomintang would degenerate into a fascist despotism under Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, or that the recently founded Communist Party of China would be the eventual vehicle both for Chinese liberation and regeneration.

Russell’s next comment was completely correct and was about an issue that, after the success of the revolution, the Chinese took very seriously.  Russell wrote that “in the long run, if the birth-rate is as great as is usually supposed, no permanent cure for their poverty is possible while their families continue to be so large.”

The introduction of birth control and the one child policy, which was a drastic step and is now being reevaluated, probably helped to considerably contain the population from an unmanageable explosion (not to credit natural disasters and the unintended consequences of  policies that turned out to be mistaken with respect to premature industrial expansion and agricultural reforms in the 1950s).

Another problem the Chinese would have to overcome before they could hope to compete with the West, according to Russell, was lack of a modern educational system for the masses. This too the CPC saw as a major problem and immediately after coming to power launched a mass literacy program and built schools and institutions of higher learning throughout China.

This was a prerequisite, Russell said, as Chinese workers would need education and skills in order to command decent wages (he did not foresee a socialist revolution in China). Nevertheless, industrialization in China, as in all other countries, would begin to develop by methods that are “sordid and cruel.” Intellectuals, he remarked, “wish to be told of some less horrible method by which their country may be industrialized, but so far none is in sight.”

Whether you are capitalist or socialist, it appears,  if you are starting from a primitive economic base, the only way you can accumulate capital to make industrial advances is to take  it from the surplus value created by the working class. As we will see Russell thinks state capitalism, or state socialism (they are the same for him), would be the best way for the Chinese to go — but he doesn’t envision a revolution.

Russell now hits upon a major problem which I think was responsible for some of the major errors of the Mao era.

There is one traditional Chinese belief which dies very hard, and that is the belief that correct ethical sentiments are more important than detailed scientific knowledge. This view is, of course, derived from the Confucian tradition, and is more or less true in a pre-industrial society.

One would think that Russell, with commitments to science as the basis for correct knowledge of the world, would hold that “detailed scientific knowledge” is always to be preferred; how would a pre-industrial society ever advance to a higher level without also developing  science?

In the 1950s and 60s Mao pushed the line that politics (“correct ethical sentiments”) was the correct guide to action and could win out over any objections based on economic (scientific) considerations. This led to the twin disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. There was no basis in Marxism for the views he was espousing even though Mao used Marxist terminology to try and explain his thought. If Russell were correct, this would have been a case of the unconscious Confucian substrata in Mao’s world view manifesting itself in Marxist guise.

Mao, himself, was anti-Confucian at this time so even he was blind to the real origins of the reactionary policies he was peddling in Marxist dress. I should also point out that it was only one wing of Confucianism that held to this view — an Idealist trend that developed in the Ming Dynasty and that there were other wings of Confucianism that were materialistically motivated. Mao had indeed studied Ming Confucianism and was influenced by it in his youth, and, I think, unconsciously after he assumed power.

“Present Forces and Tendencies in the Far East”

Russell’s chapter, “Present Forces and Tendencies in the Far East” (in The Problem of China) deals with the balance of power in this region in the 1920s and focuses on China, Japan, Russia and America. I will omit his comments on Japan here and concentrate on China’s dealings with America and the influence of Russia. Russell points out that the interests of Britain are (leaving India to the side) basically the same as those of America — at least its ruling sector of finance capital and NOT “the pacifistic and agrarian tendencies of the Middle West.”

At this time Russell thought that the two most important “moral forces” in the Far East were those emanating from Russia and America. He thought the Americans to be more idealistic than the jaded imperialists running the European capitalist states. However, he thought that cynical imperialist views were an inevitability as a nation’s power increased and the Americans would abandon their idealism.

We must keep this in mind, he warns us, “when we wish to estimate the desirability of extending the influence of the United States.” Today we can see that Russell was right. The United States has evolved into the most cynical and ruthless imperial power in the world, encircling the globe with its garrisons and fleets, and subjecting whole nations and peoples to its bloody domination in search of power, wealth, and resources.

All this, however, was in the future. The benign United States that appeared to Russell was that of the Harding Administration and the Washington Naval Conference, presided over by Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes. The conference was held from late 1921 to early 1922 and was the first disarmament conference in modern history. It was designed to reign in Japanese aggression in China, limit naval construction, and keep the Open Door Policy in place in China.

Russell thought America’s policy at the conference was a liberal one, but only because the outcome of the conference was in line with American interests in the Far East. What Russell really believed was that “when American interests or prejudices are involved liberal and humanitarian principles have no weight whatever.” Have we seen anything to contradict this assessment since the days of Warren Harding (or those of George Washington for that matter)?

If American plans for the future economic development of China should be successful, Russell thought it would be disastrous for China. It would certainly be good for America and her allies, but would involve “a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America [the CPC appears to have reversed this flow]; the development of a sweated proletariat [still a problem]; the spread of Christianity [another great evil]; the substitution of American civilization for Chinese [not yet but McDonalds and KFC have secured beach heads];…. the gradual awakening of China to her exploitation by the foreigner [China was already awake when Russell wrote]; and one day, fifty or a hundred years hence [around 1972 or 2022], the massacre of every white man throughout the Celestial Empire at a signal from some vast secret society.”

Well, the great awakening was already at hand when Russell wrote.  He was just blind to it.  China liberated itself in a little over 25 years, despite the best actions the US and its allies could do to prevent it, and no vast secret society sprang up to threaten every “white man.” The Celestial Empire has become a People’s Republic.

Russell’s vision of the future was off, but the definition he gave of what the West considers “good” government was spot on, even today: “it is a government that yields fat dividends for capitalists.” This is still the game plan in the 21st century.

Russell now embarks on some ill founded speculations which, nevertheless, hint at a grain of truth. He predicts, for example “it is not likely that Bolshevism [as seen in Russia-tr] as a creed will make much progress in China.” He gives the following three reasons:

1) China has a decentralized state tending towards feudalism whereas Bolshevism requires a centralized state. Russell doesn’t seem to understand a successful socialist revolution would reverse this tendency.

2) China is more suitable for anarchism because the Chinese have a great sense of personal freedom and the Bolsheviks need to have (and do have) more control over individuals “than has ever been known before.” This is strange. The Chinese had just emerged from an oriental despotism under the Manchus that had regulated everything including dress and hair styles for the population, and had no tradition of anything like “personal freedom” as had developed in Europe.

3) Bolshevism opposes “private trading” which is the “breath of life to all Chinese except the literati.” But ninety percent of the Chinese at this time were basically illiterate peasants  most of whom were under the control of a feudalistic landlord class. The Chinese masses had more in common with the Russian masses than Russell seemed to realize.

The greatest appeal of Bolshevism, Russell said, was to the youth of China who wanted to develop industry by skipping the stage of capitalist development. But Russia was now engaged in the New Economic Policy and Russell thought this signaled a slow return to capitalist methods which would disillusion the Chinese.

But, Russell said, the fact that as a creed Bolshevism [i.e., Marxism] would not hold any lasting appeal, Bolshevism “as a political force” had a great future. What he meant was that Bolshevik Russia would continue to play the Great Game in Asia and follow in the footsteps of Tzarist imperialism with Bolshevik imperialism since “the Russians have an instinct for colonization” [!!].

Here is where Russell becomes very confused in his analysis. He doesn’t really define “imperialism.” Marxists at this time defined it as the international policy of monopoly capitalism based on the control of the state by  financial capital sometimes allied with industrial capital. In this sense Bolshevik imperialism was a contradiction in terms. As far as “the Russians,” lumped together without any attempt at class analysis, having an “instinct” to become colonialists — such general statements are useless in trying to describe social reality.

Regardless, Russell thinks it would not be so bad for Russia to become hegemonic in Asia. The Russians could enter into more nearly equal relations with Asian peoples because their “character” [!!]  is more “Asiatic” than that of the “English speaking-nations.”  English speaking nations would not be able to have the same understanding and ability “to enter into relations of equally” with these strange inscrutable Orientals.  As a result an Asian Block of nations would arise as a defensive block and this would be good for world peace as well as “humanity.”

Russell recommends that outside powers leave off meddling with the Chinese and attempting to impose their own values on them as the Chinese will, left to themselves, “find a solution suitable to their character” for their own political problems. This idea  of “national character” is quite unscientific and if Russell had understood what he read of Das Kapital and other Marxist writings and substituted some such phrase as “find a solution based on their own historical development and class relations”, he would have made better sense. POC would have been better understood, in fact, if “national character” had been replaced by “historical development” whenever it occurred along with a brief description of that development.

Russell goes on to predict what the future of China will most likely be. Marxists, as  great predictors of the future themselves, especially its inevitable trends and outcomes, understand what a risky business this is and should have great sympathy for Russell’s wrong headed  prognosis.

Since the US emerged unscathed from WW I it had an excess of available capital to invest  and would be the principal nation involved in China’s future development. “As the financiers are the most splendid feature of the American civilization, China must be so governed as to enrich the financiers.” The US will contribute greatly to building educational institutions in China so that Chinese intellectuals will end up serving the interests of the big Trusts just as American intellectuals do. As a result a conservative anti-radical reform system will be produced and touted as a great force for peace. But, Russell points out: “it is impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear or peace and freedom out of capitalism.”

The US will encourage the growth of a stable government, foster an increase in income to build up a market for American goods, discourage other powers besides themselves from meddling in China, and look askance upon all attempts of the Chinese to control their own economy, especially the nationalization of the mines and railroads, which Russell sees as a “form of State Socialism or what Lenin calls State Capitalism.” The reference to Lenin is in respect to the New Economic Plan (NEP) in Russia.

The US would also keep lists of radical students and see to it that they would not get jobs, try to impose its puritan morality on the Chinese, and because Americans think their own country and way of life are “perfect” they will do great damage to what is best in Chinese culture in their attempts to make China as much as possible resemble what they call “God’s own country.”

As a result of all this a “Marxian class-war will break out” between Asia and the West. The Asian forces will be led by a socialist Russia and be fought for freedom from the imperialist powers and their exploitation. These views are very different from those Russell will be representing in his future Cold War phase.

Ever the pessimist, Russell sees this war as so destructive all around that probably “no civilization of any sort would survive it.” When the actual war came it was very destructive, but it was a civil war between the bourgeois democratic capitalist powers and the authoritarian fascist capitalist powers into which the Russians were drawn against their will and from which the Chinese emerged as a free and independent people determined to build socialism.

Russell ends his chapter on a socialist note about the evils of the “present” (1920s) system of world wide capitalist domination. His conclusion is almost a perfect description of the world we live in today. “The essential evil of the present system,” he says, “as Socialists have pointed out over and over again, is production for profit instead of for use.”  American power may, for a while, impose peace, but never freedom for weak countries. “Only international Socialism can secure both; and owing to the stimulation of revolt by capitalist oppression, even peace alone can never be secure until international Socialism is established throughout the world.”

“The Outlook for China”

The last chapter in Bertrand Russell’s POC is entitled “The Outlook for China”. Russell, writing in 1922, thinks that China (due to its population and resources) has the capacity to become the second greatest power in the world (after the United States). Today the US seems to be slipping economically so maybe China will become number one in the world sometime in the present century.

Three things will have to come about for China to reach its full potential. Russell lists them as: 1) The establishment of an orderly government [the CPC has accomplished this requirement]; 2) Industrial development under Chinese control [this too has been brought about by the CPC whether you call it "market socialism" or "state capitalism"]; 3) the spread of education [ditto care of the CPC].

All three prerequisites put forth by Russell have been attained if not quite in the manner he imagined in his book. Let’s look at some of Russell’s elaborations on these prerequisites.

First, the problem of orderly government. Russell says that in the 1920s China was functionally anarchic with battling warlords and weak central governments in the north and south of the country. He envisioned an eventual constitutional setup and a parliamentary form of government. But he cautioned that even so the masses of the people (Russell uses the term “public opinion”) will have to be guided by what amounts to a Leninist political party using democratic centralist methods.

Here is what Russell wrote: “It will be necessary for the genuinely progressive people throughout the country to unite in a strongly disciplined society, arriving at collective decisions and enforcing support for those decisions upon all its members.” That is just what happened under the leadership of CPC.

Second, the problem of industrial development. China, or any country for that matter, to be truly free has to also be economically free and that requires that it has control of its own railroads and natural resources. He thus thinks the Chinese government should own the railroads and the mines of China. He also thinks that state ownership of “a large amount” of the industry in China should also occur. “There are many arguments for State Socialism, or rather what Lenin calls State Capitalism, in any country which is economically but not culturally backward.”

Russell thinks that is possible for China, with a strong and honest government, to skip over the stage of capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism. This is tricky business as the Chinese would find out much later. If you skip too far and too fast you can trip and fall on your face.  With the right government “it will be possible to develop Chinese industry without, at the same time, developing the overweening power of private capitalists by which the Western nations are now both oppressed and misled.” We can only hope that China is heading in this direction.

Third, the problem of education. Russell says that “Where the bulk of the population cannot read, true democracy is impossible. Education is a good in itself, but is also essential for developing political consciousness, of which at present there is almost none in rural China.”

By “democracy” Russell then, and almost all Western governments and their intellectual tools today, mean “bourgeois democracy”; i.e., “democratic” institutions and constitutions that guarantee the government will be controlled by, for, and of one of two contending classes that exist in the modern capitalist world; i.e., the capitalist class. Russell proclaimed his belief in “socialism” (Mao even said Russell believed in “communism”) but he never transcended the bourgeois concept of “democracy” inculcated in him by the British ruling class by which he was educated.

But the wider, and I believe correct, meaning of “democracy” (rule of the “demos” or people) includes other forms of government than those proclaimed by the bourgeoisie and their lackeys.  It must refer to any form  of government that objectively rules in the interests of its people; i.e., the vast majority of its population composed of working people,  called by old time communists “the toiling masses” and historically personified by the “people’s democracies” and “people’s republics” of eastern Europe and Asia, and by the only completely democratic state in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.

In just a few years after Russell wrote the above words, hundreds of millions of the peasants of “rural China” would develop a political consciousness that would lead to the overthrow of the rule by landlords and capitalists in China and the establishment, however flawed, of a true people’s republic. Then they learned to read.

Russell was both correct and incorrect in saying the following: “Until it has been established for some time, China must be, in fact if not in form, an oligarchy, because the uneducated masses cannot have any effective political opinion [or in the case of the US -- miseducated masses]. If that “oligarchy” is a real communist party (not one in name only) it will bring to the masses the correct political opinion that they and they alone control their own destiny and can abolish their subjection to a class that only lives off of their exploitation. The one party state may be the instrument leading to this liberation and its own eventual elimination, along with the state, but it also gives to the masses “effective political opinion” and if it doesn’t, it may find itself being eliminated ahead of schedule.

Russell hoped the Chinese, by combining “Western” science with their traditional culture, would create a new civilization free of the deficiencies of the capitalist West. What we are seeing now, in the 21st century, in China is perhaps the fulfillment of Russell’s vision but it is a synthesis of Marx, left wing Confucianism, and modern science. Hopefully the coming century will see the end of Western “civilization” as we know it, a predatory war based imperialist system attempting to enchain the world, and the establishment of a real new world order. The values of Bertrand Russell will be better remembered and served in such a world.

Epilogue: What Mao thought of Russell’s Views on China¹

In his lecture at Changsha, Russell …. took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would not be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and bloody revolution….

My objections to Russell’s view point can be stated in a few words: ‘This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice’.

Education requires money, people and instruments. In today’s world money is entirely in the hands of the capitalists. Those who have charge of education are all either capitalists or wives of capitalists. In today’s world the schools and the press, the two most important instruments of education, are entirely under capitalist control. In short, education in today’s world is capitalist education. If we teach capitalism to children, these children, when they grow up will, in turn, teach capitalism to a second generation of children. Education thus remains in the hands of the capitalists.

Then the capitalists have ‘parliaments’ to pass laws protecting the capitalists and handicapping the proletariat; they have ‘governments’ to apply these laws and to enforce the advantages and the prohibitions that they contain; they have ‘armies’ and ‘police’ to defend the well-being of the capitalists and to repress the demands of the proletariat; they have ‘banks’ to serve as repositories in the circulation of their wealth ; they have ‘ factories’, which are the instruments by which they monopolize the production of goods.

Thus, if the communists do not seize political power, they will not be able to find any refuge in this world; how, under such circumstances, could they take charge of education? Thus, the capitalists will continue to control education and to praise their capitalism to the skies, so that the number of converts to the proletariat’s communist propaganda will diminish from day to day. Consequently, I believe that the method of education is unfeasible….

What I have just said constitutes the first argument.

The second argument is that, based on the principle of mental habits and on my observation of human history, I am of the opinion that one absolutely cannot expect the capitalists to become converted to communism. If one wishes to use the power of education to transform them, then since one cannot obtain control of the whole or even an important part of the two instruments of education — schools and the press — even if one has a mouth and a tongue and one or two schools and newspapers as means of propaganda…. this is really not enough to change the mentality of the adherents of capitalism even slightly; how then can one hope that the latter will repent and turn toward the good? So much from a psychological standpoint. From a historical standpoint…. one observes that no despot imperialist and militarist throughout history has ever been known to leave the stage of history of his own free will without being overthrown by the people. Napoleon I proclaimed himself emperor and failed; then there was Napoleon III. Yuan Shih-K’ai failed; then, also there was Tuan Ch’i-jui…. From what I have just said based on both psychological and a historical standpoint, it can be seen that capitalism cannot be overthrown by the force of a few feeble efforts in the domain of education. This is the second argument.

There is yet a third argument, most assuredly a very important argument, even more important in reality. If we use peaceful means to attain the goal of communism, when will we finally achieve it? Let us assume that a century will be required, a century marked by the unceasing groans of the proletariat. What position shall we adopt in the face of this situation? The proletariat is many times more numerous than the bourgeoisie; if we assume that the proletariat constitutes two-thirds of humanity, then one billion of the earth’s one billion five hundred million inhabitants are proletarians (I fear that the figure is even higher), who during this century will be cruelly exploited by the remaining third of capitalists. How can we bear this?

Furthermore, since the proletariat has already become conscious of the fact that it too should possess wealth, and of the fact that its sufferings are unnecessary, the proletarians are discontented, and a demand for communism has arisen and has already become a fact. This fact confronts us, we cannot make it disappear; when we become conscious of it we wish to act. This is why, in my opinion, the Russian revolution, as well as the radical communists in every country, will daily grow more powerful and numerous and more tightly organized. This is the natural result. This is the third argument…..

There is a further point pertaining to my doubts about anarchism. My argument pertains not merely to the impossibility of a society without power or organization. I should like to mention only the difficulties in the way of the establishment of such form of society and of its final attainment…. For all the reasons just stated, my present viewpoint on absolute liberalism, anarchism, and even democracy is that these things are fine in theory, but not feasible in practice….

1. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, “Communism and Dictatorship”, November 1920. January 1921 [Extracted from two letters to Ts’ai Ho-sen[1895-1932 a leader of the CPC, arrested in Hong Kong by the British and turned over to the Kuomintang which killed him- tr], in November 1920 and January 1921]

The company was founded by a man with a Polish-Jewish heritage, whose parents had come to this country while he was young. Although his family was by no means wealthy, because of native intelligence, the acquisition of a good education, a willingness to work hard, and determination (along with a little luck!), he was able to develop a fledgling company into a relatively stable and large firm. In terms of the dominant value system of this society, this man has not only become successful, but has made an important contribution to our society—and likely he is convinced of the latter.

Where I find irony is in the fact of his Jewish heritage; for as I reflect on Jewish Scripture—the book of Genesis in particular—it occurs to me that God is said to have created, during a 6-day period, the various components of our world (and beyond), and to have pronounced his creation good. Although the creation process itself is presented as a step-by-step one, the impression is given that the end product was an integrated whole—in which the various components mesh one with another. The impression is given that although activities—including interactions—are continually occurring, these activities are of a basically harmonious nature. And although motion is a virtual constant in this world, change is not. God created what became a system; and although this system was (by definition) characterized by dynamism, it was not characterized by temporal change.

Given this latter fact, the implication given by the writers/redactors of Genesis is that God, having created what He pronounced as a good system, wanted it to remain as He had created it: it was a good system as it was, and could not become “gooder.” So that the role given humans by God—that of steward—consisted of maintaining the integrity of the system, not changing it. But could I say regarding the founder of the company that I work for—a man presumably somewhat familiar with Jewish Scripture—that he perceived his role that way? Or, rather, had he acquired a conventional American mentality?—so that he saw his role as making a contribution to the society (a technological contribution in his case).

Now if one perceives one’s role as being one of making a contribution, it does not follow that one’s contribution will necessarily result in change of the Earth system. For example, if one composes music, creates a painting, does empirical scientific work, etc., one is making a contribution, but not a sort of contribution that is likely to result in Earth system change. Rather, one’s contribution results in adding beauty (perhaps!) or understanding. If, however, one’s contribution consists in developing new technology or an ideology, it holds potential for affecting behavior that will result in how one interacts with Earth and/or others. In short, it has potential for resulting—via direct and indirect causation—in change in Earth system.

I find it inconceivable that the founder of the company for which I work has had a conscious intention of changing God’s creation (to adopt here the perspective of Genesis). Yet it is very possible that the innovations that can be attributed to him and his employees have played some role in changing Earth system. And if one takes all of those who have developed new things and ideologies, and examines the “fruits” of their efforts, it is certain that one would conclude that those efforts have been responsible for change in Earth system. Have, in fact, been the primary factors responsible for such changes.

We have tended to take for granted that those who have originated and introduced innovations have made a positive contribution. So pervasive, in fact, is this belief in our society that one does not need to be taught it. Rather, one simply acquires it in the process of living here. And although histories used to focus on reigns and rulers and battles, for some time now they have tended to focus on “accomplishments” and the resulting “progress.” The very fact that positive connotations are associated with such words as “accomplishment,” “success,” “energetic,” “productive,” “ambitious,” “creative,” etc. is proof enough that the dominant value system in our society is based on the assumption that such traits are desirable.

But are they? Was Eugene Linden wrong in presenting, in Affluence and Discontent (1979), Western history as a story of anything but progress? As consisting, if anything, of developments that are propelling us toward disaster? My own conclusion on the matter is that Linden’s history is one that I find convincing—and compelling. Although I do not develop herein a case for such a perspective (read Linden for one!), I agree with the general thrust of his presentation—and would add that (a) existing trends suggest that our emissions of “greenhouse gases” will soon (if they haven’t already!) result in a period of “runaway”—i.e., that the negative feedback mechanisms that have been maintaining relative stasis will give way to positive feedback mechanisms, thereby resulting in rapid change in the global mean (among other consequences). This change will result (directly, and indirectly—e.g., via diseases) in many extinctions, and may even include our own! Underlying these events is the human development, and application, of technology (especially). And the irony here is the possibility that humans have been digging a grave for themselves, all the while being convinced that they have been digging for diamonds! In effect, humans have been committing “speciecide” while being convinced that they were creating an ever-better world.

Fortunately, although the beliefs and values that have been dominant in our society have been leading us to the precipice, contrary beliefs-values have not been entirely suppressed—and our “salvation” (if there can be such) lies in this fact. A century ago Thorstein Veblen argued that although a “pecuniary” mentality was dominant in our society (with its associated de jure mode of thinking), an “industrial” mentality (with its de facto, causation-oriented mode of thinking) was also (still) present. For Veblen, the latter was rooted in “human nature,” whereas the former was not. And Veblen adopted an ecological perspective, at least in the sense that he saw the latter as the productive members of society, whereas the former were predators and parasites who lived off the society’s productive members—being the dominant element in the society, and thereby the most highly rewarded!

Philip Slater (Earthwalk, 1974) has also perceived a dualistic society, with an even stronger ecological perspective. For Slater, it is “disconnector” concepts—such as ambition, honor, courage, self-reliance, and spirituality—that are the dominant ones that guide behavior; concepts which, when acted upon, result in “disconnecting” us from Earth. Slater contrasts these “disconnector” concepts with “connector” ones such as cowardice, inconsistency, dependence, sensuality, and corruptibility—which, when acted upon (he claims), connect us to Earth.

I like the distinction that Slater makes (Veblen’s is too much Economy-oriented), but would identify a different set of “connector” concepts: being passive, phlegmatic, un-ambitious—and ordinary, among other virtues. People having such characteristics might be characterized as lazy good-for-nothings in terms of the dominant value system; but perhaps it is that system that is deficient! If it is “progress” that we want, the dominant value system will do. But if it is survival that is our goal, it would seem that we should not value being hard-working, driven, creative, etc. For people with such characteristics are the ones responsible for us being in our current (rather dire) situation; and given this, it would be foolish for us to think that they can lead us away from the brink.

There is a stigma attached to being ordinary in our society. And those who are ordinary often have difficulty accepting themselves because of this fact: if others perceive one as being inferior, it is difficult for one to acquire and maintain a good self-image. Ostensibly, ordinary people are—virtually by definition—lacking in intelligence. But consider this possibility: IQ tests are geared to the nature of modern society, and will tend to yield the highest scores for those who are “tuned in” to modern society. If one is not so “tuned in”—which, I suspect, is the case with many “ordinary” people—one is unlikely to score well on such tests. What may characterize many “ordinary” people, rather, is that they are “programmed” for a way of life in accord with human “design specifications”—i.e., a way of life rather different from the one that prevails. They may be the sort of people with more of an innate urge for passing time than spending it (to use a distinction borrowed from an article (“The Gospel of Consumption”) by Jeffrey Kaplan on the Orion Magazine web site). Such people may not be admired in our society—but should be, given that they bear little, if any, responsibility for our being in our current dire situation.

It is not surprising that ordinary people have little influence in our society, and also not surprising that they tend to have modest means. However, these are unfortunate facts because what they suggest is that our situation is hopeless: Those in the best position to “save” us lack both the motivation and means so to do—so that insofar as disaster occurs, they will suffer along with everyone else. Indeed, they may be the first to suffer! Where’s the justice?!