This week’s Time magazine cover story is a chilling reminder that those mad hatter’s sipping their insanity-laced tea are no laughing matter (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601101011,00.html). The number armed and very dangerous militias, training to defeat all of us not-completely-insane (sometimes inexcusably Jewish or African American or Hispanic) people who are to them the devil incarnate, with live rounds, and grease paint, and enough loose screws rattle a civilization.
The number of active anti-government militias in America trippled in 2009, from 42 to 127. In one recent training exercise in Ohio, the scenario at which they shot live rounds, including from a belt-fed M-60 machine gun, was that Islamic terrorists were marauding over America because the current pro-Muslim president “had ordered a stand-down against Islamic troops”. One of them opines that he doesn’t know who the Redcoats will be; could be U.N. troops, federal troops, or Mexicans coming across the border (okay, he said “Mexican troops,” but given our current southern-border-xenophobia, and his complete insanity, if I were a bit more Chihuahuan in appearance, that statement would make me even more uncomfortable than I would undoubtedly already be).
These people are linked by “self-described Patriot beliefs,” including the notion that the federal government is a foreign tyrant. Some groups are white supremacists, some are members of a violent branch of Christianity. Obama the non-white, “non-American”, “non-Christian”, non-Neanderthal alien is their catalyst, their symbol of having lost ground to the “other” that they rally, and rail, against. Some end up walking the walk, as well as talking the talk.
James Von Brunn, the 88 year old white supremacist who shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, was also an anti-government “patriot,” who had taken hostages at the Federal Reserve in 1981, had complained on his website that “the American right-wing (is) nothing but talk”, had originally intended to assassinate David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior White House advisor. Von Brunn had written “Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew masters tell him to do.”
The Time article has more stories of similar wackos, of swastikas and proclaimed desires to assassinate Obama, all simmering and seething through this morass of hatred and ignorance. Most of the Tea Party isn’t so extreme, so violent, though they speak in the metaphors of war and violence. But, to me, they are implicated in this, because they too are a coalescence of ignorance and anger, of a senseless rage toward some despised “other” (see “The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” posted just before this).
America, for all of its very real wonders and triumphs as a society and a nation, has always had a certain defective cultural gene, one not quite matched (though not entirely avoided, either) by the post-World War II Western European nations (maybe because they had seen that gene come to fruition right in their midst immediately before and during World War II, and were shocked into enough sense not to let it fester into malignancy again), whose right-wing extremists were never quite what defined them, as they too often are in America.
As absurd as the folks with misspelled signs and internally inconsistent beliefs, relying on a semi-informed “constitutional idolatry,” railing against the government whose services they are relying on to do so, they, and the frothing crests of the waves atop their sea that form these militias and plot these acts of domestic terrorism, are no laughing matter. We need to figure out how to restore some measure of rationality to this country, and we need to do it soon.
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The October 15 issue of Rolling Stone includes a nice little article which explores the tangle of internal inconsistencies, pure irrationalities, simmering hypocrisies, and just plain random folly of the ultimately elusive Tea Party “ideology” (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=0). The Kentucky seniors community, many blithely mounted on Medicare funded scooters or sucking on Medicare funded oxygen tanks, raptly worshiping at the anti-government alter while suckling at government’s teat; Rand Paul followers not batting an eye at their candidate, who wants to cut every government program but is indignant that the government might cut Medicaid payments to doctors such as himself, because, after all, “physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living”; the life-long government employee who thinks it’s okay that he’s taken money from the government all his life (but that it’s not okay for anyone else to) because he doesn’t earn too much. All willing to take their share of the pie, but all eager to deny it to those far more in need.
But the author sums this mess up with a very cogent observation: The Tea Party isn’t really about issues; it’s about “us-versus-them,” about opposing those out-group members that they revile because they revile them, those “socialists” who are somehow inchoately evil and committed to a policy that will cause all that is good and holy to shrivel up and blow away. They are about “taking back their country” from whoever stole it, from whoever contributed to the discovery of electricity and the freeing of the slaves and the relative equality of women and, most of all, the invention of Velcro. It’s just blind, irrational, angry, ignorant rage. And it’s coming to a theater of culture war near you.
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There’s a new column on Denverpost.com on philanthropy (http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_15846877). The up-side of this column and its focus and purpose is that it, hopefully, will help to cultivate an awareness of the human suffering we are not addressing but can, of others who are stepping up and contributing to solutions, and of the amount of money increasingly put into circulation to do so. The down-side is that it continues to reinforce a vision of addressing our deep structural problems through a slight diversion of the surplus produced by the status quo, accompanied by a continued failure to consider how to alter the status quo in systemic ways to more substantially address those deep structural problems.
The author discusses three myths that motivate our current widespread lack of investment in positive social change through philanthropy: That there’s not enough money to go around, that more money makes one better, and that the injustices and suffering in the world is just the way it is. Similar myths, on a deeper level, motivate our widespread lack of commitment to fomenting positive systemic social change: Our political economic system cannot be fundamentally improved upon in ways that won’t hurt those who are currently faring well; the current distribution of wealth and welfare in the world is fair because those who have it deserve it and those who don’t don’t; and making significant headway on solving the world’s problems is an unrealistic Utopian dream.
It’s been said that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, and can as well be said that those who don’t understand history are doomed to be blind to its implications. We have a social movement in America that reveres a mythologized Constitution as a sacred document, that considers the country as it was established to be the perfection of political form. Yet those who understand history recognize these events as moments on a continuum, sequential developments built on previous ones. It is a lesson in the reality of progress, and a strong suggestion that there is further progress yet to be achieved, not only in terms of what is done within the political context we have created, but also what is done to refine and build upon the political context we have created.
The same holds true in economics: The development of “capitalism,” of our complex modern market economy, is a marvel of diffuse, evolutionary human genius. But it has been developing from time immemorial, and continues to develop today, and those developments are affected by conscious choices with conscious goals in mind. The notion that we can’t take this engine of wealth production and continue to refine it so that it becomes both more sustainable and more equitable is another variation of the ahistorical belief that what is is what must forever be, or that some marvelous product of history can’t be improved upon, when, in fact, what is has never remained what would be in the future, and every marvelous product of history that has preceded us has indeed been improved upon, and was itself the product of earlier improvements of earlier forms.
As I’ve written in several other posts (The Politics of Consciousness; Information and Energy), human history is an evolutionary process, an accumulation of innovations that create accelerating progressions in our social institutional, technological, and cognitive landscapes. The notion that this dynamical systemic logic somehow does not apply to the improvement of our world on the dimensions of humanity and sustainability is arbitrary and absurd. Just as we do not live in Oliver Twist’s Victorian England, future generations can and will live in circumstances different from, and hopefully better than, ours. The form and degree of those differences depend on our commitment to ushering them in, just as our transcendence of past deficiencies depended on the efforts of past visionaries.
Yes, we need more philanthropy and philanthropic spirit. But we also need more optimism, more compassion, more commitment to doing better as a society. And we need to believe that we can do far more than merely toss the peasants a coin from time to time.
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The conventional wisdom that education reform needs to involve some combination of merit pay, an end to teacher tenure, and increased accountability as determined by short-term quantitative measures, continues to be in vogue (http://www.economist.com/node/17148968). At a minimum the utility of such measures requires: 1) More qualitative measures of teacher and administrator quality that take into account a larger amount of relevant information; 2) Recognition of the relevance of varying contexts within which teachers and administrators find themselves, involving varying challenges with varying time horizons and varying requirements to be most effective; 3) Sufficient incentives for administrators to be more concerned with the quality of educational services than with the absence of “problems” or meeting checklists of superficial and often somewhat arbitrary quantitative measures, 4) sufficient increases in pay or other incentives offered to prospective new teachers to more than off-set the disincentive of decreased job-security, and 5) recognition that this remains a strategy which addresses a relatively superficial aspect of the failure of our educational system, without doing anything whatsoever to address the more fundamental problems where they reside.
All of these conditions are absent in Colorado. We are moving aggressively in the direction of strong reliance on quantitative measures that deal with short time-horizons, distort the educational process, create new and counterproductive stresses on teachers and administrators particularly in the worst performing schools (often leading to an anxious environment that is the precise opposite of what the students in those schools most need), and punish teachers and administrators for working in those most challenging environments (creating a new disincentive to do so). Given the superficiality of the quantitative measures to which teachers and administrators are held accountable, there is no sufficient set of administrator-incentives in play to create a context in which improved educational services would actually take priority over the petty politics of large school districts. Teachers are currently as likely to receive poor evaluations, or be dismissed for poor performance, for being exceptional as for being sub-par, because exceptional teachers tend to both have long time horizons in what they are trying to accomplish with their students (planting seeds that may germinate in the future rather than show up immediately on tests for which their students may be woefully ill-prepared in a way that can’t be immediately addressed) and to rock the boat in a variety of ways (e.g., b eing less willing to engage in an empty ritual that increases their performance score, or to pander to all stakeholders in ways which undermine educational effectiveness).
In anti-tax-crazy Colorado, at least, the funds to off-set the diminished incentives created by ending tenure simply do not exist. There is ample research showing that smaller class size (and a higher adult-to-student ratio) is correlated to better performance, so reducing the number of teachers is not a viable option for positive educational reform. Given the large demand for teachers to satisfy existing need and the non-competitive salary for attracting the most talented college graduates, diminishing the incentives facing prospective new teachers promises to deteriorate rather than improve the overall quality of the teacher pool.
The poor teachers that are in our schools now are there because of supply and demand, not because of teacher tenure: There is a huge demand for teachers, and a limited supply, which means that some of that demand will be met with teachers of lower quality. Firing poorly performing teachers and paying high-performing ones a little more would be a great strategy if the goal were to reduce the teacher pool to a compact corps of highly proficient professionals. But that’s not the goal: We have to continue to put a teacher in every classroom, which means we can’t reduce the number of teachers to those that are most talented. And if we offer incentives to in-coming teachers that are in aggregate less appealing than the ones offered now, not only will we have no greater number of the most skilled teachers to off-set the removal of the least skilled ones, we will in fact have fewer of the most skilled teachers.
Some might argue that merit pay would be the increased incentive to the most talented college graduates to go into teaching. But without increased revenues, and due to various structural reasons (e.g., existing contracts, and the need to retain enough teachers to have one in each classroom), significant reductions in some teachers’ pay to fund significant augmentations in others’ is not a viable solution. In Colorado, at least, significantly increased revenues for merit pay just isn’t going to happen.
While it would certainly be nice to remove the least skilled teachers and replace them with more skilled teachers, aside from the difficulties to this plan posed by such obstacles as supply and demand (it doesn’t address the need to recruit more highly skilled teachers to replace the removed less skilled ones) and the sheer expense involved in doing it effectively (in a country whose current most robust political movement is an ideologically extremist anti-tax movement), it does not really get to the heart of the educational failure in America.
The overall quality of the teacher pool is surprisingly good, in fact. The more salient problems are what children are exposed to outside of the school building and school hours: Parents who often have neither the skills nor time to devote to effectively supporting and augmenting their children’s academic growth; communities populated by people who barely know each other and feel no real connection; an anti-intellectual culture that increasingly markets to our youth the idea that hard work and academic success are neither cool nor necessary; and a plethora of mindless and ubuquitous electronic distractions that have the essentially the same effect on kids as drugs do.
If we’re really serious about improving educational success in America, we’re going to have to take the mission of the schools to the streets, to the homes, to the corporate boardrooms, and turn America itself into a classroom. We’re going to have to reform our communities so that they become foundations of personal growth, assist parents in offering intellectual stimulation to their children, address the full range of unmet needs of the lowest performing students (e.g., social emotional development and behavioral health issues), and reach down into what is at root a cultural problem.
This may sound like an overly ambitious agenda, but there are some very easy and viable first steps to take. Improving school-community partnerships is highly cost-effective, because there are many community members who could be persuaded to volunteer their time to tutor and mentor kids (both increasing the all-important adult-to-student ratio, and explosing kids to a broader range and higher quantity of adult human capital), and to help parents who need it to learn better academic-support skills as well. There are an array of state and federal programs that offer various kinds of assistance to children and families in need that can partner with the schools to ensure that those needs are met. Efforts are currently under way to coordinate the missions of schools and health agencies and juvenile justice agencies in order to better accomplish these ends.
The current emphasis on getting rid of bad teachers merely kicks responsibility for deep structural problems down the hierarchy, to those who are least able to address those problems, and does nothing to actually produce and attract the increased number of the most highly skilled teachers that would be required to make it work. Let’s focus more on creating fertile soil for education in America, so that increasingly better students and eventually better teachers will be two of the benefits reaped, rather than pretending that the solution can be imposed by a quick fix oblivious to the systemic realities that that fix will inevitably run into.
For those who missed it, Jodie Foster said in an interview a week or so ago that she would not abandon Mel Gibson, despite his anti-Semitic rant of a few years ago, or his rage-filled phone-tapes of more recent vintage (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39293539). There’s no stock in sticking by fallen idols, nothing to be gained by not shunning the shunned. Except integrity.
Jodie Foster has risen several degrees in my book, though probably not in my Mom’s. The only reference to Mel Gibson I recall from my Jewish mom was a Tourettes-like reaction to hearing his name, quick and seething. But Jodie Foster understands what friendship is, and what loyalty is, and I tip my yarmulke to her.
Jodie says, “When you love a friend, you don’t abandon them when they are struggling”. Nor should those of us who preach that we should love our fellow human beings abandon even strangers who have become easy prey for our more vile instincts.
There will always be those who test the limits of forgiveness, the really heinous predators who feed their own dark appetites at the expense of others. But we have become (or have always been?) a people who do not wait for those limits to be tested. We revile at the drop of a hat, nurse grudges and wax with righteous indignation at the failings of others while exhibiting far more pronounced ones of our own in the process.
Ours is a history of scapegoats vented on, of lepers always found or created when one is needed, to be stoned in an orgy of self-indulgent rage. The Bacchanals are never far away, ready to tear at the flesh of the sacrificial victim.
Anger is one thing, a momentary reaction to an insult or provocation, sometimes a mere misunderstanding. It is to be avoided, perhaps, but it is not the disease to which I am referring. Nor is contempt for an odious ideology, which reasonable people of goodwill may have an affirmative responsibility to oppose, and even to try to shame those who adhere to it to rethink their own position. Nor is it even the occasional interpersonal reactions to ongoing provocations, that may not be temporary, but still are something that others have fostered with their own intentional ill-will (and that should, if not avoided altogether, at least be relinquished as soon as the provoking ill-will is relinquished). I am referring instead to something that is nursed for one’s own gratification, that was not in reality interpersonally provoked, that cannot be justified as any kind of service to any kind of ideal, that is in fact an act of sustained ritualized violence and nothing more.
I have my faults, but I have never been a fan of this time-honored public ritual, repeated periodically, a different face filling the role of object of our disgust, members of the modern lynch-mob smugly patting one another on the back for being so commendable for being so mean-spirited. It is often enough to be accused; public condemnation requires no more than that. It is one of those things almost universally accepted, certainly cathartic, but deeply unhealthy for our spirit as a people.
One of my favorite stories of all time is “A Christmas Carol.” I used to read it on Christmas Eve to my brother and sister-in-law in Boston when I lived in Connecticut and spent Christmases with them. I’ve loved it since the first time I saw my first version, starring the animated Mr. Magoo, as a small child. It is the story of a person who is eminently revilable, but of those, both living and dead, who refused to revile him. As Marley’s ghost said, when Scrooge told him he had always been a good man of business, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business.”
On both the left and on the right, in different ways and draped in different raiment, these values are in shorter supply today than they were even in Dickens’ Victorian England. The right has made a virtue out of indifference to the welfare of others, cultivating an ideology which eliminates the possibility of using our agent of collective action (government) to address some inequities, misfortunes, or social injustices, pretending that by removing that responsibility from the public sphere, it will magically be met in sufficient quantity through private charity, something for which there is absolutely no evidence, but plenty of historical experience to the contrary (before we briefly became a compassionate enough people to use our agent of collective action to address the problem). And, of course, those who adhere to this ideology see those who oppose it as evil purveyors of a scheme to control their lives, despite the complete absurdity of that conclusion.
The left, in contrast, is more ideologically generous, but nonetheless prone on an individual basis to indulge in the same predatory rituals, finding the right targets, feeling the same surge of moral superiority released, ironically, by acting in a particularly morally inferior way.
This is not about judging and hating the haters, engaging in the same error being critiqued, but rather about cultivating among ourselves a renewed commitment to not just fight for a kinder, gentler world, but to act as if we mean it. This does not mean that we cannot condemn acts or ideologies that are characterized by bigotry or a lack of compassion or some underlying folly, or rebuke those who adhere to such ideologies for doing so. It means that we should not indulge in orgies of individually targeted outrage when doing so.
I cannot feel toward Mel Gibson and Michael Richards what I am apparently supposed to feel. In both cases, I felt only sadness to see such self-destructive acts, and only the wish that whatever inner-demons were at play, that these two not-particularly-horrible people somehow find a way to exorcise them, something that is better fostered by the goodwill of others than by public orgies of outrage.
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No sooner do I write and post an essay on the literally evolutionary nature of modern information technologies (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=577), then I come across an article in The Economist zeroing in on one aspect of exactly what I’m talking about (http://www.economist.com/node/17091709?story_id=17091709).
In my novel (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=126), a wizard ruminates that “the genius of the many is a captive giant, whose freedom is the ends and the means of all other things.” Wikinomics is about another large step in the liberation of that captive giant, by reducing the transaction costs involved in massive decentralized network communications. Ronald Coase famously said that in the absence of transaction costs, we would bargain our way to maximum utility. Some have interpreted Coase’s Theorem to be more about the formidable obstacle posed by transaction costs than the efficacy of bargaining our way to paradise. But, in either case, the internet has dramatically reduced the size of that obstacle.
The Denver Post reported today that Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado has teamed up with conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein to make the filibuster more difficult to implement (as it once was, not so very long ago), and only available one time (rather than at multiple stages of a bill’s journey through Congress) (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16208174).
Despite the backing of a conservative luminary, and despite Udall’s crafting of the bill as a compromise to the minority party, he has thus far been unable to find a Republican co-sponsor, again underscoring President Obama’s observations in his recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, and what everyone but the thoroughly self-deceived have known for some time (and what I wrote early today when commenting on Obama’s interview, http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=575): The Republicans in Congress have no intention of serving the interests of the American people. Their raison d’etre is to hamstring the government, blame the consequences on the Democratic majority, regain control of Congress by doing so, and continue to serve the short-term interests of the few, by cultivating and exploiting the compatible blind dogma of a large information-deprived faction, at the expense of us all in the long run.
Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards
I almost titled this post “Knowledge AND Power,” as a play on my previous post a week or so ago titled “Knowledge is Power,” but decided to be less cute and more descriptively precise. Denverpost.com published today an article on a Boulder company’s contribution to smart grid technology (http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16199737). “Power Tagging,” the name of both the technology and the company, involves embedding “a digital signal deep in the flow of electrons that can be read through the noise.” The larger implication is the gradual evolution of more efficient energy delivery systems, by, for instance, incorporating real-time cybernetic feedback loops that allow energy delivery to adjust to conditions, much as a thermostat turns on and off the heat or air conditioning in a home. But the implications of a smart grid, and particularly of this new technology, are that the more information flows with the energy itself, the more efficiently the demands on the system (e.g., producing exactly the right amount of energy to balance the grid in real-time, a physical requirement of energy production and distribution) can be met.
More generally, information and energy are the intertwined life-blood of human and natural systems. The biosphere on Earth is fueled, ultimately, by the sun (starting with photosynthesis, at the start of the food chain), and evolves through the reproduction, occasional mutation, and competition for reproductive success of packets of information (genes). Human systems are embedded in, and echo, this pattern (as I discuss in my post “The Politics of Consciousness”: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=187). In our earliest form, on the African savanna, our fuel came from that solar-powered food-chain and, eventually, the combustion of some of its products (i.e., fire). Our early development involved ways in which to utilize that energy source (feeding domesticated animals, and using fire in the preparation of food and tools, for instance). Much of human history thereafter can be understood in terms of the evolution of energy sources and the technologies for utilizing them (from levers and pulleys to nuclear reactors and solar panels).
Parallel to, and informing, this evolution of energy sources and technologies, is our own cultural evolution involving the innovation, diffusion, and synthesis of ideas. But just as our own evolutionary process is an echo of Nature’s, we in turn have created a technological echo of our own, by creating information technologies which vastly accelerate the reproduction, mutation, competition, and evolution of human cognitive information. And now, we are increasingly taking steps which will allow that information to operate independently of us, just as a thermostat does, with technological systems reacting to information that no human being need ever be aware of.
The potentials for increased efficiency and efficacy in how we address the challenges and opportunities which face us are enormous. Despite the hyperbole that has sometimes surrounded the Computer Revolution, few recognize just how dramatic a threshold we have entered in just the past few decades. From a historical perspective, it may come to eclipse the Industrial Revolution in importance, just as the Industrial Revolution in many ways eclipsed the Renaissance and Enlightenment which were preludes to it.
Just as our own echo of natural evolution is a vastly accelerated process, so too the technological echo we have created promises a new quantum acceleration once again. Human history is an acceleration of natural history due to the increased rate of information-packet reproduction (as fast as we can communicate), mutation (as fast as we can modify), and selection (as fast as we can choose what to believe or what technology to utilize). The secondary evolutionary echo that may occur as a result of information technologies operating autonomously could be another quantum acceleration still, communicating, processing, modifying, and selecting information not only at the accelerated speed that modern computers can, but with the accelerating acceleration (i.e., increasing nth order rates of change) produced by the accumulating innovations themselves. We’ve already begun to experience the first whisper of this new acceleration, with the rapid communications and data processing capacities of modern computers, ushering in new wonders of comprehension and capacity at an accelerating rate. But that is still restrained by our own cognitive speed, still the bottleneck through which our computer-augmented data processing must pass. It is when the evolutionary process of self-replicating, mutating, adapting packets of information by-pass us completely that the new echo begins in earnest.
In a book about speculative future possibilities that I read decades ago (and can remember neither the title nor the author), one idea the author floated was the prospect of robotic combination space-faring/mining machines that could self-replicate with the materials that they mined from extraterrestrial bodies, bringing back virtually unlimited material resources to Earth. (Obviously, we would also need to invent self-replicated garbage collectors removing the equally prolific production of waste, else be even more deluged by garbage than we already are!) Now, imagine combining such machines with any variety of self-replicating and self-disposing/recycling machines to perform any variety of tasks. Finally, imagine their ability to process information about changing conditions or potential design improvements diagnosed from experience, and self-modify when reproducing in order to adapt to this information.
Such an accelerated process may well also accelerate our ability to safely and cleanly tap and utilize the universe’s abundant supply of energy sufficiently to meet any demands placed upon it. Both drivers of evolution, of progress, -information and energy- would be placed on autonomous growth curves, with problem-solving algorithms incorporated into them. It is even conceivable that self-replicated computerized machines could create not only their own off-spring, but their own novel inventions as well, new self-replicating computerized machines to accomplish new tasks newly identified.
Of course, the immediate future offers prospects more modest than these far-fetched possibilities, but dramatic prospects nonetheless, and prospects that will become increasingly dramatic with the passage of time. What it requires of us is a willingness to progress, an understanding that we have not yet arrived at our final condition, that our lot in life can indeed be dramatically improved, and that it is incumbent upon us to facilitate our advance toward an ever-more robust, sustainable, and fair social order to the best of our abilities.
But, as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and great potential for disastrous unintended consequences. This is true on several dimensions; technological, environmental, and social institutional. As some have noted, we may be on the brink of creating what is essential mechanical life-forms, and unleashing forces we will no longer be able to control. The most common and imminent concern involves nanotechnology: The creation of microscopic machines that can be used, for instance, to target diseases in the body, and can be programmed to reproduce and adapt to changing conditions by reprogramming themselves as they do so. Michael Crichton, in one of his typically scientifically-almost-plausible-but-extreme renditions of this concept, wrote the novel Prey, which depicted swarms of such nanites becoming very effective predators.
Clearly, more dramatically exploiting Nature, both on Earth and beyond, means more dramatically risking the destabilization of the complex systems which comprise us. We must always remain vigilent, and increasingly so, that our increasingly robust harvesting of Nature’s bounty is not done at the expense of the stability and sustainability of the systems which produce that bounty.
And the fear that informs conservatives, that the more we act with a concentrated will, the more we risk losing ourselves to the center of power thus created, takes on new dimensions as well in a future such as the one I have outlined. Vigilantly avoiding the possible pitfalls of falling prey to our own technological and institutional inventions is one more demand upon us, and one we must keep forever at the forefront of our contemplations. But the liberating possibilities of both a more effective and expansive social institutional context, and a more effective and expansive technological context, both facilitating the provision of needs and wants and opportunities beyond all but our wildest dreams (just as the present is beyond all but the wildest dreams of those of generations and centuries and millenia past), freeing us to grow and celebrate life in ways more profound and subtle than merely meeting the demands of survival which were forever our first and most formidable shackles, is a dream not to be denied.
Despite the risks involved, I find the path we are on more exciting than frightening, one which, when combined with our inevitable increasing mimicry of nature in the production of more organic and organic-like technologies and social institutions, holds the promise for a very bright future indeed.
The phrase is mine, of course. President Obama wouldn’t, and couldn’t, use it. But in his recent, candid interview in Rolling Stone magazine (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/209395), President Obama very cogently captured the essence of the dilemma: The current divide between a Democratic Party primarily (though not universally), and in its leadership, characterized by a sincere desire to get it right, to pass the laws which best serve the interests of the American people, against a Republican Party primarily (though not universally), and in its leadership, characterized by a cynical willingness to act in ways which purposely harm the American people in order to be able to blame it on the Democrats who are currently in power, and win an electoral victory this year as a result.
There are two groups to be strongly rebuked in this narrative: The Republican Party, which has demonstrated its single-minded commitment to acquiring and retaining power, in order to serve the interests of the wealthiest Americans and continue the historically record-breaking concentration of American wealth into fewer and fewer hands (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=548); and the majority of the populace itself, which allowed itself to be a puppet on these bastards’ strings, blaming the president and the Democrats in Congress for the Republican obstructionism designed to accomplish exactly that end, at the expense of the American people themselves.
It’s time to side decisively with reasonable people of goodwill, in whatever political party they are found, with whatever ideological predispositions they may have. And it’s time to relegate these cynical enemies of the public interest, most resoundingly exemplified by the current Republican leadership and their fellow-travelers, to the dustbin of history, once and for all.
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We humans are naturally inclined to believe that things are as they appear to be. “If it walks like a duck…,” and all that. We all knew, even before we really could, that O.J. did it (unless we were among the many African Americans who alternatively knew that the system was unfailingly biased against African Americans, even very wealthy and famous ones, and that O.J. was therefore being railroaded). And lots of people similarly knew that Tim Masters did it, until some dedicated lawyers swimming upstream and for no pay proved that he didn’t, getting him released from prison after 18 years languishing there. Once we know, we filter our perceptions to reinforce our certainty. That’s the nature of prejudice, and it is far more ubiquitous, far more an inherent aspect of our lives, than most of us recognize.
In criminal matters, the first line of defense against error is the police, who, rather than being less inclined to prejudice than lay people, are more inclined. Professional experience breeds cynicism; a system which provides in some ways extravagant protections for the innocent provides too many ways out for the guilty; and the desire to compensate for that system of institutionalized doubt creates little room for doubt among those who know who committed the crime. Certainties are quickly arrived at, and evidence is sought to confirm rather than refute them. The police “put together a case” rather than test their assumptions, and a narrative is constructed that proves guilt, whether or not such guilt corresponds to reality (the fact that it usually does is not at issue, nor in opposition to this thesis, since injustices are not made more just by virtue of being in the minority).
So the police, the first line of defense, are more rather than less inclined than lay people to rely on prejudice, and to reinforce rather than question their own hasty assumptions.
Once a person is identified as guilty by the police, the presumption is really against them, though institutionally in their favor. Jurors see someone who the police arrested and who is on trial for a crime. And if that person is not terribly sympathetic, all the worse for them.
But jurors, I’m told, take their duties very seriously, and don’t convict too precipitously. And the system as a whole really does try to protect the innocent, counterbalancing some of these prejudices. Despite the many ways in which our judicial system is far less inclined to justice than we imagine, it is far more inclined to justice than almost any other sphere of our lives.
We do not enjoy the same degree of due process protections for non-judicial decisions that may dramatically affect our welfare. In many spheres, the process given involves an investigation, determination, and recommendation all done by a single office, often with a very highly pronounced predisposition of its own. If our judicial system allows more prejudice and injustice into it than we commonly imagine, then all other similar activities beyond it, that place the roles of investigation, prosecution, and judgement all in the hands of a single, predisposed agency, are doomed to be outright mockeries of justice, railroading people almost as often as they get it right.
And we enjoy no due process protections whatsoever in the court of public opinion, where the failures of other spheres become embedded in permanent reality, and a far wider universe of informal failures of its own are added to them. Some are quasi-official, such as the person who ends up on a sex offenders registry for urinating in public (something I believe that most men, at least, have done on at least one occasion, usually with as much discretion as possible). Some are simply part of our nature, such as the eccentric being ostracized.
We remain throughout our lives, to a degree we are loathe to recognize, the same essential creatures as the children we once were, mocking the little girl with the hearing aid, or the boy with a bit too much saliva production. There is a cruelty, an intolerance, that permeates what we are, in ways that we disregard or dismiss as trivial, but that have a far greater cumulative effect than we often realize.
But injustice is more deeply rooted still. We are born into different conditions in life, different opportunity structures, different lots. A person born into an abusive and neglectful family, surrounded, perhaps, by violence, poverty, drug use, and gangs that are the only source of mutual support available, does not face the same prospects as one born into an affluent and nurturing home (not to suggest that all impoverished homes are not nurturing, or that all affluent ones are).
One measure of civilization should be the degree to which we mitigate these myriad and prevalent injustices, the degree to which we level the playing field and ensure that all face equality of opportunity, and at least informal and self-imposed protection from prejudices and cruelties in all their forms. Public education is one, insufficient, vehicle for doing so. Cultivating a more widespread attitude of tolerance, mutual support, a belief that we are all members of a society, a desire to assist rather than condemn, would also go a long way to moving us further in the direction of a more just and compassionate society. Such notions have rarely been more embattled in this country, which is why they have rarely been in greater need of more voices more loudly advocating them, and more wills more diligently embracing them.
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