Our commitment, as a nation, to protect the civil rights of all people affected by our policies is a sacred one. It defines us as a people. We have often fallen short, and we have just as often redeemed ourselves with impressive reforms. We believe ourselves to be a world leader, a shining example to humanity. It is incumbent upon us to live up to that self image.
The most pressing civil rights issue facing us today, I believe, is the issue of gay rights. It is time for us all to support, without equivocation, complete equality under the law for gays and lesbians, such that all committed couples, regardless of sexual orientation, can enjoy the same benefits and rights, and such that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is treated as the civil rights violation that it is. We Coloradans believe in personal liberty: What more fundamental liberty is there than the liberty simply to be who you are without penalty? Let’s put an end to this enduring bastion of bigotry.
Having said that, we cannot afford to be complacent about the enduring prejudices that have plagued American society throughout its history. Racism still exists, and remains the same odious social disease that it has always been. Not only do we still witness viceral reactions based on racial identity, but, more insidiously, we still bear the burden of the legacy of history, a subtle form of institutional discrimination whereby those whose ancestors had diminished opportunities are themselves born into a context of diminished opportunities. But this latter problem is best addressed by addressing the primary vehicles of those diminished opportunities (poverty, and a lack of commitment to investing in all of our children), rather than the historically determined racial disparity in the distribution of opportunities.
Our challenges do not stop there. We must strive to improve our record of tolerance, and to improve our commitment to the rights of all people. In our criminal justice system, for instance, there is a need for reforms that would both increase the rate of conviction of those guilty of crimes, and descrease the rate of wrongful conviction of those innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been accused. We need to implement strict policies regarding the preservation of DNA evidence, and make an effort to address some of the known factors that contribute to wrongful convictions. And we need to move away from the failed policies of mandatory sentencing and criminalization of non-predatory behaviors.
Finally, we must be vigilant in protecting the civil rights of all Americans, in all contexts. We must steer clear of racial profiling, and the false trade of liberty for security. The key component in all of these aspects of the challenge of preserving civil rights is the error of thinking in terms of “in-groups” and “out-groups.” It’s time to recognize that we are all human beings, first and foremost, far more similar than we are different; no group has a corner on the market of either good or evil, and we should recognize that the crimes of individuals belong to them individually or organizationally, and not to any racial, ethnic, or gender group with which we identify them.
I chose to group these topics together because I believe they are strongly interrelated. The strength of families depends far more on the strength of communities, and crime prevention depends far more on the strength of both, than we have been in the habit of recognizing. Indeed, strengthening our communities is more fundamental even than educational reform, since no reform is more vital to improving educational outcomes.
Though crime rates in the 1990s began to decline and level off rather than continue to escalate, as had been expected (primarily, according to one theory, due to the earlier decrease in unwanted children coming into the world), America still experiences off-the-charts levels of violent crime in comparison to other developed nations. In fact, we suffer a cocktail of problems unequaled in the rest of the developed world: Poor educational performance, a woefully deficient health care system, high infant mortality, excessive violent crime rates, to name just a few. Add to this list of visible failures the equally high rates of less visible tragedies that occur behind closed doors day-after-day, in all socio-economic classes: the tragedies of child abuse and neglect, and domestic violence. The question we need to ask ourselves is, why?
The inevitable answer is: Extreme individualism. We are failing as a society to function as a society. Our overemphasis on the acquisition of wealth, and underemphasis on the health of our communities and families, has come at a very high cost. We are long overdue for redressing this imbalance.
We need local, state, and national grass-roots initiatives to reinvigorate our communties. I propose, and, as a resident rather than as a legislator, will help to organize, a non-partisan community initiative in House District 28, drawing on existing civic organizations and social institutions. The purpose of this initiative is to bring people closer together, on their blocks, in their subdivisions, throughout our district; to reduce the mutual anonymity of our modern society; to increase the ability of neighbors to offer moral support to one another; and to help catch kids who far too often fall through the cracks of our disintegrated society, and offer them the support and guidance they need. Those are the kids who fail to achieve in school, and fail to succeed in life. And they are the kids who, disproportionately, commit heinous acts, now or in the future.
It’s time to stop merely clucking our tongues and expressing our dismay each time horrendous but preventable tragedies of violence occur, and start taking the steps that would actually have prevented them. That’s what communities do.
Click here to learn about my mind-bending epic mythological novel A Conspiracy of Wizards!!!
Political discourse habitually loses the forest for the trees, because too rarely do we discuss human consciousness in political terms, though consciousness is both the soil from which all of our other endeavors grow, and the essence of the fruit which those endeavors strive to bear.
Consciousness is both political and evolutionary: It is fought over every step of the way, but carved on a lathe of trial and error such that it transcends, over time, the battles that comprise it. Economist John Maynard Keynes and Winston Churchill are alternately attributed with this eloquent summation: “[People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.”
British Biologist Richard Dawkins framed this process in terms of “memes,” cognitions which, like genes, are packets of information which self-replicate (through communication), mutate (through interpretation, synthesis, and innovation), compete for reproductive success (in individual choices of what to believe and what techniques to utilize, which aggregate into social institutions and prevailing technologies), and thus evolve.
American Philosopher of Science Thomas Kuhn, at about the same time (the mid-1960s), framed the process as one invigorated by the emergence of dominant paradigms (from the chaos of competing views), thus allowing focused investigation within that paradigm, the subsequent accumulation of anomalies (findings that are incompatible with the paradigm), and an eventual paradigm shift through attention to and resolution of those anomalies.
Combining these two independently developed theories into a single framework, we can discern in the realms of human consciousness the ubiquitous interplay of the parts and the whole, of the microcosm and the macrocosm (an interplay that exists more broadly across levels from the quanta or superstrings of physics to the universe in its entirety, and between individual organisms and the biosphere as a whole). The reproductive robustness of memes and the shifting of paradigms are interdependent phenomena, with the robustness of memes being a function, to some extent, of the robustness of the paradigms into which they coalesce, and the robustness of paradigms being a function, to some extent, of the robustness of the memes that comprise them.
For instance, the “anomalies” of Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts are an example of emerging memes that are incompatible with a prevailing paradigm, often displacing now discredited opposing memes that were compatible with that paradigm. This new set of memes might enjoy increasing reproductive success that simultaneously diminish the reproductive robustness of the displaced memes. This displacement can happen in part through countervailing empirical evidence, and subsequently, for the public at large, through a removal of the stamp of the endorsement of expert opinion, thus leading to an eventual replacement of the entire paradigm. As a result, other memes that comprise that paradigm but are not found in the paradigm that comes to replace it are weakened (though not necessarily eliminated) in tandem with the paradigm itself, even if no other evidence or social processes arose to undermine those memes.
(This also points to the value of attempting conceptually to separate memes and the paradigms to which they belong to some extent, since a discredited paradigm doesn’t necessarily imply that all of the memes that comprise it are similarly discredited, nor do discredited memes within a paradigm necessarily discredit that paradigm in its entirety. So, for instance, there are those who roundly reject the concept of “God,” an amazingly robust meme throughout human history, because they rightly criticize some of the paradigms which have evolved around it, though, as I argue in A Dialogue on Religion, Dogma, Imagination, and Conceptualization, the meme of god and gods may have great positive value to human consciousness if embedded in other kinds of paradigms.)
George Lakoff offered another angle of insight into this set of both political and evolutionary processes in his book The Political Mind. Lakoff emphasizes that the human mind thinks in frames and narratives which can as easily support rational or irrational beliefs and opinions; it is by appealing to the human mind as it really works (by fitting new information into existing frames and narratives), rather than as we would like to believe it works (weighing out competing arguments on their merits, and selecting the most rational one), that particular memes and paradigms (with their implications for how well they serve either reason and goodwill or their opposites) are advanced.
Referring back to paragraph two of this essay (including the quote sometimes attributed to John Maynard Keynes), the irrational exploration of “all other alternatives” is a function of how well those alternatives appeal to our existing frames and narratives, while the eventual triumph of “the rational thing” is a function of how relentlessly utility seeps into those frames and narratives and oh-so-slowly weeds out those that are irrational and self-destructive, creating the paradox of a horrifying prevalence of irrationality in the short run, serving a remarkable florescence of highly sophisticated rationality in the long run.
The complexity and subtlety of these processes are dazzling, with many apparent contradictions as a result. To begin to explore these complexities and subtleties, please peruse my series of essays that give this paradigm a more precise and comprehensive treatment: Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, The Fractal Geometry of Law (and Government), Emotional Contagion, Bellerophon’s Ascent: The Mutating Memes (and “Emes”) of Human History, Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix.
Nested within these intertwined progressions of memes and paradigms are bitter battles over what is and is not true. Scientists might discern a heliocentric solar system, but inquisitors can obstruct and punish the dissemination of this knowledge. There is, however, no a priori reason to assume that either the heretics or the defenders of the faith (whether religious or secular), in any given instance, are on the side of truth or utility: Either can be right, and either can be wrong. History is defined by the accumulation of victories of innovative memes over established memes, but this belies the vaster number of innovative memes that did not prevail, often due to their relative superficiality or naiveté. Just as in biological evolution, in which the vast majority of mutations are disadvantageous to the reproductive success of that gene, so too the vast majority of radical new ideas are less useful to human welfare than their well-established counterparts honed by the genius of time and numbers.
Of course, that genius is forever skewed by concentrations of political and economic power, such that existing memes and paradigms may disproportionately favor those already materially favored, and new ideas that may produce less human welfare may be at least momentarily popular if they are either effectively disseminated by and in service to those with more political and economic power, or if they are products of certain kinds of intense reactions to that power, promising to distribute that which is produced more fairly, but succeeding only in destroying or undermining existing institutions in ways destructive to the interests of the poor and disenfranchised as well as the rich and powerful. Often, some combination of these two forces is at work, as in the case of the current Tea Party Movement.
Many, if not most, marginal extensions of the franchise, on the other hand, have historically led to a more robust rather than less robust production of human welfare, enriching the rich as well as the poor. The lessons of history, therefore, suggest that increasing distributional justice generally increases total wealth, increases social justice, and contributes to the social stability that is conducive to both, but that the increase in distributional justice must not be overly dismissive of the complex and highly functional social institutional landscape that has evolved over time, even though it has evolved to favor the interests of some over others.
Modern political struggles are defined by these dynamics: Conservatives (in theory) defend the tried-and-true wisdom of established institutions, while progressives (in theory) strive to extend the franchise and refine the social institutional landscape in service to human welfare. To the extent that we can all acknowledge the wisdom and utility of both agendas, and devote ourselves collectively to their simultaneous realization, we will have increased the efficiency of this evolutionary process, wasting less time and effort on blind ideological disputes, and devoting more productive energy to cautious innovation. This is not to suggest that we are capable of eliminating partisanship or of living by a happy consensus, but rather that reasonable people of good will can be drawn toward a center defined by the application of careful analysis to reliable data in service to human welfare. Let our disputes be increasingly defined by the limits of our reason rather than by the extent of our bigotry.
More than anything else, my own efforts have always been, and continue to be, focused on human consciousness, and on the goal of ushering in a paradigm shift in how we predominantly perceive and address this inevitable political-evolutionary process. In one sense, the paradigm shift I hope for is the mere continuation of an historical trajectory long underway, passing through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the political revolutions (including our own) informed by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the accelerating stream of social, technological, political, and economic innovations that have ensued ever since.
History, Social Theory, Science, and Philosophy all conspire to impress upon us that change is, in a sense, the only constant. Certainly, the human mind reaches beneath that frothing sea of change, and looks for the constants that underwrite it. But those underlying relative constants, too, like the laws of physics, change, at least as far as our awareness of them is concerned, and we must reach further down still, as Thomas Kuhn and Richard Dawkins (and many others) did, to find the relative constants that underwrite those rules of change (See The Wizards’ Eye for a fantasy-fiction representation of this). As the Taoists understood thousands of years ago, whatever we can reduce to words or equations is not the immutable truth. It is essential, therefore, that while we admire the brilliance of our founding concepts, and respect their power and sophistication, we honor them by understanding that they, like those that preceded them, are meant to grow richer and subtler under the patient lathe of historical experience.
It is in this spirit that I suggest that it is time to recognize that “Liberty,” that most precious and fundamental of our values, should not be treated as the ossified talisman that it has become for so many, but should be appreciated for the living concept that it in reality is. “Liberty,” to too many, merely means “freedom from government.” While that was the core of its meaning at the time of the American Revolution, it has evolved, as good memes do, to embrace the mobilization of our consciousness, of our entire social institutional and technological landscape, to actively augment freedom, to produce and distribute a wealth of sustainable opportunities through which human beings, and the human spirit, can more effectively and enduringly thrive.
For those who find this suggestion heretical, consider the words of Thomas Jefferson himself: “[L]aws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Even in Jefferson’s time, the government that defined and enforced property rights was seen to augment rather than interfere with individual liberty. With the growth of the discipline of economics, we have come to understand that the government that reduces transaction costs and internalizes externalities in order to facilitate a more robust and efficient market economy augments individual liberty and human welfare as well. Who now doubts that the government that amended the U.S. Constitution to abolish slavery and to extend the franchise to women, and that passed legislation to protect civil rights even from private infringements, augmented individual liberty and human welfare by doing so? And who does not recognize that the expansion of government more “socialist” than any before or since in American history, the institutionalization of free and compulsory public education, is not absolutely necessary to the individual liberty and life-long welfare of all of those who benefit from it?
If the state were to be removed from the equation (ignoring, for this conversation, the foreign and private vortices of organized political economic power that would fill the vacuum), people would band together for predation or defense, violent gangs eventually coalescing into local governments, in a sense pressing the reset button on political history, and leaving us with an undoubtedly more tyrannical government than the one it replaced. The state is an inherent part of the formula, for good or for ill. The challenge of using it for good is the one we must face. The threat to liberty is not state action, but rather failure on any level to ensure equality of opportunity and diffusion of political and economic power: A government captured by any faction is tyrannical, but a government effectively designed to act as the agent of the people is liberating.
Of course, the latter challenge is never fully met. The disparate ideologies and interests of the people ensure that some will never feel that their government is acting as their agent. But this country has laid a brilliant foundation for addressing the challenge, by combining representative democracy with constitutionalism, thus enabling the many to prevail, with constitutional limits protecting minorities from their tyranny. Within this context, government is far more our agent than our enemy.
Doing the best we can with the materials we have is the essence of the human endeavor, to which all reasonable people of good will can and should dedicate themselves. Neither obstinate obstructionists clinging with ideological purity to historical memes unadapted to changing circumstances, nor rash radicals dismissing and disdaining our rich and highly sophisticated social institutional heritage, are contributing most effectively to this enterprise.
Let’s join together in common cause, rational people of good will striving to do the best we can. We will continue to debate the details, and form parties around our differences. But let’s leave blind ideology, whether of the Right or of the Left, on the dust heap of history, and instead, with eyes and minds wide open, use our accumulated wisdom, our historical experience, and our improved techniques, to wear a coat that fits us now, rather than be straight-jacketed by the one that fit us as a child.
Click here to learn about my mind-bending epic mythological novel A Conspiracy of Wizards!!!
America is bedeviled by misguided political generals not merely fighting the last war, but endlessly fighting our first war. Every act of government, and every attempt to fund government, whether federal, state, or local, is greeted with a “patriotic” opposition to “tyranny,” even though our own Founding Fathers not only saw a need to create a strong federal government, but also viewed state and local governments as vehicles for, rather than threats to, our individual liberties.
More importantly, we have resoundingly won our first war: Americans are more free today than they have been at any previous moment in American history (except in one ironic sense mentioned below). Not only have we extended the original grant of liberty won in the American Revolution to the vast majority who were excluded from it at the time (African Americans, women, Native Americans, and, to varying degrees, other non-white or non-propertied or non-protestant people), but even propertied, protestant white males are more free today than they have ever been before. There are fewer legal and actual constraints on our freedoms of belief, expression, religion, and action than ever before. There are more, and more vigilant, protections of our civil liberties. And there is more access to a host of liberating educational, informational, recreational, and organizational tools than our ancestors could ever have dreamed of.
To the extent that our liberty is currently threatened, it is threatened most by those on the far right who claim to be defending it. There are two forms of “big government,” that which encroaches upon the constitutional protections of our liberty and that which acts as a vehicle of our collective will without encroaching on our constitutionally protected liberties. Ironically, those who shout “liberty!” the loudest tend to support the former type of big government and attack the latter type, justifying this inversion of priorities (as it is always justified, in all times and places) with the imperative of preserving our domestic tranquility and national security. Equally ironically, it is the latter form of “big government,” when implemented wisely, that is most effective not only at facilitating our collective welfare, but also at maintaining our domestic tranquility and national security in the long run.
But more than our “liberty,” it is our well-being that is currently under attack. We rate abysmally in comparison to other developed nations on measures such as poverty, crime, percentage and absolute number of people incarcerated (by which measure we are literally the most unfree people in the world), infant mortality, educational achievement, and access to health care, to name a few. The primary reason for this comprehensive failure of The United States government effectively to “promote the general welfare” (a principal purpose of our government identified in the preamble of the United States Constitution) is the degree of success of the blind ideological opposition to the use of government to accomplish that task, one completely unmatched in other developed nations.
Rather than continuing to fight the ancient war we have long since won, maybe it is time to start fighting the current battles we are so tragically losing.
To be sure, this opposition to the growth and use of government for our collective welfare has been only marginally successful, though with the devastating effects listed above. Our federal government has grown, by necessity, to deal with the challenges of managing a technologically advanced industrial society in the modern era. But an honest survey of the impact of this growth in size of our federal government is that, not only has it done much to increase the health, welfare, and prosperity of American citizens, but it has also augmented rather than curtailed our individual liberties. Tyranny is not a function of how “big” a government is, but rather of how well or poorly its constitutional and democratic mechanisms function.
This is not to say that there are not real issues involving how best to balance and articulate government, markets, and other social institutional modalities in order to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of necessary and desired services. But those are issues that require the finely honed tools of informed analysis applied to reliably derived data, rather than the sledge-hammer of intransigent false certainties. The tyranny that threatens us is not the tyranny of a large government that imperfectly addresses the needs of a modern society, but rather the tyranny of highly motivated ignorance and irrationality constantly trying to undermine that government as our agent, and augment it as our overlord, imposing horrifying costs and dangers on all of us in the process
Conservatives who argue that more and bigger government isn’t the solution to our problems are absolutely right: Government is just one agent of our will, with strengths and weaknesses that delimit the scope of its efficacy. Whether we address the challenges and opportunities which confront us through government, or churches, or civic organizations, or just individually, nothing supersedes the importance of personal responsibility.
But what is personal responsibility? We generally consider, for instance, not abandoning one’s children to be a personal responsibility. We consider obeying the laws, caring for one’s elderly parents, perhaps even taking adequate care of one’s home and property, all to be personal responsibilities. At the limit, some might use the term to refer to the need that each individual take care of him or herself, so that the rest of us won’t have to. All of these have one thing in common: They involve responsibilities to others. And we understand that those others bear reciprocal responsibilities in turn. Personal responsibility, in other words, is synonymous with mutual responsibility. It is a social obligation we owe to one another.
Something as vital to our collective welfare as mutual responsibility shouldn’t be treated as a casual wish, something we dearly want to see exhibited by others, but feel powerless to affect beyond meekly encouraging it. We should, instead, strive to cultivate it, to instill it in people, something we understandably implore parents to do. But imploring parents to instill it in their children is as weak and insufficient as imploring people to exercise it in the first place. We need, rather, to make the exercise and cultivation of mutual responsibility in people’s individual interest. We need to incentivize it. And, of course, we do.
There are four basic tools for incentivizing socially desirable behaviors: Hierarchies, markets, norms, and ideologies. In hierarchies, codified rules are officially enforced through formal rewards and punishments. Examples of this method of incentivizing behaviors are legal and penal systems, employment contracts, church leadership structures, and formal organizational frameworks in general. The strength of this method is that it facilitates the pursuit of intentionally formulated goals through very direct means. Its weakness involves the rapid accumulation of bargaining, monitoring, and enforcement costs as the goals become increasingly complex, the interests of the parties increasingly varied, and the population involved increasingly large.
Markets operate by facilitating multi-lateral mutually beneficial exchange. The easier it is for me to focus on one thing I do well that others require or desire, and offer it to others in return for the things they do well that I require or desire, the more organically and robustly we are each incentivized to act in one another’s interests. The strength of this method is that, for many purposes, it is the most efficient way to align individual and collective interests, and thus coordinate human efforts in mutually beneficial ways. The weaknesses largely revolve around transaction costs and externalities, creating problems such as the robust production of environmental pollution and depletion along with the robust production of wealth, and the ability of some to off-set certain costs of their enterprises by imposing them on others not involved in, or not profiting from, those enterprises, sometimes quite catastrophically.
Norms are unwritten rules diffusely and informally enforced through the social approval and disapproval of other people. They are particularly effective in small, permanent or long-enduring groups with a high-degree of interaction and interdependence, a low degree of anonymity, and when addressing visible or easily discoverable behaviors. Their weaknesses include that they become decreasingly effective as circumstances diverge from those described in the previous sentence, and that, when most effective, they tend (even more so than hierarchies) toward “overcontrol,” intruding more than necessary on individual autonomy and self-expression.
Ideologies, as I use the term here, refer to all cognitions: beliefs, values, thoughts, anything held to be true by the individual. In a sense, ideologies are norms internalized through socialization, rules that we enforce internally by the self-imposed reward of pride or the self-imposed punishment of shame. Their strength is that we can never hide from ourselves. Their weaknesses are that they generally form a relatively flimsy bulwark against the temptation to act in one’s own crude self-interest, and that, unless one is very careful in how their own ideology develops, they tend toward rigidity rather than forming a robust foundation for continuing cognitive growth.
One weakness shared, in different ways, by hierarchies, norms, and ideologies is that, while they generate in-group cooperation, they often do so in opposition to out-groups similarly organized and motivated, thus reinforcing lines of conflict on a larger scale even as they reinforce bonds of solidarity on a smaller one. Norms often accomplish this very locally, while hierarchies can accomplish it on scales of all sizes, ranging from the very small (such as a small but very formally organized business) to quite large (such as nation-states), though norms almost inevitably are more prevalent for very small scales of social organization. Ideologies, meanwhile, reinforce whatever levels and types of organization the individual most closely identifies with, from the absolute egocentrism of a sociopath to the all-inclusiveness of global humanism and environmentalism, and everything in between.
A particular variation of the in-group/out-group dynamic involves concentrations of power, which can implicate any and all of these institutional modalities in various combinations: Hierarchical control of the means of enforcing formal rules; economic control of vital resources; ideological control of “legitimate authority;” and disproportionate normative control in the hands of those most influential in the community (sometimes due to “charismatic authority,” sometimes to influence imported from other modalities). These can interact in self-reinforcing nuclei of political and social power or, in some circumstances, separate out to some extent into competing camps.
When examining the world through the lens of these social institutional modalities, it is crucial to understand the salience of their interactions. They are, in most situations, tightly intertwined, sometimes almost dissolved into a single solution. Hierarchical organizations, laced with embedded normative and ideological informal infrastructures, are major actors in market economies. Hierarchically organized churches compete in the marketplace of ideas (and sometimes the marketplace of profitable goods and services as well), often with a large moral, or ideological/normative, component to their mission. Families are largely normative, though can have traces of a not-completely-formalized hierarchical framework overlaying that normative structure.
One traditional focus in the debates between the right and the left is the relationship between hierarchies and markets, and what combinations of the two provide for optimal economic efficiency This also happens to be a major focus of Institutional Economics (and of Oliver Williamson, one of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners in Economics). But for a more complete understanding of the implications and potentials of different policy alternatives, one must also include norms and ideologies (and emotional reactions) in the mix, and consider how these too are tangled into the complex dynamics that comprise the field of human endeavors. (The inclusion of normative arrangments was the focus of the other 2009 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom).
Understanding the nature of the human social field, to as great an extent as we are capable, is a necessary prerequisite to devising effective social policies, often by applying a light touch in particularly system-sensitive ways.
In conjunction with my campaign, I have two projects on the drawing board that seek to utilize, for the purposes of improving our collective existence (rather than simply for winning an election), the two somewhat neglected social institutional modalities: 1) the creation of a non-partisan, issue-centered, hostility-free (through moderation) political blog, which will seek out and provide the best analyses, from all perspectives, of the contentious and important social issues of the day; and 2) the creation of a network of non-partisan community organizations, from the block level on up, drawing on and augmenting all of the various kinds of community organizations that already exist, but dedicated to achieving a higher degree of inclusiveness. Anyone interested in either or both of these projects should please contact me.
The world we live in is complex and challenging. But simply agreeing to be reasonable people of good will doing the very best we can, with both humility and determination, would take us a long way forward in our on-going attempt to address that complexity and meet that challenge. As we’ve proven time and again, we’re capable of doing great things together, when we’re inspired to do so. Let’s keep inspiring one another to make this the most robust, sustainable, and fair society we are capable of making it: That’s a project worth getting excited about.
As the child of a small business owner, I understand the challenges that small businesspeople face, the risks they take, the long and hard hours they put in just to keep their head above water. Many work longer hours for less compensation than do some wage or salaried workers in other enterprises. Many large businesses, as well, struggle to survive, sometimes operating for extended periods at a loss. It is essential that we put over-simplistic concepts of class conflict behind us, and consider how best to thrive as a people, all in a shared enterprise.
But the disparity of wealth and poverty in the United States, far more pronounced than that of other developed nations, with far less social mobility (despite the myth to the contrary), is neither most conducive to maximizing our national prosperity, nor the best we can do in our quest to maximize equality of opportunity for all Americans.
Organized labor in America has been an essential force in ensuring that workers are treated as human beings whose interests and dignity matter, rather than just as factors of production who exist to enrich others. A basic sense of fairness dictates that those whose labor produces wealth benefit equitably from the wealth they have produced. In order to accomplish this, on the capital end, there needs to be a competitive return on investments, without which the jobs from which workers benefit simply dry up. The goal, therefore, is to ensure that there is a robust market economy producing competitive returns on investments, in order to create and maintain well-paying jobs and decent working conditions.
W should all strive to ensure that all Coloradans have the opportnity to thrive by their own efforts. This requires a robust economy framed by a legal structure conducive both to the success of businesspeople, and to the ability of workers to earn living wages and live high-quality lives. An economic climate friendly to investment, entrepreneurship, and the ability of businesspeople to succeed is essential to the interests of all Americans, whether wealthy or poor, whether employees or employers. But the purpose of that economic climate is to enrich us all, not just to further enrich the wealthiest among us.
We can do better, augmenting rather than reducing individual liberty in the process, but ensuring that it is the true liberty to thrive rather than the false liberty of denied opportunity. We must strive, as a people, to make sure that we are maintaining a political economy in which people work to live rather than live to work. We must strive to make sure that all working Coloradans can achieve financial security, receive affordable health care, and enjoy a modest pension in the golden years of life, without having to endure unbearable conditions or be strangers to their children in the process. These are reasonable and achievable goals, and we should all be fully committed to them.
Modern society requires large amounts of energy. This will be true even if we become far more conservation conscious, far more humble in our appetites, and far more efficient in the production and use of energy resources. In fact, developing nations, aspiring to the same life-style that we have attained, will multiply the global challenges manifold.
But such massive energy consumption produces enormous externalities. Global warming, environmental contamination, and destablizing geopolitical repurcussions are all by-products of our energy consumption. Our reliance on non-renewable resources, consuming them at a rate that will make further extraction astronomically expensive in a matter of decades, compels us to be proactive in our political and economic stance toward energy and the environment.
Environmental contamination, particularly in the forms of carbon (and “black soot”) emissions, and groundwater contamination, combined with rapid economic growth in some developing nations and with an increasing scarcity of water in many regions, are global problems that cannot be ignored indefinitely. In Colorado, water scarcity coupled with population growth, and groundwater contamination through processes such as “fraccing” and uranium mining, pose urgent challenges that require assertive solutions.
Robust, system-sensitive local, state, national, and global responses are called for in response to these challenges.
A state-wide program of subsidization of research and development in the New Energy Economy is one such response. It is good for Colorado, and good for the world. We are currently forerunners in this nascent industry. Few things are predictable in world history, but the near certainty of an impending and sustained rise in the importance and value of “green” energy technologies and industries points the way toward a very important long-term economic strategy for the State of Colorado. Providing increased educational opportunities for New Energy jobs, and increased investment in New Energy technologies and nascent industries, is a wise economic and ecological course for the State of Colorado
Health care reform faces three demands and one constraint:
1) it must increase accessibility,
2) it must reduce costs,
3) it must maintain or improve quality, and
4) it must be politically viable.
By a careful and thorough review of available empirical evidence, comparing those countries that utilize universal single-payer health care to the United States, it is clear that the first three demands are most effectively met by the implementation of single-payer health care. This is the solution that the vast majority of economists, and The Economist magazine, favor. Just comparing Canada and the United States, Canada’s total and per capita costs are lower, coverage is universal, and the health care outcomes, by every statistical measure, are superior. But the fourth constraint makes this option currently difficult to achieve in the United States. Had we tried to pursue the best of all policy courses, the resistance to passing single-payer universal health care would have succeeded, once again, in undermining any effort at health care reform. We can continue to explore the possibility, at both the federal and the state levels, how best to move in the direction of the most efficient, fair, and effective health care system possible.
Given these parameters, I think that the recently enacted Affordable Health Care Act, though woefully imperfect, is a step in the right direction: We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We needed to pass a bill that extends affordable coverage to more people and controls long term growth in health care costs without compromising the quality of care we receive. That is what we did.
Some on the left complain that it is too much of a boon to insurance companies, to which I respond: All successful and enduring historical reforms have acknowledged and negotiated existing distributions of power and influence. While it may be tempting to try to sweep away unjust, dysfunctional, and inefficient relics of the past, reform in complex societies with a huge historical accumulation of social institutional material involves working with what exists, sometimes dramatically altering it in the process. There is a surprising amount of sophistication and functionality in those relics, and a surprising amount of error in human conclusions about what would work better. All of this should be borne in mind when attempting large-scale reforms.
Some on the right complain that it is too much of a government take-over, a drift toward “socialism,” to which I respond: Government is our agent and tool for securing our right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Using it effectively in this endeavor, understanding that complex modern market economies really do require complex regulatory architectures to function, and recognizing that our purpose in life is not to cling to slogans but rather to exercise our liberty in pursuit of sustainable, robust, and fair arrangements by which to co-exist, is no more or less than what reason dictates. Thomas Jefferson himself admonished us to “change with changing circumstances.” Government is not our enemy, and refusing to utilize it to perform functions for which it is uniquely best suited is not sound economic or fiscal policy. It is useful to remember that the exact same outcries were heard when social security, Medicare, and Medicaid were passed, all of which are now taken for granted as useful fixtures in our social institutional firmament.
While, in the absence of universal single-payer health care, I strongly favored inclusion of a public option, I never considered it indispensible to meaningful health care reform: A well-regulated market can conceivably offer enormous advances along all of the above-named dimensions (cost, coverage, quality, and, of course, political viability).
Though I believe we need a national health care policy, Colorado needs to pursue policies that complement and supplement reforms enacted by Congress. One vital role for the state is to improve our integration of existing institutions, such as schools, juvenile courts, and counseling services, to provide effective mental health screening and treatment for children who need it. There is considerable evidence that this would have significant positive impacts over time on educational achievement and crime reduction, as well as being cost effective in the long run.
More generally, I believe that we need to increase attention to preventative health care and to mental health care, making these ordinary rather than extraordinary parts of our lives.
Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards
The elusive truth lies somewhere between absolutism and relativism, somewhere between the hubris of believing that one’s own fixed understandings are the universal ones that all others must bow down to, and the dysfunctionality of believing that reality (moral, factual, analytical) is whatever each decides it is.
Robin Van Ausdall recently posted the following astute observation on her Facebook page:
Media coverage of the flight attendant who removed a 13-month-old infant after her mother slapped her in the face is indicative of a larger problem: the idea that right and wrong is somehow determined by opinion polls.
To which I replied:
You have a good point, Robin, but what IS right and wrong determined by? There’s no good answer, because while the tyranny of the majority may endorse any number of horrible evils (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.), any other authority to which we might defer has the potential of being the product of some smaller group’s bigotries, or even of being a brilliant doctrine gradually attenuated by time and increasingly anachronistic.
Part of the dilemma of our lives, and of our political battles, is that there is no ultimate authority to which to turn to determine what is right and what is wrong; instead, we are left to thrash it out among ourselves, with competing narratives and arguments.
It reminds me of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in which the theme was the quest for understanding what “quality” means. It seems so simple and obvious when unexamined, but becomes so subtle and profound when looked at more closely!
It’s not that truth, or “right” and “wrong” are relative, and can be whatever people want them to be. Rather, it’s that they are elusive, and disagreements concerning them are resolvable only by the parties to the disagreement, drawing on all other information and insight that may exist in the world, but without the benefit of any final arbiter.
(Of course), people can agree on a final arbiter, whether it be human agency, or some legal or moral document, or (as is usually the case) some combination of the two. That is how we govern ourselves, by drafting Bibles and Constitutions and creating clergies and judiciaries (along with executive and legislative branches to implement and modify the legal structure). The challenge is to continually refine these mechanisms for resolving moral and legal disputes, so that they continuously approach some ideal of service to human welfare, along all dimensions that we might identify.
What are your favorite places to eat, drink, and be merry, in the Denver metropolitan area, or elsewhere? Do you have any especially wonderful recipes to share, either of food or drink?
I started putting the mint going wild in my garden to good use some time ago, making Mint Juleps with the mint leaves, whiskey, sugar and ice. A very refreshing beverage on a hot summer day!
