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As some may know, The Day of the Dead in Mexico is actually two days, November 1 and 2, the first being the day of the return of the souls of dead children, and the second the day of the return of the souls of dead adults. How fitting (if tragic) then, that, on this election day, if predictions hold, we are about to see the return of the souls of dead ideas we had hoped never to see again.
The tsunami of political zeal approaching our shores, about to crash with destructive force against our homes and communities, our schools and clinics, our poor neighborhoods and last refuges of hope for those who we have already left with too little cause for hope, is not a defense of liberty, or of fiscal responsibility, or of the ideals of the American Revolution, but rather a return to an era of Robber Barons, of disregard for the injustices of poverty and inequality of opportunity, and disdain rather than compassion for those who are unfortunate enough to be born into disadvantaged socio-economic conditions.
It is a tsunami of anti-intellectualism, simultaneously declaring itself rational and those who oppose it irrational, while both carefully cleansing itself of any trace of reason and assertively pronouncing its disdain for the fruits of systematically applied reason. It is the dark side of populism, the angry torch-bearing mob looking for monsters to kill, accusing our president of every possible membership in groups that they consider evil: He is a Muslim, a non-American born abroad, a socialist, sometimes the anti-christ itself. It is the dark past of unreasoning and hateful bigotries rearing its ugly head once again, condemning all “others,” be they Muslims, gays, Hispanics, or simply all those who do not belong to the same unreasoning, hateful mob as they do.
I’ve engaged them in the blogosphere, on Facebook, in person and in email exchanges, and while there are some more moderate people who identify with the movement, overwhelmingly those who are its most vocal spokespeople and who set its agenda reject the notion of discourse, of engaging in a process which leads to subtler and richer and more useful understandings, of accepting that none of us have the final answers, that all of us must continue to seek out ever closer approximations of the truth. They call reason irrational and compassion hateful. They turn the world on its head, and will turn our world on its head in very destructive ways to the extent that we sit back and let them take control of the reins of government.
All reasonable people of goodwill, for generations now, have sighed in relief that the horrible ghosts of Social Darwinism and all similar rationalizations by those who are fortunate enough to live reasonably comfortable lives, justifying to themselves why they not only don’t have to care about those who are not, but should actively blame them for trying to take what is theirs (see, for example, Uncle Fish’s comments on various diaries on this blog).
Another pagan precursor of Halloween is the Celtic holiday Samhain (pronounced “Sowen”), in which, due to the Celtic lunar calendar, there were five days of the Celtic New Year left over every year, falling at the end of our October (the Catholic Church moved All Saints Day and All Hallow’s Eve to coincide with it, as it later moved the Aztec Day of the Dead to coincide with it) in which the boundary between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead was at its thinnest and most permeable. People dressed and put on make-up to make themselves look as unhealthy and unappealing as possible, to discourage dead spirits seeking new bodies in which to reside to choose theirs.
But as the dead spirits of horrible and hateful ideas now are roaming among us on this day, seeking to occupy our body politic, our halls of government, our institutions of cooperation and collective problem solving, determined to undermine them in their purpose, to deprive us of our instruments of national community and aspiration, to surrender to the problems and challenges that history imposes on us, we do not need to make ourselves look ugly, but rather beautiful, to oppose and defeat them. For Hope is beautiful. Compassion is beautiful. Commitment to the welfare of the least well off is beautiful. Humility and Awe in the face of God’s Creation are beautiful, and should inspire not the false certainties and militant ignorance of the Tea Party, but rather the seeking, hungry minds of those who know that they don’t know, but want to work together with all others to do the best they can to get it right.
If at all possible, drop whatever else you are doing today, and spend the next several hours making sure that every sane and decent human being you know takes their ballot to the nearest polling place, and registers their voice, their will, and their soul in favor of hopeful living ideas, and against the self-limiting and self-destructive ones of a poorer and less hopeful past that should remain dead forever more.
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One of the underlying and defining dynamics of our social institutional landscape is the interplay of centripetal and centrifugal social forces that simultaneously are pushing us together and pulling us apart, across levels and in overlapping configurations. Neither is inherently good nor inherently evil, though system-wide imbalances in one or both directions undermine rather than contribute to the production of human welfare.
Centripetal forces are necessary to sow and reap the fruits of cooperation, of coordinated efforts, of being members of a society. All of our social institutions are primarily instruments of cohesion, at least on one level, while they may be instruments of violent conflict, or social disarticulation, on a higher level (national militaries are a good example), or of controlled conflict, or social decentralization, on a higher or lower level (competitive markets are a good example). Just as teams compete in leagues, corporations compete in a market economy, and nations compete in a global contest with emergent and precarious rules. Alliances form, symbiotic relationships, client-patron configurations, and fault lines among them, where animosities are more noticable than amistades. But all relationships, from the most intimate to the most belligerent, are characterized by some combination of convergent and divergent interests, and by some combination of cooperation and conflict.
Conflict can be energizing, a catalyst for innovation. Military conflict, for instance, has possibly been the single most robust historical catalyst for both technological and social organizational innovations. Economic competition is well known for its robustness. But it is social organization, the creation of coherence and cooperation, that reaps those benefits.
In terms of the pursuit of interests, these two social forces, centripetal and centrifugal, determine effectiveness, for in any social entity competing with others (e.g., nations with nations, corporations with corporations, political parties with political parties), too little organizational coherence dooms the social entity to impotence and defeat, while too much dooms both those within it to excessive subjugation to organizational or authoritarian will, and the organization itself to lethargy and ossification.
Members of organized groups can, intentionally or unintentionally, catalize either force, centripetal or centrifugal, either beneficially or detrimentally for the group itself, and either beneficially or detrimentally for other groups with which it interacts. For instance, some forms of solidarity are oppressive within and/or predatory without, while others are more liberating within and/or more amenable to partnerships without. For maximum benefit to group members, network ties need to bind those within the group into a coherent whole, avoid binding members of sub-groups within it so tightly that they in effect secede from the main group, and form and maintain bonds across group boundaries, if generally fewer and weaker than those within groups, then at least sufficient to create a basis for communication, coordination, and cooperation.
A group that becomes too “coherent,” with tight cognitive and social bonds within but too few such bonds without, can become predatory (as, for instance, Nazi Germany was), while sub-groups that become too rebellious and demanding undermine the ability of the overarching group to act effectively in its competition with other similar groups. (Economist Mancur Olsen wrote a book in the 1970’s or 80’s called The Rise and Decline of Nations, discussing the enervating effects of too much time and energy being diverted from economically productive activities to distributional struggles, and used it to provide an explanation of the paradoxical economic phenomenon of “stagflation”).
In fact, implicit and explicit alliances between internal dissenters and external belligerents are frequent in human history, even when they are ideological opposites (e.g., the Bolsheviks and the Germans during World War I, when the latter funded and assisted the former in order to weaken and distract Russia from within while they attacked Russia from without; or, in an example of greater ideological compatability, the French alliance with the American Colonies, in which the French assisted the colonies in order to weaken Great Britain from within while continuing to engage in sporadic military conflicts with Great Britain from without).
We see such an implicit alliance today in modern American partisan politics. On the left, there are those who are trying to disarticulate the Democratic Party, just as the far right is ascendent with a passionate social movement. By doing so, that faction with the Democratic Party is inadvertently contributing to the success of that far-right social movement, rather than to the reform of their own party that it is their intent to effectuate (Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: Why Our Tea Party Future Will Be The Left’s Fault).
One of the factors that will contribute to Democratic Party losses in Congress (and in state governorships and state legislatures and local governments) in the 2010 midtern elections is occasionally organized, somewhat coherent disenchantment with the pace and boldness of legislation pursued by our Democratic President and Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. When the disenchantment rises to the level that they are declining to vote, then it is quite analogous to an implicit alliance with the far right in the latter’s take over of the country, contributing to the centrifugal forces of their own party at the very moment when highly passionate centripetal forces are mobilizing a sufficiently coherent far-right movement to effect a major shift in the distribution of political power.
While competing ideologies tend to explicitly emphasize either more coherence or more disarticulation, in reality, they are all jumbles of the two. The Tea Party is all about “liberty” and individualism, but its members are also more inclined to be highly nationalistic, moralistic, and militaristic. Progressives are all about using government to address social issues and invest in our collective welfare, but also emphasizes civil rights and multiculturalism.
The distinguishing traits between conpeting political parties do not actually involve a consistent commitment to either more social cohesion or less, but rather to more empathy or less. The right coheres around aggression and authoritarianism (in order to defeat others), while the left coheres around human welfare (in order to enrich all). The right disarticulates in order to possess and exclude, while the left disarticulates in order to enjoy and permit.
But, for both, discipline determines effectiveness, a discipline which either permits or does not permit internal discord, but which always contextualizes it in terms of internal consolidation. The United States began with a document that facilitated only discord, and not cooperation (The Articles of Confederation). It drafted a new one, that contextualized individual and states rights within the context of a strong federal government.
The ultimate goal is to create an optimal distribution of centralization and decentralization, neither too much nor too little of either, at any level of social organization. The future belongs to those, whether nations on the world state or political parties on the national stage, who are able to consolidate with enough discipline to compete with others who have done so. Factions that preach against compromise within the more liberal or progressive political parties are also, in effect, fighting to diminish the efficacy of their party.
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The issue of improved public discourse is, ultimately, the most important of all political issues, for it is in the final analysis the means by which reason and justice prevail over irrationality and bigotry, within each of us as well as throughout society. Discourse is challenged along many dimensions: civility, robustness, depth, subtlety, inclusiveness, rationality, factual accuracy, scope, precision, and quantity of information mobilized and assimilated. How kind is it? How productive is it? How well-informed is it? All of these are relevant dimensions to be constantly improved upon.
Discourse takes many forms. As I wrote recently, perhaps one of its most useful and probing forms is satire (Tragically Comical American Political Discourse). Humor can be revealing, as well as enjoyable, and is often most provocative of deep insights of all discursive forms. From Gulliver’s Travels (in which Jonathan Swift gave us the term “yahoos”) to Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22, and beyond, satire often hits the nail right on the head, and leaves us with a smile on our faces while doing so. That’s as good as it gets.
But discourse fights against many dysfunctional structural inhibitors and disinhibitors. Those with the largest audiences are often either incentivized to censor themselves or to inflame uninformed passions. Those who depend on endearing the many and offending as few as possible must avoid taboo topics and controversial positions as much as they are able to, while those who depend on appealing to and cultivating a loyal following must do just the opposite, and pander to their target market (whether sincerely or insincerely), reinforcing and helping to insulate prejudices and unreasoning passions. This bifurcates the most loudly broadcast voices into those that are sterilized by political and strategic considerations, and those that are contaminated by demagoguery.
Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff argued in his book The Political Mind that we need a new Enlightenment, one which does not try to advance the cause of Reason simply by recourse to rational arguments, but one which embraces new insights into how our minds work, and seeks to advance the cause of Reason along the avenues carved out by those insights (recognizing the roles of frames and narratives, of primary and complex metaphors, and working with them in advocacy of Reason and Empathy). But the old Enlightenment still holds its lessons, some of which we should continue to learn from.
The Economist recently published a review of Philipp Blom’s book (to be released in March): “Wicked Company: Freethinkers and Friendship in Pre-Revolutionary Paris” (http://www.economist.com/node/17358838). The theme of the book is those Enlightenment philosophes who convened in salons to discuss all matters, some of whom refuted the existence of God, despite the dangers of doing so. It was not, overall, a more courageous time than our own, and it was not a time when more people were willing to question the existence of God (Biologist Richard Dawkins, for instance, is one of many famous modern atheists, while Blom critiques some famous philosophes for their own failures to publicly entertain non-religious perspectives). But it is instructive that those committed to reason were discussing over two hundred years ago a reasonable but historically persecuted point of view that is little more tolerated today than it was then.
For the record, I am not saying that I consider atheism to be the final word on the subject (I don’t; I consider the truth to be far subtler, and far less dismissive of the sublime aspects of reality that concepts of divinity address). I am saying that atheism’s continued absence from most spheres of public discourse, along with the absence of subtler but equally unconventional views (e.g., pantheism, Taoist/Buddhist non-anthropomorphic mysticism, etc.), and the continued hold over public discourse and public cognition that the generally reductionist, absolutist, and somewhat superstitious bias of insitutionalized religions continues to command, are evidence of a public discourse unhealthily constrained by cognitive, social, and institutional forces that hinder rather than facilitate a robust and comprehensive public dialogue.
In other words, we continue to put informal “Inquisitions” between ourselves and the pursuit of truth. Galileo, who was basically accurate on every topic he addressed, and certainly more accurate than the Church, was subjected to torture by the Inquisition until he recanted his assertion that Copernicus was right, and the Earth revolved around the sun, rather than vice versa. And my own career as a teacher ended when I faced my own Inquisition for having compared cultural to genetic diffusion and innovation in a World Geography class (though I remain convinced that it was one of the best lesson plans my students had ever been exposed to).
Religion isn’t the only topic around which informal barriers to discourse are thrown up, nor do such barriers need to be society-wide to contribute to the constriction and impoverishment of public discourse. Some current trends in political discourse are contributing to further constriction, though in a more balkanized manner. Those with strong ideological views listen to and talk with those of similar views, and avoid those of conflicting views, sometimes quite explicitly (one left-wing ideologue, in a post on SquareState, said he was interested in reasonable criticisms, defined as things unlike what I say, which are too incompatible with his worldview to count as “reasonable”). The “confirmation bias” already making cross-fertilization of differing views difficult, is reinforced by the ability now to get news from, and engage in discourse with, those who already agree with us, making it that much easier to filter out contradictory evidence and analysis. Instead of a society-wide constriction of public discourse, we have a balkanized constriction, in which occasional debates across ideological borders quickly degenerate into angry mutual denouncements and insults.
A sociologist named Mark Granovetter wrote a paper in the 1970’s or 1980’s called “The Strength of Weak Ties,” in which he discussed the value of those network connections that form bridges between social (and ideological) islands. He was writing in a different era (strange as it may seem that so much has changed in so short a time), but captured a truth that transcends the form that our social coalescences take. We still need “weak ties,” bridges across social, cultural, and ideological chasms. We still need some threads of authentic social interaction, authentic dialogue, among as well as within our ideological enclaves.
There should be no taboos, particularly no taboos regarding modes of thought that do not preach hatred or antagonism of any kind. There should be no privileging of fixed ideologies. We need to work as a people toward promoting a society-wide public discourse that does not presuppose the conclusions, neither on the left nor the right nor in any other location of our complex ideological space. We need to continue to cultivate a commitment to reason, to analysis, to reliance on carefully acquired and verifiable information. No political challenge is more important, no advance more beneficial to our long-term collective welfare than advances in our ability to participate in a robust and unconstrained public discourse, with reason, humility, and goodwill as our guiding lights.
I admit it: I lose my sense of humor in the heat of political discourse, all the time. Ironically, in most other spheres of life, I’m known for being a bit of a cut-up. If you ask my seven-year-old daughter to describe her dad with one word, she’d probably say “funny” (of course, seven-year-olds are “an easy room”). But political discourse makes me mad, and sad, and often sick-to-my-stomach.
On SquareState, a progressive blog dominated by blind ideologues I briefly (and wishfully) tried to promote as an alternative to the unfortunately currently alternativeless Colorado Pols (unfortunately, because Jason Bain, the driving force behind Pols, and probably his anonymous partners as well, are arrogant pricks), I was savaged for cross-posting “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: Why Our Tea Party Future Will Be The Left’s Fault” by people on the left who, faithful mirror images of their counterparts on the right, believe that compromise is evil, extremism is good, and demanding from their party what would ensure their party’s long-term demise is their civic duty; my candidacy, hair-cut, and preference in pizza toppings all brought in as arguments to prove why I am both wrong and evil (okay, only my candidacy, but the other two might as well have been for all the relevance of some of the responses). To my immense discredit, I don’t just disregard, or laugh off, these absurd Glenn-Becks-of-the-left, but instead engage them, respond to their nonsense, and, by doing so, let them drag me down into the gutter along with them.
But the truth is, despite all that is at stake, and the consequential significance of current political and ideological trends, there’s no denying that a nation in which one of the most reported on U.S. senatorial candidates starts a campaign ad with “I am not a witch,” and in which the Tea Party Nation in early October cited Campbell’s new halal soups as proof that Shari’a law is infiltrating the United States, is a knee-slappingly funny nation…, though tragically so.
The November 1 issue of Time Magazine includes an excellent article on Jon Stewart and Stephen Cobert, two Comedy Central political satirists who compete with, and highlight, the hilarious reality of modern American political discourse. Cobert, for instance, took Tea Party Nation’s absurdity to the next step, suggesting (in character) that it’s no coincidence that bananas are crescent shaped. Stewart’s “cruelly accurate” parodies of Glenn Beck are hysterical, because they’re true (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-18-2010/conservative-libertarian).
The article discusses the difficult line Stewart and Cobert tread between comedy and commentary, remaining funny while remaining incisive and relevant. The article also discusses the competition these satirists face from current American political reality, the latter often being more absurd than anything they can invent. Stewart can often just play an authentic newsclip and make a face to receive raucus laughter in response, the joke having already been made for him.
The combination of humor and sincerity, of recognizing absurdity and shining a spotlight on it, so that we can, hopefully, laugh our way to sanity and moderation, may be the most significant contribution to raising the quality of American public discourse that exists today. Cobert’s reference to “truthiness,” the belief that what one feels in their gut is more important than objective reality, draws attention to a real, and tragic, absurdity dominating a broad swath of public discourse. It isn’t just humor; it’s an attempt to interject profound rationality into a profoundly irrational national dialogue.
Let’s all take a deep breath, laugh at ourselves, and scrub the humor of the tragedy, recommitting to being reasonable, and light-hearted, people of goodwill, doing the best we can. We don’t need to privilege the paranoid ravings of a Glenn Beck (or his blogosphere counterparts on the left), or the incredible ingnorance of a Christine O’Donnell. We just need to laugh at ourselves, and then build on the humility that that engenders.
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Some events are better than others. At a reception preceding a presentation by Janet Napolitano (Secretary of Homeland Security) yesterday evening, I enjoyed a series of chats with Frederico Peña (former Denver mayor), Su Ryden (current Colorado state representative), Pilar Ingargiola (apparently a co-founder of the small policy LLC for which I currently do frequent short term research contracts), a bunch of guys from Iowa, and Aaron Harber (Denver talk show host).
Then the speeches began (for the smaller crowd invited to the reception; there would be another round for the full audience gathered upstairs in the auditorium where Secretary Napolitano was to speak). Larry Mizel of the CELL (Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab) introduced Michael Bennet (Junior U.S. Senator from Colorado), who had two endearingly spontaneous human moments during his speech: 1) He paused at one point during his introduction of John Hickenlooper (Denver Mayor and Colorado gubernatorial candidate) to say “God, I’m tired,” and 2) after saying that neither John Hickenlooper nor Larry Mizel would take credit for the CELL, nor would either of them give full credit to the other, Hick gestured from the side that he would give full credit to Larry, to which Michael said, “Well, John will give full credit, because he’s…,” quickly checking himself before saying “a candidate” or “running for office.” The audience filled in the blank and chuckled appreciatively.
After the speeches, we went up a back staircase to the auditorium, where the first few rows were reserved for us. Larry and John gave two more short speeches, and then Secretary Napolitano took the stage. Her presentation struck several chords with me, the underlying theme resonating with themes that I have been developing on this blog, and, in fact, with themes that are woven through my novel.
Secretary Napolitano referred to “the threat landscape,” a phrase that parallels my frequently used phrase “the social institutional landscape.” They are, indeed, two aspects of the same landscape, one a destabilizing, chaos-producing aspect, and one the ordering and re-ordering aspect. This was a major theme in my novel (An epic mythology): The interplay of chaos and order, and the ways in which the disorganizing influences (personified in my novel by mischievous imps, the Loci, who I considered to be, in effect, magical terrorists), lead to more subtle and complex, increasingly organic, re-orderings.
Indeed, that was precisely what Secretary Napolitano was describing. Homeland Security recognizes that the best counterterrorism network would be an all-inclusive one, informing and mobilizing up and down through social institutional layers from the Department of Homeland Security to individual citizens, and creating channels for individual citizens (and others up and down the hierarchy) to inform those more charged with acting on that information.
The “see something, say something” campaign is one aspect of this attempt to mobilize and organize the populace in a decentralized system of cooperative vigilance, utilizing diffuse observation and information to create a counterterrorism network comprised of everyone, with eyes everywhere, far more comprehensive than anything that could be accomplished in any other way. Indeed, it is another example of activating “the genius of the many,” a theme I have discussed in my series of essays on the evolutionary ecology of our own social institutions and technologies (The Politics of Consciousness , 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), as well as my post on “wikinomics” (Wikinomics: The Genius of the Many Unleashed) and “crowdfunding” (Tuesday Briefs: The Anti-Empathy Movement & “Crowdfunding”).
The system is far more involved than just recommending that people report suspicious behavior. It involves a network of “fusion centers,” basically information way stations and processing centers, through which information is channeled upward and downward. In other words, Homeland Security is consciously trying to create a centralized system of upward and downward flows of information, of utilization and implementation of decentralized effort and in-put. This is the increasingly organic model of human social organization that I have long been discussing as our inevitable path of development.
To be sure, one model of such decentralization, with, in many respects, little need for a centralizing agent, is the market economy itself. But the market economy, while able to exist almost independently of governments, does so only in a crude, inefficient, and failure-laden form. Refining that organic system into the robust market economy of today required the development of government backed currency and clearly defined and enforced property rights. It has since benefited from the development of a complex regulatory structure that ensures that market actors aren’t able to exploit information asymmetries to their own advantage and at the public expense. And it will benefit in the future from increasingly sophisticated Political Market Instruments (see Deforestation: Losing an Area the Size of England Every Year) which both internalize externalities, and bring a variety of public goods and public bads under the umbrella of market dynamics.
But markets are just one social institutional material among several (A Framework for Political Analysis). Our development of a more organic, robust, sustainable, and fair social institutional and technological landscape does not benefit from monomania, but rather from a commitment to develop all of the social institutional materials we have in productive, integrated, and decentralized but coherent ways.
Despite the decentralization of the counterterrorism regime that Secretary Napolitano was describing, it was a return to a sense of communal effort, and away from our growing extreme individualism. It is a “neighborhood watch” writ large, a community of people watching one another’s back, addressing a collective need, nationwide. One of its benefits is that it helps move us back in the direction of recognizing that we are inherently in a collective enterprise, whether we are satisfying collective needs through markets, or hierarchies, or normative rules of conduct, or values and beliefs which motivate us to do so. We are not just a collection of disconnected individuals, neither in the production of wealth, in the production of human welfare, in the coping with life’s challenges, or in the vigilance against the violence of others. We are inherently interdependent, and need to cultivate the cultural and social institutional acknowledgement that we are, so that we are not constantly fighting to disregard the demand to meet the needs posed by that interdependence.
In terms of counterterrorism, there are other subtleties to incorporate besides the upward and downward flow of information, and the upward and downward flow of its utilization and implementation. There are also privacy concerns, which Secretary Napolitano addresses by having experts in privacy law at her headquarters, involved in the design of our counterterrorism architecture from beginning to end. There is the challenge to create an informed and activated society without creating a more fearful one (something accomplished by the sense of empowerment that participating, and knowing that most others are participating, in our shared vigilance against terrorism). And there is the emphasis on suspicious behaviors rather than suspicious ethnic membership, discouraging the ethnic profiling that is so corrosive to our coexistence in a diverse society, though completely avoiding the noise of prejudice in a decentralized system will undoubtedly prove to be impossible.
Nor will our ability to prevent all terrorist attacks. But the rise of this decentralized and very dangerous form of warfare, benefiting from modern communications and information technologies much as other decentralized enterprises do, increases the demand for intentional and coordinated development of decentralized and organic systems of response. Even terrorists contribute to the evolution of the human ecosystem, albeit at too high a price.
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Democracy is a system which works best when people, informed of the issues, vote their conscience. Without a doubt, it has become polluted with money and marketing strategies, a battle of psychological manipulation and the amassing of the funds to propagate it. But if we fail to draw the line at outright intentional deception, at blatant misrepresentation designed to deceive voters into voting for something that they have been led to believe is something else entirely, then we should at least invoke the moral condemnation that should be triggered by such acts, followed by the punishment of it at the ballot box.
Amendment 62, of course, is a ballot measure which defines life as beginning at conception, in a probably unconstitutional assault on Roe v. Wade and women’s reproductive rights, and is a little gremlin of legal mischief, tying in knots a legal system almost entirely predicated on legal rights that vest at birth. Even that minority of Democrats who lean in the pro-life direction would (or should) tend not to support this measure, because it’s poorly drafted and poorly conceived, and far more draconian in its implications than simply the repeal of Roe v. Wade would be. The majority of Democrats, who, in the final analysis, simply can’t conceive of reducing women to legal incubators, would oppose this ballot initiative both for its anti-reproductive-rights implications, and for its general costly dysfunctionality (if it became law, it would wreak havok through a plethora of unintended consequences, while simultaneously tying up the courts by the need to rule it unconstitutional, the inevitable ultimate outcome).
Which is why its advocates decided to try to trick Democrats into voting for it, by means of a robocall by “a fellow democrat” which makes no reference to “abortion” or “fetuses” or “unborn children” or any other word or phrase which would indicate what the amendment is actually about, but instead refers only to thousands of Coloradans being killed due to a lack of civil rights protections (as reported by Colorado Pols: http://coloradopols.com/diary/14149/now-thats-one-misleading-robocall).
Yes, you can argue that from the perspective of whoever paid for the call (but who also violated Colorado election law by not stating who they were), the description in the robocall is entirely accurate (if also intentionally selective). But there is no doubt that it was designed to invoke false images in the mind of the listener, to deceive them into believing that Amendment 62 is a measure to protect some group of fellow Coloradans (as currently legally and conventionally defined) whose lives have been put in jeopardy by a failure to provide adequate civil rights protections.
It is left to the imagination of the listener who the members of this group may be. Illegal immigrants being denied life-saving services? Residents exposed to toxic substances in their drinking water? Inmates being subjected to dangerous involuntary drug testing? There is no doubt that the ambiguity was exploited in order to trick some population of not terribly well informed or dilligent Democratic voters into voting against their conscience, by misleading them about the meaning of the measure on which they would be voting.
This is a case of a fanatical minority, knowing that they are in the minority, but wanting both to impose their moral tyranny on the majority that disagrees with them, and to circumvent the Constitution which protects the rights of some from the tyranny of others, trying to undermine both popular will and constitutional protections by means of outright deception.
Since they are so transparent in their contempt of both democracy and constitutionalism, I recommend that we take pains to ensure that democracy and constitutionalism return the favor.
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I was going to title this post “Fate, Genes, Obama, and the Rest of Us,” but decided that “Cousin Obama” might do more to pique curiosity. After all, am I claiming that President Obama and myself have some traceable genealogical link? (Well, sort of.) Am I referring to our President’s “white” half, and the fact that he is as racially related to whites as to blacks? (No.) Maybe I’m referring to his Kenyan family, members of whom could call him by the title in the title. (No.) What I’m referring to is, well, “Fate, Genes, Obama, and the Rest of Us.”
Fate: The genetic confluence of an obviously gifted left-leaning Kenyan (later) Harvard grad student in economics with a more subtly but similarly gifted woman of English and German descent in a Russian Language class at the University of Hawaii, followed by the rich culturally diverse and sense-of-wonder laden childhood that that mother provided to the immediate product of that genetic confluence, who then goes on to be a very socially conscious, academically brilliant, oratorically gifted politician, experiencing a meteoric rise in prominence, resulting in one of the most exhilarating and emotional presidential victories in the history of the nation.
Genes: We are dealt a hand from the same very large and complex deck, one which defines who we are at birth. Barack Obama clearly was dealt an exceptional hand. The person that Bruce L.R. Smith describes in his Washington Post Column on Barack Obama Sr., reprinted in the Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16352336), is a father in whom one can see the son foreshadowed, though the father had virtually no hand in the creation of that son other than to contribute his sperm and his memory. And the mother President Obama has described is similarly but differently endowed, creating the kind of genetic and cultural complement that provides the best chance of producing off-spring which combines and transcends the gifts of both parents.
Obama: The dealing of a genetic hand to each new person born, from the constantly reshuffled deck, produces an endless variety of unique individuals. From the distinctly finite emanates the nearly infinite. President Barack Obama is a unique individual, complete with strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, natural endowments and flaws. He is not just the (more than) sum of his genes, but also of his experience, of how he was raised (by a mother who instilled in him his sense of both social responsibility and wonder about the world, and by grandparents who instilled in him traditional American values), and of the social contexts in which the narrative of his life spun itself out.
The Rest of Us: The description of President Obama above describes each and every one of us. And it does not describe us in mutual isolation, but as unique swirls and eddies in a shared stream, less “individual” than our hyper-individualistic ideology is wont to acknowledge, non-existent without the stream of which we are a part. The river of reproduction is a single flow of interwoven currents. We are all cousins, all related and interrelated, threads in a dynamic tapestry weaving itself as we weave our ways through our own interconnected lives.
We are indeed all genealogically related, all human beings on this Earth, all descendants of “Mitochondrial Eve” who lived between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago (http://hubpages.com/hub/Genealogy-and-DNA-testing). And the clusters and branches within that family, defined through the drama of human history, are generated by fascinating tales. According to one genetic study, 0.5% of the male population of the world is directly descended from Genghis Kahn, who, as is known to have had dozens of legitimate and illegitimate children (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_genghis_2.html). How many more such tales exist, that have not been studied, and that don’t always involve historically famous personages?
Who we are genetically, the deck from which our genetic cards have been dealt, was determined most broadly by natural history (carving out the branch of primates that we are), broadly enough to encompass all living human beings in the interim period between natural history and recorded human history called “prehistory,” in broad swathes by both recorded and unrecorded real-life dramas throughout human history, and in most precise detail by the unique (and therefore statistically astronomically improbable) confluence of events which caused the genes of our respective parents to converge in and genetically define each of us.
But there is another, similar, pattern overlaid atop this one, faster, more superficial, but fleshing out the narrative, realizing the potential that the genetic story creates. As I’ve discussed in several essays now (The Politics of Consciousness , 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), the underlying dynamics of human history echo natural history, the pattern of genetic (biological) evolution being quite closely repeated in memetic (cultural) evolution. The study of geographic and historic distributions and evolutions of languages, religions, technologies, political forms (and social institutional forms in general, including family, community, economy, military, and so on), the combined landscape of all such cultural-cognitive artifacts, maps out a dynamical pattern of how we speak, think, believe, wonder, act, and live that, like the genetic story beneath it, also reshuffles and deals from an ever-evolving deck (one evolving far more rapidly than the genetic one).
We are each instances of these multi-layered narratives, defined by currents both broad and specific, from the general to the particular, determining what kind of species we are, what range of variation we encompass, what developmental branches have been carved out from that range, what sub-branches and twigs have led to the context which produced us, and what combination of particular genes, and unique life experiences, in the end define us each as marginally unique, but deeply similar and tightly interconnected, human beings.
At about the age of thirty, simply by following logic and observation wherever they led, I came to the unremarkable conclusion that markets are robust generators of wealth, and, as such, contribute in vital ways to human welfare. But, at the same time, I recognized that their very robustness not only amplified our productive activities, but also their destructive side-effects. And I have always been aware of the danger of false idols, whether they come in the form of the U.S. Constitution (“Constitutional Idolatry”), an oversimplistic and self-defeating conceptualization of liberty (Liberty & Society), or a pseudo-economic conviction that markets are completely self-regulating providers of all that is good and holy on Earth (The Economic Debate We’re Not Having, Regulation of Financial Markets).
Markets aren’t just functional, but, especially in the traditional sense of actual locations where wares and ideas are hawked, they can also be vibrant slices of life (Welcome to the agora!). The notion of human beings coming together to exchange the products of their hands and minds is an inherently appealing one. And the vitality of such places, the color and richness and pageantry of human activity, especially in its more primative forms, is hard to deny. Life isn’t just about producing and consuming wealth, or even ideas, but also about living, and such places are rich with the act of living. (Ironically, I can barely stand to spend two minutes in modern malls, finding them to be mind-numbingly sterile rather than lively).
The German Sociologist Max Weber warned about a century ago of “the iron cage of rationality”. The evolutionary logic of human history increasingly “rationalizes” our social institutions, but not necessarily in ways which maximize human happiness and welfare. The theme is similar to the one found in Aldous Huxley’s famous novel Brave New World, or Fritz Lang’s famous silent movie Metropolis: We gradually turn ourselves into cogs in a machine which operates according to a logic of its own (maximizing “efficiency”), sterilizing our world, reducing us to servants of the machine we have created, and sapping our lives of that which makes them truly satisfying to us as human beings.
It may well be that this precautionary tale is overstated, that efficiency itself eventually recoils from too much dehumanization, because the human mind and imagination, a resource whose maximally efficient functioning is an essential component of an efficient social institutional framework, does not thrive in such sterilized and dehumanized contexts. But, be that as it may, there is certainly one force in play, the drive toward increased mechanical efficiency (which would prevail, say, on assembly lines), which can be a brutal tyrant as well as a generous provider.
When we focus exclusively on GDP as the indicator of economic success, and ignore the gini coefficient (the statistical measure of inequality in the distribution of wealth) and the ecological and public health damage caused by the production and consumption of that wealth, we are surrendering to the iron cage of markets, privileging “efficiency” over all other concerns. There is nothing inherently just about those born into the world with inferior opportunities (less inherited wealth, social network advantages, and familial experience of success to serve as a model, for instance) being left either to beat the odds or suffer the consequences, not because life has to be fair (or ever fully can be), but because we should not casually shirk our responsibility as human beings to make it more so. There is nothing wise about privileging the production of wealth today at the expense of the Earth’s biodiversity and the predictable future costs, perhaps truly apocalyptic in scale, of our increasingly aggressive parasitism vis-a-vis the host body upon which we depend.
But markets do not have to be inequitable, nor parasitic. We can be the wise stewards that we need to be, incorporating into the mechanisms of markets themselves the goals and values that they do not automatically attend to. We can “internalize the externalities” so that market activities which impose costs on others, both today and in the future, are priced in ways which force buyers to take those external costs into account, so that buyers can decide if the value to them is truly worth the costs to others (thus, in aggregate, reducing those activities to the levels that truly serve our collective long-term interests). And we can make public investments in the development of both human and material infrastructure, to make markets more robust producers of wealth, and human beings regardless of the chances of birth more fairly able to partake of that wealth. We can keep working to get it right, rather than to surrender our wills to some dehumanized force that we have turned into a false idol.
In terms of addressing abject poverty, markets as they currently exist leave many behind. Those living primtive lives have little to offer to attract the wealth produced elsewhere, and, when they do (generally in the form of natural resources), markets are brutal exploiters of their desperation, paying them less than those less in need would receive. But we can use markets, intentionally, to do what they do not do organically: We can provide infrastructural investments which create the ability to produce something for local markets, and tiny start-up loans to enable poor folk in poor conditions (mostly women) to engage in some productive activity (“Grameen Banks” have been hugely successful in this: http://www.grameen-info.org/). We can devise small innovations, like trundle pumps (to ensure potable water where water is scarce), and cook stoves (to reduce the emissions of black soot that plague many desperately poor people around the world, and contribute significantly to global warming), which get those most in need into a position where they can benefit from markets. We can see markets as a valuable tool to be utilized in this shared human endeavor of ours, rather than a justification for doing nothing to address the horrors of an unjust and in many ways self-destructive status quo.
We must always be the masters of our technologies and social institutions, never their servants. They exist to serve a purpose, not to demand our allegiance and submission. The vitality of markets, in the modern sense, as robust producers of wealth, and in the traditional sense as vibrant slices of life, needs to be made whole again, if not in the actual appearance and ambience of most of our marketplaces themselves, than in how we view them. Markets are vehicles of life, where we come with our needs and desires and offerings, to enrich one another both materially and spiritually. And it is incumbent upon us that they are inclusive rather than exclusive, providing opportunities rather than exploiting desperation, and addressing problems more robustly than they create them.
David Harsanyi wrote in the Denver Post that the Obama Administration is running out of people to demonize(http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16321444). This right-wing columnist insists that Democratic “demonization” of the Chamber of Commerce is reinforcing moderate perceptions that the Democratic Party has gone bonkers. Ironically (too painfully so), it is what has become the Republican mainstream that literally (rather than figuratively) demonizes Obama himself, accusing him of being foreign born, Muslim, and, yes, the the anti-Christ. As a mouthpiece for right-wing extremism, Harsanyi has turned reality completely on its head, accusing the opposition of the defects that so dramatically characterize his own ideological camp.
The Denver Post criticizes Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CO CD 7) for, among other things, supporting cap-and-trade (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16281757). I think that Ed is doing a great job in general, is supporting what reason and goodwill dictate that a responsible elected representative support, and has revolutionized constituent services and outreach (his “government at the grocery store” town halls have become famous). But what strikes me as incredible is the Post’s irresponsible position on cap-and-trade on the basis that it raises energy costs.
The rest of the developed world, responding to abundant and compelling evidence, recognizes the need for an affirmative global warming abatement policy (the prime contenders being cap-and-trade or a carbon tax), but has been stymied in its attempt to create a globally concerted policy to address the problem by the short-sightedness of a country that would rather keep energy prices low today than start to reduce the infinitely higher future costs that we can no longer completely avoid. We scuttled the Kyoto Protocol, and now the Denver Post wants to make sure that we make continue to stick our heads in the sand rather than even begin to address this most consequential of challenges. It’s one thing to have to fight popular misconceptions, it’s another to have them amplified by Denver’s last remaining major metropolitan newspaper. I’ve never in my life felt less respect for any newspaper anywhere in America than I feel for this one now.
Susan Greene reports on the strong-arm tactics of the Denver Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, suing a lesbian Sunday School teacher the Archdiocese had fired for brining her case to the Colorado Civil Rights Division (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16314690). Such strong-arm tactics by institutions that should be in the vanguard of nobler attitudes are all too common. I’ve experienced them at the hands of the current Jefferson County Schools administration, first for trying to bring to the district’s attention the serious problems with a principle who was the superintendent’s “dear old friend,” and more recently for trying to establish a robust school-community partnership in Jefferson County. In all such cases, it is the community’s responsibility to stand up and reject this privileging of power over purpose. I strongly encourage people to be more aware, and get more involved.
The Economist reports on the use of steganography, and a program called “Collage,” which distributes and hides messages among files posted to public websites, and allows intended recipients to reassemble them (http://www.economist.com/node/17243251). It is another example of the decentralized, and unstoppable, flow of information in the modern world, with all of the vast implications that that has. Totalitarian governments will find it increasingly difficult to control what information people have access to, and their ability to organize in opposition to the government. And more responsible governments will find it increasingly difficult to control the organization and implementation of violent extremism.
The blogosphere is a cacophony of arbitrary assertions, unreliable information, angry retorts, and assumption-laden quick commentaries. Long, thoughtful explorations of issues and aspects of our lives are resented on many sites, high volume being instantly equated with low density, and in-depth analysis conflated with unnecessary verbosity. There are reasons for this: The lack of quality control and editorial assistance involved in instantly self-published compositions leadto a lack of confidence on the part of others that investing a large amount of time is worth the effort. And the world has become a more sound-bite driven place, relying more on quick hits of factoids and headlines than insightful discussion of underlying dynamics and implications. The rapid, massive flow of information is a deluge in which no one can swim, and those who try are left grabbing fractured pieces rather than comprehensive narratives.
But lengthy composition does not imply poor quality. Those of us who still read books, read books that are hundreds of pages long, without generally complaining that the author failed to make his or her point in less than 200 words. Even the magazine articles we read are generally of a length that would be greeted with derision in the blogosphere. But those who self-publish are not necessarily writing works of inferior quality, and thoughtful essays cannot be reduced to soundbites without destroying their value entirely.
I started this blog (just over seven weeks ago, as I write) in order to create a more thoughtful haven on the internet, a place where we do something more useful than post links and quick retorts and escalating flame wars. I wanted to create a confluence of thoughts and ideas, a place where people can teach and learn from one another, where we can all lift one another up by using this technology of collective consciousness in a more deeply nourishing way.
But though a fair number of people have been stopping by on a daily basis to read my posts, very few have posted anything of their own. I can’t make this clearing house of ideas and insights and ponderings and contemplations work all on my own; I need the help of others who are also thinking about the world in which we live. Please, post your essays here, on any topic of interest to you, and send the link to this page to everyone you know who might wish to do the same. Let’s create a real confluence of thought, and imagination, and aspiration, right here, and, hopefully, gradually, flowing together with all other such efforts wherever they may be, everywhere.
I look forward to reading your thoughts about the world in which we live, and what we can do to improve the quality of our lives.
