Unfinished Business

Now that the vox populi has spoken in the most expensive election in the history of human civilization (courtesy of the Supremes and Citizens United), it might be a good time to take a breath or two before the 2016 campaign begins to take stock of the unfinished business of the current, but soon to expire, 112^th Congress.

As Ezra Klein has noted, the 112th Congress will likely be remembered as one of the worst in American history. Not only did the shameful 1112th Congress pass fewer public laws than any Congress since Harry Truman, it is more polarized and more unpopular than any previous Congress, scoring the same approval rating as Hugo Chavez -- 9%. 

How did they manage to earn such a level of disapproval you ask? Well how about creating a false crisis over increasing the debt limit in the summer of 2011 that cost the US its AAA credit rating, dealt a blow to business and consumer confidence, and set back the recovery? This was an act of economic sabotage which, had it been done by a foreign power, could have been regarded as a causus belli. But then they did something even stupider -- as part of the deal to end this manufactured crisis the venal 112th Congress decided to create a special “supercommittee” to hammer out a grand bargain on a deficit reduction deal. They tied failure of this “supercommittee” to a spending sequester that would enact  automatic  across the board spending cuts that neither party likes, which will really cripple the economy if allowed to take place. And guess what --- the “stupidcommittee” failed, and those automatic spending cuts are now due to be enacted on January 1, 2013 unless the remnant of this dysfunctional lame duck Congress does something about it.  Good luck!

The problem is that the 2012 election basically affirmed the status quo with the Republicans retaining control of the House of Representatives and the Democrats control of the Senate and White House. This is the same recipe for partisan gridlock in Washington that we have had for the past few years, and there is no reason to think that the results of the election will do much of anything to break this pattern.

One may reasonably ask: How did it get this bad? Maybe it is the fault of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Bull! It was the Republicans fault. Don’t take my word for it, read the book by two longtime Congress-watchers, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” who say that the Tea Party tide of 2010 that caused the dysfunction of the 112th Congress. Although that tide is mercifully receding, Republicans will still control the majority in the House of Representatives for the 113th Congress and will most likely continue on their path of obstruction. 

One might think that having now failed to achieve their major political objectives, to ensure that Barack Obama would be a one-term president, and to gain the majority in the Senate, the leaders of the GOP (Guardians of Plutocracy) would decide to back off their ideological extremism and return to moderation. I wouldn’t bet on it. There aren’t any moderates left in the Republican leadership to make the case for this kind of sensible move to the political center because they were purged in the Republicans primaries earlier this year. This is the reason the prospects for progressive legislation in the next four years continue to be poor. I agree with Alan Wolfe that it is all but certain that the Republicans in the 113^th Congress won’t be any more cooperative with President Obama and the Democrats than those in the 112^th were, and that ”It will take more than one presidential election before the Republicans will ever prefer governance to politics.”

Wolfe goes on to argue that since Obama cannot hope to get any significant new legislation through the next two Congresses, he should become the “Educator in Chief” and really explain to Americans that we really, really do need to do something about wealth and income inequality and about global climate change (perhaps someday). While this may be realistic and pragmatic advice, I do not think it is good enough. President Obama should lead with a real legislative agenda, not with just a bunch of talking points for the punditocracy to jabber about.

Nor do I think it is a good idea for President Obama and the Congressional Democrats to try to “play nice” with their Republican colleagues. There will be some who will say that given how narrow the Obama victory was and how divided the country is, it would be best to pursue the path of moderation. Go for the relatively noncontroversial issues: a sensible deal of taxation and deficit reduction that balances cuts in entitlement spending with modest increases in the nominal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans; increase spending for education, shore up Medicare and Medicaid in sensible ways, and so forth. If President Obama reaches out to the other side with an olive branch, the thinking goes, and there is hope for piecemeal incremental progress.

The problem with this advice is that it is basically the game plan Obama followed in his first term in his forlorn attempt to overcome Washington partisanship. What happened was that the Republicans bit the hands that reached out to them and responded to offers of compromise as their cue to move the goal-posts even further to the right. By leading with moderation all Obama got was a ratcheting of the center of political discourse into the crazy zone (death panels and socialism) and at the end of the day, no deal anyway. One hopes that Obama has learned this lesson and recalibrates his negotiation strategy so that he does not begin with a moderate left-center position, and then cave to center or to the right of that, as he did in agreeing to the extension of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for an extension of unemployment insurance in the midst of the Great Recession.

Instead of moderation and compromise, I think that progressives both within and on the fringes of the Democratic party need to urge that President Obama and the democratic party leadership in the Congress go on the offensive with a real progressive legislative agenda, rather than with a modest and moderate one that their Republican colleagues will obstruct in any case. The progressive wing of the party was loyal to the Democrats this time around and did not undermine his chances of re-election by supporting third party candidates, like Jill Stein, in large numbers. It is time for progressives to urge that Obama adopt a progressive policy agenda in his second term. 

One of the big failings of President Obama’s first term was that he held onto the notion that he could overcome partisanship in Washington by just being reasonable and moderate in his political objectives. He took “Medicare for All” off the table from the get-go and went with what was essentially a Republican, market-based, plan to extend medical insurance to (almost) all Americans. Now that “Romney-care” has been rechristened as “Obamacare” and the supreme Supreme, Chief Justice Roberts, has given it his constitutional blessing, it would be a good idea for the Democrats to push to put back the “public option” that was stripped from the proposal even though it did not make any difference in the end on the number of Republicans who voted for the Affordable Care Act. So, the first element of a progressive democratic agenda is to work to strengthen and extend Obamacare and to ensure its successful implementation. It will never become “Medicare for All” in its present legislative form, but can out an end to some of the greatest injustices of a market-based health insurance system. How about bringing back the “public option” that was traded away in a failed attempt to win over some Republican votes?

Second, we need another round of economic stimulus to accelerate the economic recovery. With much of the East Coast devastated by Hurricane Sandy (the real October surprise in this election) what better way to deliver a needed jolt to the economy than by passing a significant federal infrastructure spending bill? It could be structured so that it contained grants for states and counties to apply for federal funds to rebuild critical infrastructure damaged by the storms, but it should also address the need to build a new, more resilient infrastructure that can withstand or bounce back from future environmental shocks like the one we have just experienced. This is not rocket science – it must be obvious even to so-called “low information voters” that what America needs now is (literally) “nation-building” in America – we have to rebuilt America’s physical infrastructure – our plumbing, electrical grids, our roads, trains, and airports, and our water supply systems to be able to survive the altered climatic conditions of the 21^st century.

Third, America needs to get serious about controlling carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. Forget about “cap and trade” -- go for a  rebatable carbon tax of the kind James Hansen and his colleagues have proposed. Such a tax would enable us to place a real market price on burning fossil fuels of all kinds, while providing consumers with a monthly “green dividend check” to offset the increased cost of fossil fuel consumption. Democrats should put the “Climate Stewardship Act” on the legislative agenda, and let the Republicans howl all they want about the EPA and “too much regulation.” The Roberts court, having reaffirmed that Congress can levy taxes (duh!), will not be able to block it either. Then educate the American people as to why it is needed and how they and their children and grandchildren will benefit from a quicker transition to an energy economy that is less reliant on fossil fuels. While the Republicans are trying to figure out how to tell more lies, hit them with a bill that will eliminate the current subsidies to the petroleum, coal, and natural gas interests that have spent millions on TV ads trying to make people into “Energy Voters.” Yeah, well some of us already are energy voters, and we are voting for renewable energy not for more fossil fuels.

Fourth, we still need to have real financial reform that breaks up the banks that are too big to fail and places restrictions on risky gambling on Wall Street. The bankers largely backed Romney in this election; Obama owes them nothing. He should proceed to reign them in.

Fifth, we need urgently to resolve the immigration mess once and for all with a policy that allows paths to permanent residence and in some cases citizenship to the millions of undocumented workers on whom our economy depends. The passage of the “dream act” in Maryland may be a sign that the country is moving away from hysterical nativism and xenophobia on this topic.

Sixth, lets end the failed “war on drugs.” Let our Mexico and our southern neighbors address the many problems it has created for them dealing with the “narco-economy” that it has created. In this light it might be instructive to revisit the history of Prohibition (see Boardwalk Empire) and reflect upon the important lesson in political philosophy delivered by the failure of the Volstead Act – one cannot enforce virtue through legislation. Instead create community-based programs to deal with drug addiction as a public health problem and increase funding for similar programs to address other vices with adverse health impacts such as alcoholism and obesity. While we are at it, propose an “amnesty” bill that would have the effect of emptying the prisons of non-violent offenders convicted on drug charges and given ridiculous mandatory minimum sentences for victimless crimes. Calling for a general amnesty for such offenders will really give the Republicans fits, but so what – fuck ‘em. If they are going to say “no” anyway to anything that the Democrats propose, then at least propose things that make real sense and would make a real difference. Then when it does not pass, spare no effort on blaming the Republicans for sabotaging our democracy.

The rhetoric of this campaign has been surprising free of Democrats playing the “blame game” – even though it is obvious to most observers that the retrograde 112^th Congress has been obstructing progress on the economy, health care, infrastructure spending, immigration reform, and most other reasonable and necessary legislative initiatives. No doubt this was due to a political calculation on the part of democratic campaign strategists that people don’t like it when you blame others for you own failures, and that making such a charge is tantamount to admitting that much of the democratic legislative agenda was thwarted in the 112^th Congress at a time when the President wanted to run on his record. But that political calculation is now expired, so the democratic leadership should feel free to put the House and Senate Republican caucuses on the defensive by proposing an ambitious and progressive new legislative agenda for the 113^th Congress, and blaming the Republicans when the bills die in the Congress.

Freed from the need to run for re-election, President Obama should lead more confidently and aggressively in his second term both domestically and internationally. Domestically, he should be pushing his democratic allies in the Congress to take up this more forward-looking agenda and fight for it with him, not only as the “educator in chief,” but the “persuader in chief.” Obama needs to get off of the sidelines and go over Congress directly to the American people.

He also needs to attend to important foreign policy challenges, for instance, forging a relationship with China’s new leader Xi Jinping that will end our schizoid “frienemy” relationship and ask him to step up as a real partner in maintaining international peace and security in places like Syria, Iran, and Pakistan, not only North Korea. He also really needs to put more pressure on Israel’s right-wing coalition to deal seriously with the settlements and the question of Palestine. Dare I mention, Cuba?  

One last thought, while I think that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have done about as well as could be expected given unrelenting Republican obstructionism, sabotage, and lying, their tenure as party leaders should also expire with the current Congress. The Democrats should elect new, more progressive leaders in the House and Senate to carry the fight to the next level. But before they go there is still that little matter of the “spending sequester” and the fiscal cliff that looms before us. I think they should try to convince the rump 112^th Congress that before it passes into history that it should have the decency not take the rest of us down with it.  

Weapons of Mass Deception

With the political campaign season poised to go into high gear next month it is important that voters become aware of the various propaganda techniques being employed by the candidates and their surrogates. Having taught logic for many years I am familiar with the standard rhetorical techniques used to persuade audiences to accept conclusions by means of invalid or fallacious arguments. In this political season there is already plenty of name-calling, fear-mongering, oversimplification, distortion, half-truth, false dilemma, misquotation, ad hominem and ad miseracordiam arguments, and other classic informal fallacies being bandied about. But in the digital age political propagandists have invented some novel forms of deception that employ juxtaposed visual imagery, audio cues, and other media techniques designed to mislead audiences into drawing conclusions for which there is no evidence and believing what is not true. 

A fun campaign party-game involves getting a group of friends together and watching the evening news to see how many fallacies and propaganda techniques you can spot. For a useful primer on the new kinds of techniques developed for TV and digital media, I recommend the Patterns of Deception pages on the Annenberg Public Policy Center's website Flackcheck.org. Here you can find descriptions and examples of techniques such as deceptive dramatization, photo-shopping, visual vilification, and glass housing. 

I was particularly interested in glass housing, a propaganda technique which I had observed but did not have a good name for. Basically, glass housing involves accusing your opponent of something which you yourself have done. The name derives from the saying, "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones," which suggests, of course, that the mud one slings at one's political rivals may also end up on oneself. This pattern of deception relies on selective omission of crucial information, namely that the speaker is in fact guilty of the very same supposed heresy. It is a confusional technique, since it creates the impression that the speaker is against something he is actually for. Using this technique may invite the charge of hypocrisy, but only if someone in the audience bothers to fact check the claim against both the target's public record and the speaker's own record. Courting a charge of hypocrisy appears to be an acceptable risk to many politicians who seem to place no value whatsoever on logical consistency. In the example on the Flackcheck site there is a snippet of a Santorum Michigan TV attack ad accusing Romney of not supporting the automobile industry bailout, while conveniently failing to mention that Santorum did not support it either. 

I believe that I have also observed examples of an interesting variant of glass-housing, which I will call preemptive glass housing.  This is a particularly cunning technique if used carefully. Preemptive glass housing involves accusing your adversary of doing something that you or your surrogates are about to do. For example, in the last few days the Romney-Ryan campaign has been putting out statements claiming that the Obama-Biden campaign has been "driven by division, attack, and hatred," in other words, he is accusing Obama of  "going negative." I suspect that this  is an example of preemptive glass housing designed to inoculate the Romney-Ryan campaign against similar charges when they come out swinging with millions of dollars of negative advertising following their upcoming convention. 

Preemptive glass housing allows one to appear to be the moral and honest character in the mud fight by inviting audiences to believe that the speaker could not possibly be in favor of the tactics he is criticizing his opponent for using. It works like a vaccination against possible future counterattacks as well, since it has primed one's audience to regard retaliation as evidence for the original charge, whether that charge had any truth or not at the time it was published. My reading is that by stating now that the Obama-Biden campaign has become harshly negative (which it hasn't), the Romney-Ryan campaign is preparing its audience for it doing just that. When the Obama campaign returns the fire, the Romney camp will just say "I told you so." They will also be in a position to claim that "They started it." But, if Obama-Biden refuse to take the bait, then the smear will stick. Pretty neat, eh?

Why do I think that the Romney-Ryan campaign is going to go harshly negative on Obama? Well because that is basically how Romney secured the Republican nomination. Whenever any primary opponent began to outpace him at the polls (which was often), the Romney camp unleashed a torrent of negative campaign ads against them ahead of the next primary election. This use of negative campaigning worked well against the likes of Gingerich and Santorum, and now Willard is planning to use the same strategy against Obama. Romney's donors and Super-PAC backers understood this all along, which is why they have been stockpiling millions of dollars for negative ad buys in the last two month before the election. 

Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate provides also evidence that he has decided that his best chance of winning the White House is to mobilize a lot of angry Republicans to turn out on election day while his political allies in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida suppress the Democratic vote, particularly among black, Hispanic, and working class voters. He seems to have reached the conclusion that Obama's favorable likability numbers, as compared to this own, make it unlikely that he will be able to pry loose the votes of many independents, who are the traditional targets in presidential elections. He probably also figures that those primary voters who supported other Republican contenders during the "anybody but Mitt" primary period will come out to vote against Obama, but only if he can get them excited and angry enough. So, he is feeding the Republican base its red meat with Paul Ryan, and will be playing to their baser instincts to get them to the polls in large numbers.

So that is why my money is on the Romney campaign turning fiercely negative in the next few weeks following the Republican convention. If you think this campaign has been dirty, dishonest, and deceitful thus far, "Baby, you ain't seen nuthin yet." 

The Symbolism of the Titanic Disaster

On April 15, 1912 the ocean liner Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, drowning 1517 passengers. On this centenary of the disaster there are memorials taking place in Belfast where the supposedly “unsinkable” steamship was built,  from Southhampton England, its port of departure, and in New York, its intended destination. Church bells are also ringing in Halifax Nova Scotia from whence ships sailed to recover bodies from the icy waters of the North Atlantic and where 150 of those who perished were laid to rest. 

The Titanic went down on its maiden voyage. Its passengers were a cross-section of humanity. There were the poor who booked third class tickets dreaming of making a new life for themselves in America, as well as the rich who booked the luxury cabins and were taking a holiday cruise. When the ship struck the iceberg in the early morning hours panic ensued. There were not enough lifeboats for all of the passengers. The best of human nature came fully into view, as some brave men and women decided to remain on board the sinking vessel to allow others to board the lifeboats. The worst was also evident, as some of the richest passengers, including the ship’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay, left the sinking ship in partially loaded lifeboats The ship’s wireless telegraph operator, Jack Philips, stayed at his post in the “Marconi Room” until the end,  tapping out the distress signal at that time “C, Q, D: Calling all ships. Distress, We have struck an iceberg.” And the ship’s band, led by Wallace Hartley, continued to play the song “Nearer, My God to Thee” as the great vessel sank into the depths of North Atlantic.


News  of the Titanic disaster was broadcast nearly globally in less than two days, and is one of the earliest example of a “viral” global news event. It also sparked a regulatory revolution that has led to many improvements in safety on board ships, though they did not prevent the Costa Concordia from running around on January 13, 2012 killing 30 people, due to human error. In the past 100 years, the Titanic has spawned hundred of books, thousands, and a “block buster” 1998 movie by James Cameron that made the tragedy real to a new generation of people.

Our fascination with the Titanic derives in part from its serving as a metaphor and symbol; it is an icon for a ship on a different voyage, one that we now are all passengers on. The Titanic symbolizes human civilization since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 17th century. The voyage began with philosophers, such as Descartes and Francis Bacon heralding the dawning of a New Age in which the secrets of Nature would be unlocked by science and technology allowing us to exert our control over the natural world, to better satisfy human needs and desires. Their faith in the capacity of human reason to discover the Laws of Nature in order to Subdue Nature to our Will, turned out, as we all know, to be well-founded.

The Enlightenment’s faith in scientific reason  brought us Issac Newton, the steam engine, constitutional democracy, international trade, factories and mass production, bicycles, electricity, corporations, railroads, cotton gins, the end of slavery, telegraph, photography, internal combustion engines, airplanes, motion pictures, automobiles, radios, telephones,  plastic, refrigerators, submarines, vacuum tubes, oral contraception, transistors, helicopters, computers, fax machines, audio tape recording, nylon, nuclear weapons, Space Shuttles, DVDs, and IPads. Those of us fortunate enough to have been born in the latter part of the 20th century into one of the more prosperous and developed countries, have enjoyed the benefits, comforts, and capacities that far exceed those available a century ago to even the wealthiest passengers aboard the Titanic.These benefits and new capacities came about largely because of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and our belief in Reason’s power to discover the Laws of Nature. But the fruits of Reason were widely diffused in society by Corporations operating within a Capitalist Economic System. The industrial civilization which has been created by this combination of factors, is mighty and impressive, so much so, that many believe it is “unsinkable.”  Some of the passengers expect that this voyage of discovery and invention will continue to lift humanity, and when they peer into the far future, see that we will one day have the ability to leave the Earth in Space Ships and become Wayfarers in the Universe, going where no one has gone before.

But there are also some passengers, among whom I count myself, who fear that we are at the present time heading towards a catastrophe. There are icebergs on the horizon whose shapes are beginning to become visible through the fog and dark of night: global climate disruption, species extinction, terrorism, deforestation, drought, famine, economic collapse, global epidemic, mass starvation, genocidal conflict, conflict over diminishing land and water resources, ecosystem collapse, over population, peak oil, and nuclear war. Those of us who see these ominous shapes on the horizon are trying to urgently warn to other passengers of the danger of our situation by pointing to these looming shapes on the horizon.

But most of the other passengers are not paying much attention to us. They are going about their businesses on the ship,  working to make money so that they can acquire more of the gadgets and goodies that the ship’s shopping mall deck has on offer. Down below, the passengers in third class are trying to make their way to the upper decks to join in the conspicuous consumption carnival.  Up on the bridge, the captain seems to be vaguely apprehensive about what dangers may ahead, but he is skinny and kind of weak and does not have the power steer the ship onto a new course, especially given that there is a group of lunatics on the bridge who seem intent on grabbing the wheel and turning the ship directly into the path of the icebergs. Other passengers are sleeping, or drinking, or having sex; just enjoying themselves.          

There are also some people in the ship’s chapel. Some are praying for a Savior to arrive, while others are talking about the possibility of a “paradigm shift” to a new global consciousness. These latter folks see the dangers that lie ahead if we continue on our present course. They try to practice living in a more sustainable fashion by planting urban gardens, and bringing canvas bags to the local farmer’s market, which they go to on their bicycles or in their new hybrid vehicles. They also host “webinars” and organize conferences in which they discuss finding “inner peace” through yoga and meditation, and then spread the gospel of the New Earth that is possible through sales of books and DVDs. It is comforting to be around these types because they remain optimistic that a New Age of global peace, justice, and abundance is still possible if we only “Occupy Ourselves.”

Other passengers, aware of the impending calamity, are already heading towards the lifeboats. They are moving out of the cities, creating sustainable communities, and re-learning the skills necessary to live off of the land, the skills that our ancestors once had, but which Modern Humans, have forgotten. When the catastrophe hits, these people think they will have their own arks, and will be counted among the survivors.

Some other passengers are trying to do science and to invent new technologies that will help us avert disaster. They are making packaging out of mushrooms; cooking food on solar ovens, erecting windmills, and building baby incubators out of spare automobile parts. It is not clear that any of these inventions will actually avert the Collapse of Industrial Civilization, but at least they are doing some practical things that may one day change the ways we relate to human society and to the natural environment. They are not willing to abandon their faith in Human Progress through Science and Technology; they are trying to apply scientific reason  to the problems and threats that we are now facing. But even as they work, the ship sails on; the bridge controls are dysfunctional, there are not enough lifeboats, and the icebergs are still floating on the horizon.

Still others are sending messages over the Internet (like this one) out to anyone who might happen to be listening for a distress signal: ”C, Q, D, --- C, Q, D.....C. Q, D.....”

But no one is out there listening who is coming to rescue us;

We are the ones we are waiting for;

And many of us will be going down with the ship.....

           

Reflections of the End of the Iraq War

The US war in Iraq is now officially over. It will go down in history as the greatest US foreign policy fiasco since the Vietnam War. In my lifetime I witnessed two lengthy and illegal wars of choice that the US blundered into. Both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars ended in ignominy and disaster, both for the US and for the countries that we went to war to "save".

Along with millions of other Americans, mainly on the political left, I opposed these wars. But the people who thought like me were ignored, vilified, called unpatriotic, and our concerns about the immorality and folly of these conflicts were discounted. On the other hand, those who ordered our young men and women into unnecessary combat were lionized and were never punished for their crimes, war crimes, in particular, the crime of aggression. In neither case were the main objectives for going to war accomplished. We failed miserably in both cases and these failures were bought at great cost in terms of treasure and lives. 

The goal of the Vietnam war was to stop this country from becoming a socialist state and preventing a "domino effect" leading other Southeast Asian nations to fall into the Communist column. By the end of this stupid war, 58,000 Americans and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese died. The conflict set up the conditions for a genocide in neighboring Cambodia in which another 1.7 million Cambodians died. In the end, the People's Socialist Republic of Vietnam won the war, but like its traditional enemy and neighbor to the north, the People's Republic of China, it is now a socialist state in name only. Vietnam is "open for business" and is in no way a threat to global capitalism. The irony is that this probably would have happened anyway and the war that was fought to prevent Vietnam from going communist merely delayed the transition of that nation to a market economy. Had the US done nothing instead of waging a stupid costly war, we probably would have ended up with the same result, a Vietnam that is hospitable to US businesses.

In the case of Iraq the Bush administration invaded this country in order to rid it of weapons of mass destruction (which did not exist) which it was feared might fall into the hands of terrorists groups such as Al Qaeda (which had no ties with the Iraqi government). The real underlying motive for this war was to surround and contain Iran by establishing a set of permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and securing their vast oil reserves for exploitation by US and British companies such as Exxon and BP. The Bush-Cheney cabal thought we needed more US military bases in the region to guard "our oil", particularly after Saudi Arabia dis-invited us because of concerns raised by Osama bin Laden (among others) about having infidel soldiers stationed on holy land.

But in the end none of these objectives were achieved. The new Shiite-led Iraqi government has stronger ties to Iran that the Sunni-led regime of Saddam Hussein ever did or would have had. This government has also decided that there will be no permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and has dis-invited us from maintaining any military presence in their country. They did this mainly because of the US insistence that our soldiers be immune from Iraqi law. The US will not allow other countries punish its citizens for war crimes, such as occurred in Haditha in 2005 and Nisour Square in 2007, and we do not punish them either. American insistence on impunity is the reason why American troops are now leaving Iraq.

Meanwhile, the oil fields are still not producing up to their potential and the leases for future production have been sold off to China, Malaysia, Russia and other countries that opposed the US-led war in the first place. It is true that some oil leases have been sold to US and British companies, but who would suggest that this "benefit" was worth the price paid in lives and treasure. If the costs of this war, estimated at over 1 trillion dollars, were factored into the price of gasoline at the pump when we fill up our SUVs, we Americans would appreciate the real cost of our dependence on oil.

Some will point out that we did succeed in toppling Saddam's murderous regime and killing both him and his odious sons. One must, however, wonder whether this would not have happened in due course anyway without US and British meddling. The Arab spring revolutions that took the region by storm in 2011 swept away murderous authoritarian dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Other middle eastern family dictatorships, such as the Assad regime in Syria, are now under siege from their own people. Historical counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but isn't it hard to believe that had the US not invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam, the Iraqi people themselves would not have risen up against him by 2011?  The irony in this case is that it might well have been the case that the Iraqi's themselves would have won their freedom from an oppressive dictator had we not decided to do the job for them.

Iraq is now "democratic", but the US is now far weaker, militarily, politically, economically, and morally, than it was before this war was launched. We Americans are victims of self-inflicted wounds.

China and other nations often accuse the US of improperly meddling in other countries' internal affairs. This criticism is correct as it concerns America's record of waging foolish wars of choice by invading other nations to save them from some threat, real or imagined. Political leaders in the United States need to think long and hard about these lessons of history before launching more such foolish wars. 

But curbing US military adventurism is not at all the same thing as arguing for US isolationism. The US must remain engaged in international affairs, but can do far more than it does currently to reshape the world to suit its interests and its values by dramatically increasing its humanitarian and development assistance, budget priorities that have been beggared by the gargantuan cost of maintaining our military dominance. We need to dramatically reduce the size of our bloated and wasteful military establishment. When people talk about shrinking the size of government to "starve the beast" I tend to agree with them if by the "beast" one means the Pentagon and the military industrial complex -- to this is one of the branches of government that does need to be starved and shrunken down to size.

But the question is, as it always has been, not whether our government is "too big" or "too small", but whether it is a good government. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, I do not think our government has been all that good in either its foreign or domestic policies. To say this is not to be unpatriotic -- it is merely stating a truth that is obvious to all unbiased observers. This is why I always laugh to myself when people talk about exporting democracy to other nations. If our system of government is so great why are Congress's approval ratings so low?

The people in this country who think like me have been saying these things for more than fifty years. I have thought this way since I was twelve, in 1961. I am now 62 and have not changed my mind. Indeed the events of history I have witnessed in my lifetime have only strengthened my conviction and my willingness to speak my mind. Perhaps now, at the end of yet another stupid, immoral, and wasteful US military adventure, more people in this country will begin to listen and take action.  No more (stupid) wars. 

Occupy TCNJ Talk

Last February we all viewed with amazement the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt which quickly spread to other Middle Eastern nations such as Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya. The protesters were united by their common desire for human rights and democracy, putting an end to authoritarian dictatorships that had held them down for decades, and in the hope that their children might enjoy a better future. Another important theme of these protests was economic inequality, unemployment, and the lack of hope on the part of the young that economic conditions would enable them to prosper. The Arab spring represented the awakening of a social movement of citizens who were tired of waiting for these political, social, and economic conditions to change -- they decided to take matters into their own hands and force them to change.

Now we see popular protests taking place here in America and around the world. These protests are also led by young people and are also a response to injustice and inequality.  The American autumn is an awakening of a populist movement which is tired of waiting  for a corrupt and dysfunctional political system to address the real problems of this country: unemployment and underemployment, the debt burdens of families and students, the lack of real opportunity for many, and the concentration of wealth and political power among the 1% -- the rich men who rule the world -- the plutocrats who have taken control of the Republic  and have deployed the resources of both the State and the Market to entrench their own wealth, privilege, and power.

In a poll conducted the The Hill nearly three-quarters of the respondents said that income inequality is a problem in the United States (The Huffington Post, 31 Oct 2011). The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the income of the top 1% of the income distribution has increased 243% from1979 to 2007, while that of the bottom 90% grew by only 5%. The top 10% of Americans control two-thirds of the wealth, and the richest 400 Americans control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of households, while at the same time 46 million Americans, or 15.1%, live below the poverty line, and half of those who do have jobs earn less than $27,000 a year. The most popular slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, “We are the 99%” is obviously a reference to the fact that most of us are not among the super-rich. But it also expresses the truth that we the people are also the democratic majority. If so, how did we get to this place?

The answer is that in America, and much of the rest of the world, we live in a plutocracy, that is, under a system of domination and exploitation in which the richest also control the levers of political power of the State. This combination and concentration of wealth and political power we see among the plutocratic ruling classes in contemporary societies is not a new phenomenon; has been seen many times before in history.

In Athens of 594 BC, according to Plutarch, "the disparity of fortune between the rich and poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances…..seemed possible but despotic power" (The Life of Solon). Things began to get tense in Athens with the poor preparing to revolt and the rich preparing repress them with force, but in this case, violent class warfare was avoided by the election of Solon who eased the burden on all debtors by devaluing the currency; “he also reduced all personal debts and ended imprisonment for debt, cancelled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest, decreed that the sons of those who had died in Athens wars would be educated at government expense, and he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay twelve times that required by the poor” (Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History 56). The poor complained that he did not divide the land, and the rich whined that he had confiscated their property, but by redistributing wealth Solon averted a revolution and ushered in a Golden Age.

Whenever the poor begin to complain about wealth and income inequality, the representatives of the rich ruling class accuse them of engaging in “class warfare”. The progressive magazine The Nation recently had a cover proclaiming that Wall Street invented class warfare. But, in fact, class struggle that sometimes erupts into class warfare is much older than that.  If you want to know what class warfare is really like, reflect on how the historian Barbara Tuchman described what happened in 1358 when the Jacqueries revolted against the lords of the Oise Valley: 

At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her husband and then killed her. (A Distant Mirror)

Now that is class warfare! Anyone who has ever visited Versailles understands immediately that the main cause of the French Revolution was social injustice and in particular the inequality and wealth and political power.  But the French Jacobin’s Reign of Terror made liberal use of the guillotine, and the revolution ended badly, ushering in the Napoleonic wars. Things went somewhat better on this side of the Atlantic; the American Revolution succeeded in throwing off the yoke of the British aristocracy without lopping off a lot of aristocratic heads.

But, observing the French and American revolutions Karl Marx concluded that their chief results was not greater wealth and income equality, but rather the transfer of wealth and political power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Marx was among those who understood that these cycles in which wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, which produces a backlash of popular discontent and revolution, are recurring features of human history. He made it the basis of his theory of class struggle and saw the competition between classes as the main driver of history. But Marx also thought that the class struggle could be ended by a communist revolution leading to the final victory of the proletariat in which the ownership and control of the means of production would be shared democratically among the workers themselves.

But things have not turned out that way (except perhaps in a few cooperative, employee owned enterprises such as Spain’s Mondragon). Instead, in the late twentieth century capitalism was triumphant.  In the former Soviet Union, and in post Maoist China, capitalism destroyed communism. In America, and much of the rest of the world, capitalism is now destroying democracy. This is why we are now experiencing another cycle in which wealth and political power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.

Unlike Marx, I do not believe that these historical cycles of concentration and redistribution of wealth and political power can be eliminated entirely. But I do think they can be managed more rationally and peacefully than in the past. I see these cyclic oscillations in terms of systems theory as features of a regulatory process that involves both positive and negative feedback loops. Wealth and power in society tends to get concentrated in the hands of a few because power can be self-reinforcing; the wealthier and more powerful some people become the more they are able to use these advantages to preserve and enhance their own power and privilege. Small and temporary differences in power can thus be amplified over time into large and permanent ones.

We have understood for a long time now that in order to compensate for this tendency it is necessary for human societies to institute a compensatory negative feedback loop that works to equalize power and wealth in society. In the modern era we learned to do this through democratic institutions that provide for equal basic rights and equality of opportunity, as well as through programs and agencies that provide all citizens a degree of economic security. We have these institutions not only because of the requirements of justice and fairness, although that is one important reason why they exist, but also because we know that greater economic and political equality is conducive to social peace and economic prosperity.  

In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Rutgers University economic historian James Livingston presented evidence that shows that private investment is not in fact the thing that drives economic growth; rather it is consumer spending and government spending (“It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid” October 25, 2011). Between 1900 and 2000 real domestic product per capita grew more than 600%, but during that same period, net business investment decreased by 70%. Contrary to the “common sense” peddled by conservative economists and most Republicans, corporate profits are not the real source of prosperity. The argument that we should cut corporate taxes to jumpstart economic growth is bull-pucky; it is a lie used by the plutocrats and their apologists to justify the transfer of even more wealth from the poor and the middle classes into their own pockets. As a result of these kinds of lies and deception, the USA now ranks 27^th among OECD countries in measures of basic social justice, just ahead of Chile, Mexico, and Turkey (Social Justice in the OECD: How Do Member States Compare? Bertelsmann Siftung, 2011).

So the question we face is how will this crisis of social injustice and economic inequality be resolved? Will we elect wise leaders, who like modern Solons will broker some kind of moderate plan of wealth redistribution which dilutes the power and privilege of our plutocrats, or will the rich men who rule the country (and the world) use the police and military power of the State to repress popular discontent?

We saw these two approaches in the responses to the Arab spring uprisings earlier this year. Given what happened to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who is now on trial, and also the fate of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who is now resting in an unmarked grave, it looks like Tunisia's Ben-Ali was the smart one who got out while the getting was good. On the other hand, in Syria President Assad is deploying his military and secret police to kill protesters by the thousands and is getting away with it.  Repression of popular dissent does work, but only for a while. Once it is used on a large scale, the prospects for violent civil war or revolution increase markedly, and history suggests that popular forces are usually ultimately victorious, but often at an enormous cost in human death and suffering.

Here in America we are already witnessing the potential for the Occupy Protests to be violently repressed by the police, as recently happened in Oakland California, Denver Colorado, Atlanta Georgia and elsewhere. On the other hand, in many cities, the local officials are following a more moderate and tolerant course of action, and in Nashville the ACLU has successfully defended the first amendment rights of the protesters and forced the city council to rescind a curfew law designed to remove the Occupy Nashville protest camp.

Because of our first amendment freedoms, there is some reason for hope that here in America that the current crisis of inequality and social injustice will be resolved peacefully through political compromise and equitable wealth redistribution that will reduce the current vast inequalities of wealth and power that we now have in this country. But I think that the only realistic hope for will be if we all, and especially young people like yourselves, occupy the voting booth. Don't let your friends vote for fools and demagogues. Don't buy into the economic dogmas and lies that many politicians are peddling.  Don't let the "money power" in American politics overwhelm the "people power." Let your elected representatives know what you think, and why you are angry.

But, let me say, that I am really quite worried that the deep corruption and dysfunction of the American political system will prevent any meaningful compromise solution from emerging. Our political system is deeply corrupted by the money power of the plutocrats, and the electoral system is rigged in their favor. But, the longer we go on not addressing the real problems affecting our nation, the more the popular pressure for radical change will build.  We the people are tired of waiting for Republicans and Democrats to get their acts together and govern this country responsibly. Many of us no longer believe that President Obama is the agent of change some people were hoping he would be. We no longer trust the Supreme Court to decide justly when so often they side with the plutocracy and the corporations against the people.

The 2008 election popularized the slogan "We are the people we are waiting for." Let me suggest that the slogan for the 2012 election should be, "We are the people. We are tired of waiting, and we are the 99%”.

9/11 and Human Rights

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I was riding in a NJ Transit train bound for Manhattan when my cell phone rang. It was my wife Sally calling from Baltimore; she was watching CNN while getting dressed for work and saw a breaking news alert saying that a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46am. She urged me to get off the train and turn around. But I had appointments that morning at the Amnesty International USA offices to interview job candidates.  I told her it was probably just a small plane accident and not to worry. As the train pulled out of Newark NJ station I looked over my right shoulder and saw the black smoke pouring from the crash site into the cerulean September sky and began to wonder whether I had made the right decision.

By the time I made my way from Pennsylvania Station to the AIUSA offices on 26^th street the second plane had crashed into the South Tower and everyone knew that this was no accident. The people who made it into the office were huddled around television sets or staring out of the south-facing windows through which the burning towers were clearly visible. I was standing next to Curt Goering, Deputy Executive Director of AIUSA, looking out of his office window when the South Tower began to collapse in an enormous cloud of dust and smoke. At that moment I had a visceral sensation in the pit of my stomach; I realized that I was witnessing an event in which thousands of people were perishing. These eye-witness images are seared into my memory with devastating intensity. It is the worst thing I have ever seen.

Several days later, on September 14, 2001 I participated in a hastily arranged faculty panel at The College of New Jersey, where I teach philosophy. I titled my remarks “The Impending Moral Slide” and talked about the risk that American policy makers would respond to this ghastly provocation with a “war on terror” in which important moral and legal boundaries would be transgressed. I observed that officials in the Bush administration were already framing these events as “acts of war” rather than as “crimes against humanity” and were preparing for a military response. I speculated that America might be led to disregard the UN Charter and unilaterally invade other states in order to hunt and kill “terrorists”. I speculated that our government might engage in ethnic profiling of Muslims, detain people without charges and trial, suspend habeas corpus, assassinate suspected terrorists, and engage in torture in order to respond to the threat of further devastating attacks. But I argued, perhaps naively, that a moral slide of this kind was neither necessary nor inevitable, and that it was still possible to prevent the USA from sliding into this moral abyss.

We know now, of course, that my fears were well-founded; the moral slide that I warned about did indeed occur. The list of human rights violations, crimes, and abuses that can be laid at the feet of the Bush administration is long and includes: the “disappearance” of suspected terrorists into CIA-run secret prisons, the denial of the right of habeas corpus of detainees, the use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods, otherwise known as torture, such as water-boarding, by military interrogators and the CIA,  the indefinite detention without charges or trials of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo, the use of Predator drones to assassinate suspected terrorists, the detention of an American citizen, Jose Padilla, without charges or trial for more than three years, the irregular rendition of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria where he was tortured,  the torture of  Khalid Al Masri in a secret CIA prison, ill-treatment and deaths of detainees held at Abu Gharaib prison in Iraq and Baghram airbase in Afghanistan, and the secret and illegal eavesdropping on American citizens by the National Security Agency in violation of the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among others.

Some of these human rights abuses have been the subject of high-level special reports on U.S. human rights violations prepared by the charter-based bodies of the United Nations. The Special Rapporteur for the Mission to the United States of America, Martin Scheinin, identified, "serious situations of incompatibility between international human rights obligations and the counter-terrorism law and practice of the United States. Such situations include the prohibition against torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; the right to life; and the right to a fair trial." This report and many others, both by agencies of the United Nations and by private nongovernmental human rights organizations, both in the U.S. and abroad, provides compelling evidence that senior officials in the George W. Bush administration conspired to systematically transgress international human rights obligations, violated US federal law, and authorized the commission of war crimes.

But this is neither the time nor the place to argue this case in detail. Instead I want to share with you the results of a conference I participated in that was organized to address the question whether the moral back-sliding that occurred in the USA produced significant and lasting damage to the overall international human rights regime.  In April 2008 I was invited to participate in a small conference at the University of Pittsburgh that addressed this question. A group of distinguished human rights scholars both from North America and Europe were invited to attend, and to present discussion papers defending a view on this question. Following the conference the participants were invited to revise their discussion papers for inclusion in a book. This is that book: Human Rights in the 21^st Century: Continuity and Change Since 9/11, edited by Michael Goodhart and Anja Mihr. I will begin by describing my own contribution and then discuss those of several of the other authors.

I titled my chapter “Why Human Rights Will Prevail in the War on Terror” and in it I argued that while 9/11 and the reaction to it had indeed produced a spate of serious human rights violations, that the counter-terrorism and security policies of the Bush administration did not delegitimize and undermine the global consensus about human rights, rather, those policies were themselves de-legitimized because they violated human rights. In the end, what was seriously damaged was the credibility of America’s claim to be a champion of human rights.

Allow me to clarify this claim. There is no doubt that the past decade has been characterized by patterns of major human rights violations. The terrorist attacks that took place ten years ago were themselves a crime against humanity – a systematic attack against a civilian population. The epidemic of subsequent suicide bombings in London, Madrid, Bali, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are also major human rights violations which have taken the lives and maimed thousands of innocent people who were treated as pawns in a political game. So it is unquestionably true that terrorism has been a cause of human rights violations in the past decade. And it is also true that governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens against these kinds of wanton crimes.

However, rather than responding to these violations in a proportionate and lawful fashion, one which affirmed human rights norms and values against those who would flout them, the Bush administration adopted counter-terrorism policies that flew in the face of globally accepted human rights standards. The architects of these policies justified them by the same “ends justify the means” logic that terrorists use. As noted above, there is no question that these policies produced human rights violations and that those officials of the government of the United States who authorized and carried them out have thus far escaped accountability for these crimes. What is questionable, and open to serious debate, is whether this pattern of action and over-reaction has done serious and lasting damage to the human rights paradigm itself, that is, to the global consensus on human rights. 

Although it turned out not to be possible to prevent American policy-makers from back-sliding on their human rights obligations, the “push-back” against Bush’s security and counter-terrorism policies from the global human rights movement, leading international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and domestic civil and human rights NGOs such as the ACLU and Human Rights First, has been vigorous, sustained, and I think largely successful in discrediting, and in some cases, reversing these policies.  The legal academy, both in the United States and elsewhere has responded as well with hundreds of articles in law reviews and the more general scholarly literature condemning the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies.

Self-correction also came from a series of important U.S. Supreme Court decisions which rebuked the Bush administration’s Guantanamo detention policies. In four important cases: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Boumediene v. Bush (2008) the high court rejected the specious arguments put forward by Bush administration lawyers such as David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Alberto Gonzalez, that the inherent powers of the president as commander in chief of the armed forces places him above the law and justifies the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation of the Bill of Rights, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and international human rights and humanitarian laws to which the United States is a party.

In addition, evidence from polling data that supported my contention that by 2008 public opinion both domestically and abroad, had turned sharply against the policies of the Bush administration, but continued to show strong support for human rights. Public opinion polls conducted in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and in the United States itself, demonstrate that global public opinion firmly rejected the policies of the Bush administration regarding human rights.  For instance, a poll conducted by the BBC of more than 27,000 people in 25 countries found that a majority believe that torture is not justified even if it is used to obtain information that could save innocent lives from terrorist attacks (World Public Opinion 2006b).  Other polls found that two in three Americans say the United States should change the way it treats detainees at Guantánamo Bay as prescribed by the UN Commission on Human Rights (World Public Opinion 2008a: ;World Public Opinion 2006a), and that a sizable majority of Americas oppose the rendition of suspects to countries that practice torture and reject the argument that suspected terrorists should not have the same due-process rights as U.S. citizens (World Public Opinion 2007b).  Another poll conducted in 2006 showed that a large majority of Americans believe that the U.S. is viewed more negatively by people in other countries as a result of the policies of the Bush administration (World Public Opinion 2007c).  The same poll found that 73% of Americans were somewhat or very worried that the U.S. might be losing the trust and friendship of people in other countries.  This belief was confirmed by another poll in 2007 that found that in 20 of 26 countries surveyed the most common view is that America is having a mainly negative influence on the world.

These polling data, as well are other more recent studies, show that the norms embodied in the contemporary human rights paradigm have not been weakened or delegitimized by their being violated, even by one of the most powerful nations.  Human rights, particularly civil and political rights, function as a shield against tyranny and the abuse of power by governments.  They are designed to thwart systematic or institutionalized oppression by state authorities, and as such, the fact that they are violated or ignored does not undermine their validity as moral and legal norms.  Instead it highlights and reinforces the perception of why the effective protection of human rights is necessary and why the selective application of human rights standards by states must be firmly resisted, even, and perhaps especially, when the state that violates them is a “superpower.” The contemporary international human rights paradigm has proven more robust and resilient than many people feared; in the confrontation between the policies of the government of the United States of America and the contemporary human rights paradigm, the United States lost and human rights won.

Several of the other contributors shared my perspective. Jack Donnelly (University of Denver) argued that while the “war on terror” certainly harmed human rights, the global state of human rights has not changed fundamentally. At the international level of multilateral institutions there is no evidence of decline. Similarly, data on national human rights practices from Freedom House and the Cingranelli-Richards human rights data project show some evidence of decline, particularly in freedom of expression, but it is “modest, uneven, and incomplete” (18). While bad things did happen because of the “war on terror”, Donnelly contends that “it has not been a human rights disaster.”

Michael Goodhart (University of Pittsburgh) who was one of the organizers of the conference and a co-editor of the book, argued that the back-sliding on human rights that took place during the Bush years represented a “reversion to form” of long-running theme in American politics – American exceptionalism. He traces this theme back to the Puritans who believed that (like the Blues Brothers) the colonists were on a mission from God to create a model “city on a hill” that would be an example to other nations. He calls this view “Providential exceptionalism” and argues that it tends to produce foreign policies characterized by a “messianic engagement” with other countries, particularly when America feels itself threatened. 

According to Goodhart, the period between the fall of the Berlin wall (11/9) and the fall of the twin towers (9/11), was a period of significant expansion and consolidation of the international human rights regime. During this period American policy, both under the first President Bush and President Clinton, became more pragmatic and more supportive of multilateralism. But the shock of the 9/11 attacks produced a sharp reversion to the stance of unilateral messianic engagement that had dominated American foreign policy during most of the Cold War. He noted that, “the war on terror” had a clearly redemptive aim as articulated by the second president Bush, namely to rid the world of “evil doers”. He argued that this has been reversed again to some degree by president Obama, who has stopped using the term “war on terror”, and reverted to a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy, but who has at the same time, continued many Bush-era counter-terrorism policies.

The general consensus of the conference, and the overall conclusion of the book, was that the countries of Western Europe and Canada experienced much less back-sliding on human rights than the United States, and that the likely reason for this was the greater degree of the institutionalization and domestication of human rights norms and values into the laws and cultures of these societies. The distinguished Dutch scholar, Peter Baehr (who passed away while this volume was being prepared for print) argued that in light of its perceived vulnerability to Islamic terrorism, the Netherlands did enact several counter-terrorism policies that are on the face of it at odds with human rights. But that it did not go nearly as far down this path as the United States. Similarly, Yan St. Pierre (Universite de Montreal) argued that as a “middle power” Canada can be used as a barometer to measure the impact of attitudes about the trade-offs between national security and human rights. He noted that Canada did enact tougher and more restrictive immigration and border control policies, largely due to criticism from the USA, and also that the government demonstrated “complicity to torture and inaction towards human rights abuses” to an extent that is not in keeping with Canada’s historical stance on human rights. But Canada’s regression was seen as “simply reflecting the stronger policy changes imposed by major powers” (199).

The overall assessment of the editors is that, important exceptions notwithstanding, “the [human rights] regime has survived a major shock intact” (266). Human rights remains the dominant global normative discourse and it has not been displaced by the new discourse on counter-terrorism and national security that 9/11 spawned. States will always be tempted to back-slide on their human rights obligations when threatened, and the experience of the past decade shows that the best way to prevent this from happening is to create “thicker layers of institutionalization” of human rights norms and values within the fabrics of national ethical cultures.  That this process is continuing despite the setbacks of the past decade is the silver-lining behind the dark cloud of fear that obscured our hopes for a more just and peaceful world in the 21^st century following the horrifying attacks of September 11, 2001.

On Musement

Spinoza's distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata (nature naturing and nature natured) refers to two aspects of God or Nature considered as the realm of both actuality and potentiality. Robert Corrington (1992) calls this view "ecstatic naturalism":

The most basic division affirmed by ecstatic naturalism is that between nature naturing (natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata). Nature naturing is here defined as the unlimited realm of potencies. The potencies are not yet possibilities because possibilities can only arise within and among actualities, that is, within the orders of the world (nature natured). Nature natured is the created orders of the world: that is, the manifest orders within which the human process finds itself....The difference between nature naturing and nature natured is the fundamental divide within nature itself. That is, this divide does not separate off nature from some alleged realm of the non- or super-natural but lives out of the heart of a self-transforming nature (209).

The border between these two realms of Nature is always in flux. As potencies become actualities through Nature's self-transfiguring evolutionary process, new orders of being create new potencies that in turn allow for still newer orders of being to emerge. The created world that is manifest to us is the living record of this evolutionary process of Nature's self-transformation and self-actualization.

Human intelligence participates in Nature's self-creative evolutionary process by means of a reasoning process originally described by Peirce as "interpretive musement." Musement is a species of abductive reasoning (reasoning that move from cases to general hypotheses that apply backwards to the case and others like it) in which the,

semiotic world of empirical knowledge becomes open to novel possibilities when musement works in its seemingly random fashion to let complex and different signs interact in ways that could not have been possible for the other more restricted forms of method. Interpretive musement opens up a free semiotic zone in which the self is actually brought into interaction with the depth structures of nature (212).

Musement mines novelty from the realm of potentiality and transmits it into the realm of actuality. Musement is the creative play of the spirit as it strives to make itself manifest. It is the source of the creative processes by which human imagination becomes reality.

Music, amusement, amusing, musical, museum, bemusement....In ancient Greek mythology the Muses are goddesses that inspire the creation of poetry, literature and art. They were regarded as the sources of knowledge that humans pass from one generation to the next. In modern usage, a muse (uncapitalized) is said the be the source of inspiration for artists and writers. Museums are shrines to the muses that inspired artists of the past to create form and meaning out of matter. Libraries are the shrines to the muses that inspired writers to create form and meaning out of ideas.

But there are other forms of human creativity, for instance, science and technology, in which the hidden potentialities of Nature can become manifest. Culture, considered in the largest sense, as all of the knowledge and information that can be passed from one human generation to the next, the sum of all memes, is itself an emergent order of Nature. Culture is natura naturata as it has been expressed through human action. But we also are continually creating culture; it is self-transfiguring like Nature itself. This is perhaps why we place such a high value on novelty in art and literature and science. We are always seeking the ecstatic experience of discovery.

I find these thoughts quite amusing.

Corrington, Robert S. (1992). "Ecstatic naturalism and the Transfiguration of the Good". In Randolph Crump Miller (Ed.) Empirical Theology: A Handbook. Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, pp. 203-221.

After the Rapture

The beginning of the end of the world did indeed occur yesterday May 21, 2011 just as Harold Camping had predicted. But not a single person was miraculously raised from earth into God's arms. This demonstrates once again that there are no righteous people and that the doctrine of salvation is a myth. Neither faith, nor good works, nor God's grace will save us from ourselves. We are the only ones who can do that. So what are we waiting for? You know we have limited time. None of us is getting out of this place alive. Let's get started.

Hannah Arendt's Intellectual Courage

The trial of Adolf Eichmann began fifty years ago this week, on 11 April 1961. There is a huge secondary literature on the trial, of which Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is certainly the most famous contribution.[1] Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in a five part series published in the New Yorker magazine in February and March 1963. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1963 by Viking Press which contained several technical corrections, some additional material concerning the German anti-Hitler conspiracy of July 20, 1944, and a Postscript dealing with the controversy that followed the original publication. I believe that this work should be a “core text”, particularly for courses and curricula dealing with the Holocaust and genocide studies. It’s value lies not only in the historical information it provides. Arendt’s book is important because of the controversy her analysis of Eichmann’s motivation provoked, and the intellectual courage she demonstrated in writing her book and responding to its critics.

SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolph Otto Eichmann (1906-1962) played an important role within the Third Reich in the implementation of the Final Solution for the “Jewish Problem”. As the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration he organized and managed the deportation and transport of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Germany and Austria to Eastern European ghettos where many became victims of the Einsatzgruppen. Following the Wansee Conference of 20 January 1942 (which Eichmann attended as recording secretary) he was given the job of Transportation Administrator of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a position in which he arranged shipments of Jews to concentration camps where they were murdered on an industrial scale. At the end of the war he was captured by the U.S. army but escaped under a false identity. He fled to Argentina in 1950 using a fraudulent International Red Cross passport and worked at various jobs under the name Ricardo Klement. He was living in Buenos Aires with his wife and their four sons in 1960 when he was captured by Mossad agents and taken to stand trial in an Israeli court on fifteen criminal charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and executed by hanging.

As Arendt attended much of his 1961 trial, read transcripts, and listened to the testimony unfold, she came to be focused on the question of the character of Eichmann’s conscience (or apparent lack thereof). How could a “good German” who was raised on the Ten Commandment (Thou shalt not murder) send thousands of innocent people to their deaths? If Eichmann was indeed “evil” in what did his evil consist?

Arendt’s answer to this question was shocking: she argued that Eichmann was an “ordinary man” whose head was swimming with empty clichés that he called “winged words”. He was a family man and a careerist who wished only to conform himself to the requirements of “respectable society” as it was understood in Nazi Germany at the time:

Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by “good society,” and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors....What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of “good society” as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler;...Hitler, he said “may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Fuhrer of a people of almost eighty million....His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.” His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which “good society” everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him. (Peter Baehr Ed, The Portable Hannah Arendt. 355)

In Arendt’s portrayal, Adolph Eichmann was far from being a “moral monster” that many thought he must have been -- his brand of evil was boring and ordinary -- it was banal.

Arendt’s description of Eichmann’s moral character, as well as her comments on the role of the Jewish Councils (the Judenrate) which had cooperated with the Nazi’s in sending their fellow Jews to their deaths, provoked a series of vicious attacks on her, mainly by American Jews. She was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of the B.nai B’rith and labeled as “self-hating Jewess”:

For their part, critics claimed that the expression “banality of evil” seemed to exonerate Eichmann and blame the victims. Others accused her of bad taste, triviality, an insultingly harsh and ironical tone, a perverse unwillingness to understand the depth of the dilemmas facing the Jewish Councils, and of failing to show love for her own kind. A “lapse into uncomprehending arrogance” was how one scholar described the report eight years after Arendt’s death (in 1974?), and compared with some of the comments she had to endure during her lifetime this was putting it mildly. (Baehr, xxvi)

According to Peter Baehr, Arendt was “shocked and dismayed by the maelstrom her report had provoked.” Yet in the Postscript she wrote for the Viking edition she blandly observed:

Even before its publication, this book became both the center of a controversy and the object of an organized campaign. It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former. This became especially clear when a strange mixture of the two, in almost identical phraseology - as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came "out of a mimeographing machine" (Mary McCarthy) - was carried from America to England and then to Europe, where the book was not yet even available. And this was possible because the clamor centered on the "image" of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.

Arendt goes on to argue that the report does not attempt to address in any systematic manner the “larger questions” about the Holocaust, the German people, Jewish complicity, original sin, or other general matters, but was only about “the person of the defendant, a man of flesh and blood with an individual history, with an always unique set of qualities, peculiarities, behavior patterns, and circumstances.” She does admit that:

I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove a villain." Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

But then she says,

That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.

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What are we to make of this lesson today? Do we have any theory about it that can help us understand how men can behave so thoughtlessly? Recent research in moral psychology suggests a theory about the kind of “banal evil” that Eichmann represents. The work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes that morality both “binds” and “blinds” us.[2] Haidt has described the pull of group cohesion on individual as a kind of force field, comparing it to the lines of a magnetic field. This force is what makes human social life possible -- it is the basis of group cohesion. Human beings, unlike other social animals, have the ability to build cohesive groups around beliefs and symbols, not just around kinship relations. We create group solidarity, and hence the basis for social cooperation among human individuals who are not related by kinship by anointing some object or belief as “sacred” or inviolable. The sacred object can be something like the Quaaba in Mecca, the image of the crucified Jesus, the flag, or the corporate logo. As individuals drawn into these force fields they are taught that success requires conformity to the belief system that characterizes the group. Deviation, disloyalty, or dissent is regarded as suspect and can lead to ostracism or worse. Those members of the group who dare to step across the line of what the group considered to be “acceptable thoughts” are quickly and violently rebuked for undermining group cohesion. Public disloyalty to the group’s ideology is a great sin -- blasphemers must be stoned, heretics burned at the stake, traitors much have their noses cut off, and dissident intellectuals must be shunned and discredited.

When mass societies are drawn into totalitarian ideologies such as fascism or communism, one has the potential to mobilize millions of humans to fight and die for their sacred symbols, or to kill millions of other humans in the name of their beliefs. What was shocking about Arendt’s insights into the origins of totalitarianism was that she realized that monstrous evil could come about simply through the normal functioning of the human moral sense. It was not an aberration that ordinary men like Eichmann could become mass murders; rather it was something to be expected because of the way the force field of social cohesion characteristically functions in human societies.

Arendt herself fell victim to this kind of attack because she asserted that the “really horrific discovery of totalitarian regimes has been that mass conformists ---”job holders and good family men” -- were much more pliant, dedicated, loyal, and abundant agents of extermination than the criminals, ‘fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots’ and social failures of the mob” (xliii). The greatest irony is that she herself was punished for disloyalty, for violating the taboos of the tribal group morality of Jewish intellectuals, for saying this.

Arendt is not the only intellectual whose ideas have been denounced because they deny some tenet of a tribal moral code. Haidt provides several examples of intellectuals who have met similar responses to their ideas.[3] Daniel Patrick Moynihan was vilified for having suggested that African-American culture might be one reason for the impoverishment of the black community. Lawrence Summer’s was hounded from the presidency of Harvard University after commenting in a speech that the reason there are no more women in science and mathematics might be due to a statistical observation that males are more likely than females to be on both the lower and the higher ends of the bell curves of intellectual achievement. Noam Chomsky, has met a similar fate after he signed a petition for the Holocaust denier Robert Fourissan. Chomsky denied that he was defending Holocaust denial; he saw himself as a defender of the principles of freedom of thought and opinion and argued that even ideas that he hates should be heard. Chomsky later wrote a short essay on the principle of freedom of speech that was included without his knowledge in a book by Faurisson. When he learned of this, Chomsky asked that it be removed. But he was nevertheless viciously attacked in a book by Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (1995). In his usual matter of fact manner Chomsky has responded by saying, “It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”

In her book, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Temple University Press, 2010) Susan Herbst argues that political discourse in America has become intensely partisan, uncivil, debased, and deceitful.[4] This is not a new phenomenon – American politics have always been nasty – but the cable news channels, the 24-hour news cycle, and the Internet have made the mass dissemination of toxic nonsense much easier. The Information Revolution has enabled a culture of mendacity to supplant reasoned and deliberative political discourse in the public arena. She notes that the early media theorists Robert Merton and Paul Lazarfeld predicted that radio and television would send us into a state of “narcotizing dysfunction” in which citizens would become cynically disengaged from strong political engagement But they could not imagine the extent to which we are now drowning in a sea “information” that is false, misleading, distorted, and deceptive.

So much of what passes for political discourse in the present media-saturated culture is really nothing more than the partisans of different tribal moral codes insisting on beliefs that members of their moral tribes believe in which members of other moral tribes deny. The discussion is not about truth; it is about loyalty to the tribal belief system. In order to be a member in good standing of the Republican party one must now believe that Obama is not an American citizen, that global warming is a hoax, and that the way to create jobs is to lower taxes for the rich and cut government spending. People invent elaborate rationalizations for continuing to be loyal to their tribal belief systems even though there abundant evidence that their beliefs are false. Like Eichmann they convince themselves that since all those important and successful people believe these things that they should too. Such is the power of the force fields that align people like mindless iron filings into conformity with the pattern of a group ideology.

Is there anything that can effectively counterbalance and thwart these tendencies towards enforcing mass intellectual conformity? Like many liberal college philosophy professors, I tend to believe that one can do so by teaching young people the arts of critical thinking and logical reasoning. Knowing about the rules of evidence, logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks, and taking part on reasoned debates about social, political, and ethical issues can allow young people to learn how to defend themselves against the daily tsunami of intellectual rubbish. But recent empirical research on learning outcomes among college graduates suggests most students show little if any improvement in their critical reasoning skills.[5]

Herbst argues that, “We cannot rely on standard, even if excellent, civics courses or Introduction to Political Science. We need to teach young people how to argue with vigor, intelligence, and panache.” This is what Arendt did in Eichmann in Jerusalem: she argued with vigor, intelligence, and panache that what happened in Nazi Germany can happen in any human society when the mass media are deployed in order to induce mass ideological conformity to a false tribal morality. That is why Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem ought to be required reading. But there is also the example of her own intellectual courage. Herbst writes that, “being a citizen of a democracy always demanded a sort of courage....the bravery it takes to express opinions and do so civilly.” The example of intellectual courage that Arendt provided in writing her report it is what today’s students should come to know and emulate. But they should also heed her warning about the potential for ordinary men to commit crimes against humanity by not thinking for themselves and simply going along with their tribal moral code. This timeless lesson is particularly timely right now.

Postscript (4/17/2011) I presented this short essay at the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Text and Courses, New Haven CT on Friday 4/15/2011 as part of a panel on the concept of evil. The comments and discussion brought out more sharply the contrast between Eichmann's moral character and Arendt's --the one being an intellectual conformist and the other a non-conformist, indeed, an iconoclast who was willing to take the risk of criticizing the ideas of the members of her own "tribe." This morning I found this short essay by Ralph Seliger "Hannah Arendt: From Iconocast to Icon" that makes a similar point.

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[1] A new study of the trial by Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, has just been published. Some 400 hours of the entire trial are available in the English language on Youtube . For the trial transcripts, click here. There is also a film by Eyal Sivan, The Specialist. The two judgments, of the District Court of Jerusalemand the Supreme Court, are also available.

[2] Jonathan Haidt. “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology”. Delivered to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, January 27, 2011. Available online: http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/postpartisan.html. Visited 9 April 2011.

[3] Haidt himself commented that he went out on a limb in this talk, and declined to give any further examples from his own field of social psychology, saying it was “too risky” for him to do so. But he did go on to demonstrate that the ratio between social psychologists who describe themselves as politically liberal is 266 times greater than those who describe themselves as politically conservative, even though poll results consistently show that within the general population the ratio of liberals to conservatives is 1 to 2.

[4] Susan Herbst. “Rude Democracy in America: Can We Overcome it?” Phi Beta Kappa, Key Reporter, Spring 2011, pp. 8-9.

[5]Richard Arum, et. al., Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. (University of Chicago, 2011) studied 2322 college students at 24 colleges and universities over four years. They found that, “large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education”. After four years 36% showed no significant improvement in higher order thinking skills. They did find, however, that, “Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.” See Sara Rimer, The Hechinger Report. “Study: Many college students not Learning to think critically,” January 17, 2011.