Creator of Bracing Views. Contributor to TomDispatch, Truthout, HNN, Alternet, Huffington Post, Antiwar, and other sites. Retired AF lieutenant colonel and professor of history. Senior fellow, Eisenhower Media Network
I can’t remember where exactly, but I stumbled across this apothegm of Karl Marx:
“In every era, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas.”
Striving for even more brevity, I truncated it to rulers’ ideas rule.
Contrarians of the world should unite to identify and challenge these ruling ideas. When they serve only the needs of the powerful, we should be prepared to mark them as dangerous and most likely as undemocratic. And we should work to change them.
What are some of today’s ruling ideas? I challenge you to come up with some. But on this Friday morning, here are ten that I see as ruling our lives:
1. That capitalism is the only economic system that works, and that rampant consumption is necessary to keep the economy growing.
2. Related to (1) is the idea that GDP and similar economic measures are the best measure of America’s strength.
3. That “success” in life is measured by money and titles and possessions.
4. Related to (3) is the idea that education that doesn’t end in a lucrative career is largely worthless.
5. That poor people and other disadvantaged groups are the way they are because they refuse to work.
6. That it’s absolutely necessary to spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on national defense, wars, homeland security, intelligence agencies, and nuclear weapons, all of which are justified in the name of “keeping us safe.”
7. That privatization is the way to improve everything, including public services like education, the prison system, and health care.
8. That corporate spending in elections is the equivalent to freedom of speech for individuals and is therefore protected by our Constitution as our nation’s founders intended.
9. That there’s no such thing as class warfare in the United States.
10. Related to (5), that there’s equality of opportunity for everyone in the United States, regardless of race, ethnicity, economic background, and so on. Thus those who “fail” do so because of their own failings, not because the system is rigged against them.
That’s my non-rigorous, somewhat off-the-cuff rendering of rulers’ ideas. Please add your ideas in the comments section. Contrarians of the world unite!
A concern I have about the new borderless digital world is its ephemeral nature. Even though I keep a blog and write a lot online, I still prefer books and hardcopy. I clip newspaper articles. I file them away and then occasionally resuscitate them and use them in class when I teach.
Hardcopy has a sense of permanence to it. A certain heft. Whereas our new digital world, as powerful as it is for instant access and personal customization, seems much more ephemeral to me.
I know similar complaints have been made throughout history. The proliferation of books was deplored as leading to the decline of visual memory skills. Television was equated with the end of civilization, with the medium becoming the message.
Perhaps what I’m truly lamenting is the slow decline of context, together with the erosion of deep memory. The digital world we increasingly inhabit seems to encourage an ephemeral outlook in which history just becomes one damn thing after another.
To switch metaphorical images, the dynamism and flash of the digital world is much like a landscape with lots of beautiful shiny leaves and glistening flowers to attract our attention.
Yet, at least in our minds, the landscape is rootless. Our gaze is enraptured, our minds are intrigued, but the moment is fleeting, and we fail to act. We fail to act because we are entertained without being nurtured.
Let’s take smartphones, for example. With their instant access to data, they seem to make us very smart indeed. But access to knowledge (data recall) isn’t intelligence. There’s simply no substitute for deep-seated intellectual curiosity and the desire to learn.
Smart phones are useful tools — a gateway to a dynamic digital world. But they’re not making us any smarter. Perhaps they’re helping us to connect certain dots a little faster. But are we connecting them in the right way? And are they the right dots to connect?
Those are questions that smartphones can’t answer. Those are questions that require deep, contextual, thinking. And group discussion. Think Socrates and his followers, debating and discoursing. And acting.
Sometimes it’s best to disconnect from the matrix, find a quiet place for reflection, sink down some roots, and hit the books. Then find other informed people and bounce your ideas off them. Collisions of minds in informed discourse. Competing ideas feed the completing of actions for the common good.
As the Moody Blues might say, it’s a question of balance. The astral planes of the digital world can open new vistas, but let’s not forget the need to return to earth and get things done.
In his non-apology about “bridgegate,” Governor Chris Christie lost my vote. In his “mistakes were clearly made” pabulum, Christie failed the test of leadership. It doesn’t matter whether you think Christie is a bully. It doesn’t matter how much Christie knew about the bridge lane closures and when he knew it. What matters is how he’s evaded responsibility for it. Evasiveness is the last quality we need in the next president of the United States.
When you’re the governor, you’re much like the pilot of a 747 or the captain of a ship. You’re in charge. You create a climate within your command. Your actions and behavior set the tone. Your crew looks to you as a model for their own behavior.
Obviously, Christie’s senior staffers looked to him and decided that petty retribution was perfectly consistent with the tone set by Christie himself. Maybe these staffers truly misread Christie. Even so, Christie chose them. Either these staffers rightly believed they were acting in accordance with Christie’s stated (and unstated) directives, or Christie empowered people within his organization who didn’t have a clue about his ideals. Neither conclusion reflects well on Christie.
What should Christie have done? He should have stepped up and offered an immediate and personal apology. He should have said “I’m sorry” to every motorist stuck in that traffic jam. And he should have apologized to every resident of New Jersey for the reckless disregard his staffers had for public safety.
In other words, this should have been his Truman moment, a time for “the buck stops here,” a time to man up and admit his responsibility as the captain of his ship.
During his “State of the State” address on January 14, Christie finally admitted his responsibility as governor for what happens on his watch. But it was a case of too little, too late.
He initially hid behind “the abject stupidity” of his staffers. Even in his address on the 14th, he continued to hide behind that old “mistakes were made” mantra, that classic passive voice construction of politicians seeking to duck direct responsibility.
Christie wants authority without personal responsibility. He’s quick to hold others responsible but not himself. He equivocates when he should be unequivocal.
Yes, I know it’s a harsh claim that Members of Congress don’t care about sending your son or daughter off to war. Partly that’s because more than half of them are millionaires. And if they’re not millionaires now, they will be when they leave office and cash in as lobbyists and similar Beltway bandit jobs. After all, it’s hard to sympathize with working-class families with sons and daughters in the military when 1) You’re rich (or at least comfortably well-off); and 2) You have no sons or daughters in the military, and never will.
I wrote to one of my senators in PA, Bob Casey, about the need to end our wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere — about the need to bring our troops home rather than continuing to place them in harm’s way for no reason that’s in our national interest. When I wrote, I asked him if he would send any of his four daughters to Afghanistan, or even if he’d urge any of them to serve our country in any capacity in the military. I never heard back from him or his staff, not that I was surprised.
Senator Bob Casey is a Catholic who went to Holy Cross in Massachusetts in the early 1980s. I’m a Catholic who did my ROTC service at Holy Cross in the early 1980s. We may have even crossed paths on campus. But Bob Casey is from a well-connected political family. I’m the son of a firefighter and a homemaker who joined ROTC to help pay for college. Bob Casey and his daughters have never had to think about military service except in the most abstract terms. They might applaud it, but they won’t do it.
The same was true for Mitt Romney and his five sons. Eager to salute the military; not eager to join and serve. Fortunate sons (and daughters), all.
You could say the same for virtually all Members of Congress today. Almost no military service. Few sons or daughters in the military, and certainly none in the front lines in combat branches. Certainly, they’ll praise our troops. They’ll salute the flag with vigor. But what they won’t do is to send their loved ones into harm’s way.
Each and every time our Congress or our President sends troops into harm’s way, they should think whether they’d risk their own. For example, it’s conceivable that President Obama’s oldest daughter, Malia, could join the military in 2015 at the age of seventeen. (You can join the military at seventeen with parental permission.) After basic and advanced training, many American teenagers have been sent into combat only to die before they’re out of their teen years.
Can we imagine such a tragic fate befalling the son or daughter of any prominent politician in the United States? Of course not. The burden of military service has perhaps never been shared equally in our history, but its inequality has never been more slanted than it is now. The rich and privileged exempt their offspring from service (or at least from dangerous service), which only emboldens them when they cast their votes for more war. In doing so, they risk nothing near and dear to them. Heck, they may even pose as being “tough” and “uncompromising.”
Save me the flag lapel pins of our millionaire politicians and all their posing. Want to support our troops? If you’re young enough, quit Congress and enlist in the military. Or be sure to encourage your own sons and daughters to join and serve in harm’s way. At least then you can say you’ve made a sacrifice commensurate with those made by so many working-class families across the USA.
The World as Confessional, with the NSA as its Priests
W.J. Astore
At TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt has an especially fine exposé of the National Security State as a religion with its own priesthood, holy books, dogma, and true believers/followers.
I recommend reading the entire article, but I do want to highlight some implications of his argument. Like the Catholic Church (and I’m Catholic), the National Security State is hierarchical, conservative, and often anti-democratic. We, the laity, have little if any say in how the system operates, even as we’re the ones who fill the coffers and collection plates. We are subject to a militarized (or militant) aristocracy that sees itself as uniquely privileged, the “best and the brightest,” working to keep us safe from the devil of the day. To question the system and privileges of the powerful is to risk being seen as an apostate.
But the Catholic Church is, at least in theory, dedicated to the cause of peace (though historically sometimes at the point of a sword). The U.S. National Security State, despite (or rather because of) the evangelicals or true-believers in its midst, is dominated by a church militant and a church triumphant. This is unsurprising. Powerful militaries seek military solutions. Defeats or stalemates like Iraq and Afghanistan are reinterpreted as triumphs (at least for the U.S. military). If they defy reinterpretation, defeats can always be attributed to Judas-like figures within the body of the American politic, like the anti-war hippies of the Vietnam era (even if the latter looked more like Jesus than Lucifer).
The biggest problem is how the dominance of the National Security State weakens our democratic structures, including our right to privacy. Consider the penetration and interception of all forms of electronic communication by the NSA and similar “intelligence” agencies. Like the Catholic Church with its rite of confession, the NSA listens to our “sins” in the name of safeguarding us from harm. In the bad old days, the Church used its rite of confession to gain access to the secrets of the powerful. Leave it to the NSA to trump the Church by turning the whole world into a confessional booth.
Such a subversion of privacy doesn’t preserve democracy – it destroys it. Like the Catholic Church of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the National Security State is choking on its own power and privileges, losing its sense of mission as it wallows in money and sanctimony.
Where is Martin Luther when you need him? For like the Catholic Church in the 16th century, the U.S. National Security State needs a serious reformation.
Update (1/7): At TomDispatch.com, Nick Turse has a great article today on the growing reach and power of Special Operations Command (SOCOM) within the U.S. military. It’s a powerful coda to Engelhardt’s article. Extending the Catholic Church analogy, SOCOM in the U.S. military today is much like the Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church — missionaries of the American military across the world. And like the Jesuits they see themselves as an elite, as true believers, as holy warriors deserving of secrecy and privilege and power.
As such, they believe they should not be accountable to the laity — meaning us. Neither do they believe they are accountable to our legal representatives in Congress. They answer to their Loyola (Admiral McRaven) and ultimately to the Pope (whoever the commander in chief happens to be, as long as he supports them).
The National Security State has truly become the new national religion of America. We worship at its Pentagon of Power, its huge NSA facilities. They are America’s true national cathedrals.
A juxtaposition of two stories is revealing of our sad American moment. The first involves Iraq. Fallujah, the city for which Americans fought and died (and largely destroyed) in the Iraq War is now in the hands of Al Qaeda. Let’s recall that before the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq.
The second story involves the desperate struggle for unemployment benefits by ordinary Americans–benefits that Congress allowed to expire in the name of fiscal austerity.
Naturally, the Pentagon has been rewarded for its failed policies with a huge budget in 2014. Meanwhile, Congress continues to dither about renewing unemployment benefits to workers desperate for help.
Congress can’t spare a dime for ordinary people even as they empty our national purse for the Pentagon and defense contractors.
Isn’t this an illustration of the American moment? For shame, America.
“War is like love; it always finds a way.” So wrote Bertolt Brecht, and when it comes to American politics and foreign policy in 2014, you can bet on Brecht being right. There is no major anti-war party in the USA today. Despite claims to fiscal austerity, Democrats and Republicans fall over themselves to fully fund the Pentagon and its ongoing wars across the globe. Our misguided involvement in Afghanistan lurches into its thirteenth year with promises that it won’t end until 2024 at the earliest. The only certainty for 2014 is more dead bodies, more casualties of war, more money wasted.
Barbara Tuchman, a historian who knew how to write for the educated public, was right in pointing out the persistence of folly in history. A heavily militarized U.S. foreign policy is an illustration of that. Our country continues to seek global dominance through militarized measures, perhaps because we’ve exported so much of our non-militarized economy to countries having cheaper labor. War and weapons are now are primary export. That, and our desire for total information dominance that produced all of the abuses that Edward Snowden is revealing.
As we persist in war and weapons and surveillance, we’d do well to recall the words of John Bright, a British statesman who spoke about war and its dangers in the House of Commons in 1854. Here’s what Bright had to say:
“It is a painful and terrible thing to think how easy it is to stir up a nation to war … and you will find that wars are always supported by a class of arguments which, after the war is over, the people find were arguments they should not have listened to.”
When are we going to stop listening to arguments in favor of more wars and more weapons and more infringements of our rights, all justified in the name of “toughness” and “sanity” and “security”?
Sadly, not in 2014.
But if we’re truly looking to make meaningful resolutions for 2014, how about bringing our troops home? How about building fewer weapons? How about working to eliminate our nuclear arsenal? How about spying less and trusting more?
There are those that think that pursuing a less militant course is naive. But what’s truly naive is the idea that constant warfare is consistent with any kind of enlightened democracy.
Let’s work together to ensure my prediction for 2014 is wrong. Let’s find ways to stir up our nation to pursue peace.
My wife and I always watch “A Christmas Carol” around this time, the classic version with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. Before his redemption, Scrooge is the ultimate miser, a mean-spirited soul who refuses to give to charity since he’s already paying taxes to support prisons and workhouses. For his fellow man Scrooge has no concern, arguing that those who can’t support themselves had best die “to decrease the surplus population.”
By all accounts, including his own, Scrooge is a successful man of business, always keeping a positive balance on his ledger sheet, even if he has to pinch pennies to do so. Generous he is not; you might say he passes nickels around as if they were manhole covers.
His partner Jacob Marley, dead for seven years, restores Scrooge’s humanity with the help of three spirits. Perhaps Marley has the best line when he screams at Scrooge: “Business! Mankind was my business!” The Spirit of Christmas Present also has a powerful scene in which he reveals two slack-eyed and wretched children under his robe, “want” and “ignorance,” and tells Scrooge to be beware of both but especially of ignorance.
So, in this season of generosity of spirit, how are we doing in the USA? Does the skinflint Scrooge rule, or does the redeemed one? Well, just one factoid. Unemployment benefits are due to run out for 1.3 million Americans on December 28th. What are the options for those in want of a job? Are there no prisons, no workhouses? Perhaps they had best die to decrease the surplus population.
Extending unemployment benefits for another year would cost roughly $25 billion. A penurious America can’t afford that, right? But the USA can afford $633 billion for the new Pentagon budget and its “overseas contingency operations” (a great euphemism for war). We’ll spend roughly as much money on these “contingency ops” ($81 billion) as we will on federal funding of education. So much for the Spirit of Christmas Present and his warning about the price of ignorance
Heck, we can even afford $355 billion over the next ten years to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal (this money is separate from the budget for the Pentagon). At the same time, more of the unemployed will see their benefits cut. According to an article at Counterpunch, “Another 1.9 million who were projected to continue benefits in 2014 will also now lose them. Emergency benefits that up to now included extended benefits from 40-73 weeks, will now revert back to only 26 weeks. This occurs at a time when 4.1 million workers are considered long term unemployed, jobless for more than 26 weeks. Knocking millions off of benefits will likely result in 2014 in even more millions of workers leaving the labor force, which will technically also reduce the unemployment rate.”
That’s one way to reduce the official unemployment rate: Leave the unemployed so disillusioned with their plight that they give up looking for jobs. When the “long-term” unemployed stop looking, the government stops counting them. Did I hear someone bark “Humbug”?
The more our country follows the benighted Scrooge — the more ungenerous we are to the unemployed even as we ladle out benefits to the rich and powerful — the more we should fear a visit from that most horrifying ghost of all: The Spirit of Christmas Future.
Note to reader: I wrote this back in 1988 when I was a first-year graduate student in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University. I took my first graduate seminar with Owen Hannaway, a distinguished professor of early modern science and alchemy. He asked us to do a book review, and I chose Peter Medawar’s The Limits of Science. I dedicate this article to the memory of Owen Hannaway (1939-2006), a distinguished scholar and a gallant man.
The Limits of Science is an intentionally short book dealing with topics in the history and philosophy of science. It consists of three different essays written in three different styles, yet it yields a general outlook on science which can be nicely summarized. Sir Peter sees science as the most successful of man’s enterprises, but he is quick to observe that science has limits, although the growth of science itself is not self-limited.
Medawar first defines science. Science, he says, is not a mere collection of facts but organized knowledge, knowledge that can be used to predict the behavior of the sensible world. Medawar is careful to emphasize the difficulty of obtaining scientific knowledge, and the need for confidence based on trust within the scientific community.
Medawar then discusses whether there is such a thing as the scientific method and traces the development of different approaches. Before the Renaissance, deduction in the form of the Aristotelian syllogism was used to advance science, while intuition and revelation were used to support science. For philosophers in the Middle Ages, divine revelation guaranteed absolute certainty. Francis Bacon lit a new path for enlightenment in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through the use of induction. Bacon’s new method was the development of general premises through the use of experimentation and the collection of observations. The frontispiece of Bacon’s Novum Organum summed up the new ideal of Plus Ultra (more beyond): it depicted the pillars of Hercules with a biblical inscription (Daniel 12:4) prophesying the advancement of knowledge.
Medawar next examines deduction and induction and finds them lacking. The chief difficulty with deduction is that it begs the question; it can only discover something already contained in the major premise, therefore it is not a way to new knowledge. By comparison, a major premise arrived at through induction cannot contain more information than the sum of its known instances. A theory consisting of a legion of facts summarized by an iterative inductive process can thus be overthrown by a solitary contradictory instance. In sum, a deductive premise merely makes explicit information that is already present in the premise, while an inductive premise is no better than the sum of its parts. Neither method leads to new knowledge.
Considering these arguments, Medawar sides with the conclusion of Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper that there is no scientific method. The myth of induction as the method for scientific advancement, developed by John Stuart Mill and Karl Pearson in the nineteenth century, persists today mainly because it agrees best with the public’s conception of science and the scientist’s desire for a positive self-image.
What then is the catalyst for advances in science? Medawar adopts Shelley’s idea of poesis in poetry: creation through the act of imagination. The source of scientific hypotheses is these flashes of vision, and it is these hypotheses which guide and limit further science. Medawar clearly rejects the idea that scientific discovery can be premeditated and cites the role of luck in scientific discovery. He carefully qualifies the role of luck by showing how the scientist places himself in a certain mindset amenable to luck through his studies and associations with other scientists.
Medawar’s last essay discusses the limits of science. His fundamental assertion is that science does not yield absolute knowledge, and he quotes Kant as support: “Hypotheses always remain hypotheses, i.e., suppositions to the complete certainty of which we can never attain.” Science’s goal then is not the absolute but the nearest approximation possible; the nearer the approximation, the better its predictive capability.
Continuing the discussion, Medawar observes that there could be either a cognitive inadequacy or a restriction arising out of the nature of the human reasoning process that limits the growth of science, but since any such limitations would be present from conception we would never know of them (just as we could never perceive the Pythagorean celestial music due to its continuous presence in our lives). Are there then limits of science? Not if science is understood as the art of the soluble. If something is possible in principle, Medawar states, it can be done if the intention is sufficiently resolute and sustained.
The one limit to science as Medawar sees it is that it cannot answer ultimate questions, e.g. “Does God exist?” Medawar goes on to say he is not indicting science; rather he is recognizing that these questions require transcendent answers, which neither arise from nor require validation by empirical evidence. He actually takes this argument one step further and asserts these questions have no possible answers. (Medawar recognizes that Immanuel Kant felt the opposite; since somehow man’s nature drives him to ask these questions, Kant felt that answers necessarily exist.)
According to Medawar, the question of whether God exists is outside the realm of science; the leap of faith required for a belief in God is one he himself is unwilling to make. Although Medawar did not personally believe in transcendent answers, he did feel that these answers had a usefulness measured by the peace of mind they bring people.
I bought this book because as a Roman Catholic I was interested in what a scientist had to say about the limits of science in answering ultimate questions. Medawar confirmed my suspicions that science can play at best only a subsidiary role with regards to these ultimate questions and the religious beliefs they help spawn.
For anyone looking for an introduction into what science is, how it advances, and what questions it can and cannot answer, Medawar’s book is excellent. Perhaps the one idea I am always left with after reading this book is although science has limits, as long as man retains his ability to create imaginative hypotheses and his inclination to ascertain whether his guesses correspond to reality, there will always be more beyond for intrepid explorers in the realm of science.
Professor Hannaway appended the following note at the end of my review:
“What do you think your reaction would have been if you had read a book by a scientist less sympathetic to the claims of religion? Perhaps you can find one, read it, and then critically assess the arguments of Medawar.”
“Why do you think a famous scientist like Medawar was so concerned by such questions to write about them in this way? Could you find out something about his life that might explain this? Try sources like the Times obituary columns, Nature, Notes and Records of the Royal Society.”
That was Owen: always generous with advice, and always trying to spur you to dig deeper, to learn more.
Bonus Anecdote: I’ll never forget this saying of Owen’s: “Scotch is for after dinner.” The last time I saw him in Denver at a conference, I was really pleased to track down a glass of single malt whisky for him. He was a wonderful man.
Bill McKinney as Captain Terrill in “The Outlaw Josey Wales”
W.J. Astore
President Obama’s recent ten-year commitment to Afghanistan (until 2024 and beyond) put me to mind of a line from The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), the classic Western starring Clint Eastwood. Eastwood plays the “outlaw” who just wants to be left alone in the aftermath of a brutal civil war. But another character, the vicious Captain Terrill, wants to pursue and kill all the Confederate irregulars who had fought against the Union. In hot pursuit of Eastwood and a wounded confederate, Terrill rejects the idea that the killing will stop once the final two “outlaws” are dead.
“Doin’ right ain’t got no end,” Terrill coldly says.
That’s our government’s attitude in a nutshell: “Doin’ right ain’t got no end,” especially when the “right” involves killing outlaws. No matter how many we kill, there’ll always be more to find. And in the brutally imprecise process of rooting them out and killing them, we’ll make many mistakes and harm many innocents, thereby creating many new enemies — and many more men like Captain Terrill.
Like Terrill, our government’s actions and attitudes have conspired to create a forever war, a score-settling exercise against outlaws that serves to perpetuate terror. We’re trapped in a cycle of violence that’s very much of our own making. We believe we inhabit an implacably hostile realm that supposedly hates us and our freedoms too, and by believing it, we make it so.
This neurotic state recalls a science fiction novel, Deathworld (1960), which I read as a teenager. Its author, Harry Harrison, imagined a world where the flora and fauna are relentlessly hostile to a certain band of can-do colonists, who reply in kind with Spartan-like warrior intensity and murderous brutality.
As impressive as these warriors and their death-dealing technology are, their actions merely beget more violence. Until an outsider visits and sees the situation for what it truly is, the colonists cannot perceive that it’s their own fear and violent natures which are driving their enemies to attack. Unless they change their implacably hostile mindset, their ultimate defeat is inevitable because their actions spawn new enemies and endless violence everywhere.
As the United States exercises its global power in the name of winning a war on terror, we are creating a death world of our own making. As long as we continue to believe we’re “doin’ right” in fighting an open-ended (and seemingly endless) war, Captain Terrill’s words will continue to render a harsh and endless judgment.
“Doin’ right ain’t got no end” – a tragic meme for a death world of our own making.
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