John G. Messerly's Blog, page 53
January 27, 2020
Christopher Hitchens’ Death
Christopher Hitchens
[This is a reprint of a June 13, 2016 post. In the last 24 hours, it has had over 4,000 views.]
I just read David Frum’s recent piece in the Atlantic, “Betraying The Faith of Christopher Hitchens.” The article provides a scathing review of the Christian apologist Larry Taunton’s new book: The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist[image error]. Frum’s takedown of Taunton is so devastating that I will let the aforementioned article speak for itself. (Frum is a well-known conservative political commentator and former speechwriter for American President George W. Bush.)
Taunton’s book claims that Hitchens was considering converting to Christianity at the end of his life. (Taunton’s outrageous claim provides evidence for the idea that people generally believe what they want to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.) He bases this astonishing claim on his interpretation of a few conversations he had with Hitchens. Not only is this evidence anecdotal, but it contradicts Hitchens’ very public and forceful claims to the contrary. At the end of his life Hitchens could not have been more direct in rejecting the idea of a deathbed conversion as the videos below show.
Viewing any of the above videos should put Taunton’s nonsense to rest. As for Hitchens’ views of religion in general, they are set out clearly in his magnum opus: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything[image error]. The idea that Hitchens would reject his lifelong views at the end of his life is preposterous. Taunton may wish that Hitchens had converted in order to make Taunton feel good about his own irrational beliefs, but wishing does not make it so.
[image error] [image error]
Of course religious stories about the deathbed conversions of atheists and agnostics are legendary. Thomas Paine, atheist and a prominent figure in the American revolution, was said to have had such a conversion. End of life conversions stories have also been told about the great philosopher David Hume and the contemporary philosopher Antony Flew. The most famous deathbed conversion story is that of Charles Darwin, but even the religious site Answers in Genesis acknowledges that this story isn’t true.
All of these conversion stories express the sentiment of the aphorism “there are no atheists in foxholes.” The idea is that in times of extreme stress or when facing death people are more likely to believe in, or hope for, divine help. But there are problems with the aphorism. First, the aphorism isn’t true, for clearly many people die as atheists. Second, even if the aphorism were true and foxholes were populated exclusively by theists, that says nothing whatsoever about whether theism is true. Moreover, if true the aphorism really reveals that the source of religion is fear. And that doesn’t reflect well on religion, although it has made it a very profitable endeavor.
The reasons that motivate the religious to believe in deathbed conversions are obvious. Some believers just can’t accept that others are reject the gods; some find atheism threatening because it causes believers self-doubt; and others hate that they can’t force heathens to agree with them. But whatever the reasons, believers often find comfort by telling themselves that atheists convert at the end of their life.
But this is all so pathetic. Even if Darwin, Hume or Hitchens converted at the end of their lives—which they didn’t—so what? This would have no bearing on the truth of theism. Apollo, Zeus, Allah or Yahweh either exist or they don’t. If theists are really confident about their beliefs, why would they care that others convert? Are believers so insecure in their beliefs that they must invent stories about other people agreeing with them? Surely these deathbed conversion stories appeal to believers because believers have doubts.
But perhaps the deepest reason these false deathbed conversion stories resonate with believers is that they help believers repress what to them is a terrifying idea—that most of what passes for their cherished belief is just superstitious nonsense.
January 23, 2020
Can Stoicism Help Us Live Well? Forthcoming
Bust of Seneca
I have written about Stoicism previously but lately, I’ve been researching it extensively. The goal of my research is to distill the essence of Stoic wisdom as it pertains to helping people live well—primarily by achieving inner peace and equanimity. Then I’ll share these insights in easy to understand language. In other words, I will write a short essay that someone can read and say, “I understand Stoic wisdom and I see how it will help me to experience more peace of mind and happiness.”
Note that while the internet supplies many excellent explanations of Stoicism (Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Modern Stoicism) they tend to be more detailed and academic than I want to be, although I’ll consult these and other good sources. There are also many simple accounts of Stoicism but most of them are, in my view, disappointing. This gap in the literature has motivated me to try to write my own version—a Stoicism for beginners if you will.
I’m also inspired by the notion that by clarifying the essence of Stoic wisdom to others I will come to better understand it myself and, at the same time, become better able to incorporate its wisdom into my own life. Hopefully, my presentation of Stoic wisdom will help both all of us in our quest to live more tranquil lives.
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Note: It may take a few weeks to finish my background reading and write the essay.
[Previous posts on Stoicism. The first 3 listed have each been viewed over 50,000 times.]
January 21, 2020
Richard Carrier on the Dark Ages
© Richard Carrier, Ph.D. (Reprinted with Permission)
Below is an excerpt from Richard Carrier’s essay, “Yes, the Dark Ages Really Were a Thing.” It resonates with me because while teaching philosophy, especially at Catholic universities, I often encountered the (mistaken) view that the Dark Ages weren’t really that bad.
Dr. Carrier is a world-renowned author and speaker. As a professional historian, published philosopher, and prominent defender of the American freethought movement, Dr. Carrier has appeared across the U.S., Canada and the U.K., and on American television and London radio, defending sound historical methods and the ethical worldview of secular naturalism. His books and articles have received international attention. With a Ph.D. from Columbia University in ancient history, he specializes in the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, particularly ancient philosophy, religion, and science, with emphasis on the origins of Christianity and the use and progress of science under the Roman empire. He is also a published expert in the modern philosophy of naturalism as a worldview.
He is the author of, among other works,
1) On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt[image error]
2) Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed About Christ
3) Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith
4) Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995-2013
5) Not the Impossible Faith[image error]
6) Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation of Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?
7) Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism[image error]
8) Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus[image error]
9) Science Education in the Early Roman Empire[image error]
10) Scientist in the Early Roman Empire[image error]
and a contributor to:
11) The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave[image error]
12) The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails[image error]
13) The End of Christianity[image error]
14) Christianity Is Not Great: How Faith Fails[image error]
Here is the excerpt.
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There is a trend to try and deny the Dark Ages ever existed; even to portray them as really lovely, light and wonderful ages of goodness and achievement. I’m exaggerating. But only a little. I’ve debunked this a lot. I have a whole category assigned to the subject. And I wrote a whole chapter on it, with scholarship and evidence cited, in Christianity Is Not Great. My book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire also has a pertinent section on the myth (Chapter 5.10). But here I’m going to take on a recent iteration of the idea.
…
I’ve written before on why the Dark Ages are in fact aptly so-called, despite all the additional myths still believed about them. Even the original coiners of the term did not mean by it “total darkness” or anything the like. They meant a substantial and catastrophic decline in civilization over a five hundred year period (from which we did not fully recover for yet another five hundred years), during which vast amounts of knowledge and information were lost, and had to be rediscovered or reinvented in the early Renaissance; allowing us to finally pick up where the West had left off in the 4th century, by the middle of the Renaissance in the 15th century. Which is approximately one thousand years after that decline began—which beginning was not in the Dark Ages, but Late Antiquity. As nearly all scientific and technological progress ceased after the 3rd century A.D. and everything spiraled out for a century or two more until it all fell apart. The resulting collapse of civilization in the West spanned centuries after that, and is what we call the Dark Ages.
That collapse was much slower in the East, owing to its absurd wealth; so the Dark Ages does not refer there, as McDaniel rightly points out. People often forget the Eastern Roman Empire hung on a bit longer and did a bit better. But it still stagnated and continually declined as a civilization. It made no significant advances in science or technology for a thousand years, and then was finally overrun and extinguished by Muslim nations, never to exist again—Muslims who had centuries before adopted the same abandonment of science that doomed Christian lands in both the East and the West for a thousand years. But unlike the West, the Islamic world experienced no Renaissance with which to rescue itself. It remained in stunted ignorance. And thereby surrendered all future world dominance to Western Imperialism.
My chapter on “The Dark Ages” in Christianity Is Not Great lays out the facts and scholarship demonstrating how catastrophic that period was for the West and why it took so long to recover from. And why, consequently, it held us back. We lacked the wealth even barely to survive much less continue the advances that ancient civilization had been steadily building on; we lost vast amounts of human and intellectual and technological resources (see below). And Christianity as an ideology was wholly ill-equipped to fix or prevent this, as it was hostile to the very values necessary to the task: curiosity, empiricism, and commitment to progress. Which is why civilization stalled even in the Eastern, Byzantine Empire.
I first demonstrated this point in my chapter “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science” in The Christian Delusion. It was only the recovery of pagan ways of thinking, and some of their lost works, that brought us back to a real recovery—as in, a restoration of Western civilization to where it had left off: a scientifically and technologically inquisitive and progressive society with a potent base of accumulated knowledge and capabilities to build on. Had the abandonment of all that in the 4th and 5th centuries not occurred—had Roman civilization been allowed to continue thriving on the same intellectual and material basis as it ended the 2nd century with—we would be 1000 years more advanced today. But Late Antiquity and the Dark Ages combined into a total stall-out, experiencing almost nothing but decline, no significant advance.
Which is not to say Christianity caused that stall-out. It didn’t. It just guaranteed by its take-over of the Western mind that nothing that needed doing to reverse that downfall would be done for at least a thousand years. As I demonstrate in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (e.g. pp. 471-542), and with respect to education, in Science Education in the Early Roman Empire (e.g. pp. 137-66), Christian values were the opposite of scientific values, and kept humanity from returning to the latter for far too long. As to the catastrophies of the third century that actually started this downfall, which were not caused by Christianity but rather contributed to Christianity’s rise to dominance, see my discussion in Not the Impossible Faith (pp. 435-40).
…
Yes, the Dark Ages happened. They occupied the period from the 5th to the 10th century. And they took five hundred more years to fully recover from, bringing Western civilization back by the 15th century to all the peak markers of accomplishment that it had achieved by the 2nd century. That’s a thousand years we were set back.
And yes, those ages were sufficiently dark in every measure to warrant the appellation. They dropped the Western world (and even, if less catastrophically, the Near Eastern world) to its lowest levels of decline by every measure not seen since before the rise of the Ancient Greeks who built up Western civilization on a foundation of democracy, technology, and science. The Dark Ages were an era we as human beings should look upon in shame, disappointment, and concern never to repeat what caused them or sustained them. They deserve the name. And only someone who would deny that can have any reason to avoid it.
Enter Rodney Stark, a typical example. He’s a Christian sociologist who often says completely false things about the history of science and Christianity’s relationship to it (he is one of the targets I debunk in my chapter on this in The Christian Delusion). He has this to say in his hopelessly unreliable book The Victory of Reason, subtitled “How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success” (pro tip: it didn’t):
For the past two or three centuries, every educated person has known that from the fall of Rome until about the fifteenth century Europe was submerged in the “Dark Ages”—centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery—from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously rescued, first by the Renaissance and then by the Enlightenment. But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, during the so-called Dark Ages, European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world!
Literally every sentence of that paragraph is false. Except for “it didn’t happen that way,” but that accidentally obtains truth only by everything Stark saying around it being false!
No relevantly educated person for the last three hundred years has regarded the Dark Ages as extending “to about the fifteenth century.” Indeed, the Renaissance began in Italy in the 1200s and spread to the rest of Europe by the 1400s, the fifteenth century. Which follows on the High (or Late) Middle Ages. The Dark Ages only mark the first half of the Middle Ages, the Low (or Early) Middle Ages. So right out of the gate, Stark is fabricating a straw man, and on that basis declaring the Dark Ages don’t exist, merely because some (?) less informed people confuse which period they denote.
The Dark Ages were “centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery.” As I just showed you their misery is extensively documented in the archaeological and historical record. As is their ignorance and superstition. Even scholars of the period, far scarcer than in former times, were significantly backward in their comprehension and access to knowledge compared to their peers at the height of the Roman Empire.
The Renaissance took centuries to develop once society began its climb out of the Dark Ages around 1000 A.D. And it took centuries more for the Renaissance to evolve into The Enlightenment, which began in the 17th century. Altogether, from the end of the Dark Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment, we find over 600 years. That is not “suddenly, almost miraculously.” It’s painfully, sloggishly, maddeningly slowly.
In absolutely no sense whatever did European technology and science overtake and surpass the rest of the world “during the so-called Dark Ages.” Or even in the High Middle Ages. It only did so during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Which we could have obtained one thousand years earlier, if the Dark Ages had not happened—if Christianity had brought a scientific spirit to Western civilization during an age of crisis instead of abandoning it. Which resulted in the Dark Ages causing a massive centuries-long decline in “European technology and science,” that we then had to take centuries yet more to crawl back out of—not a surpassing of prior glory; but a loss of nearly all of it.
It’s time to reject this new attempt to rewrite and whitewash history. Stand up to it. Not with false ideas about the Dark Ages, however, but correct ones. McDaniel’s article is worthwhile for learning what myths in the other direction to avoid. But his enthusiasm takes him too far. This present article, and the articles and resources it links to, aim to fill that gap. Between the two, you can crusade for what really happened in the Dark Ages.
Pun intended.
January 18, 2020
Understanding Freedom: Freedom and Politics (Part 1)
© Robert Orwell Hand – (Reprinted with Permission)
https://understandingthings.net/2019/...
In the United States, the political world is superficially divided in terms of the two-party system: Republicans (ostensibly, the defenders of “freedom”) vs. Democrats (ostensibly, the defenders of “equality”).
In deeper and far more revealing terms—terms that include the economic and social, and even spiritual, dimensions of freedom—the political sphere divides not into the interests of the two opposing political parties but into the interests of the powerful vs. the interests of the powerless.Only as political parties and ideologies are analyzed in light of relative power relations can they be adequately understood in regard to the subject of freedom.
While what are called “conservatives” like to present themselves as the champions of “freedom” (especially when it comes to the economics of “free enterprise,” “the free market,” and “free trade”), the political reality is that the freedom they champion is the exclusive property of the powers that be.
Conservatives (virtually all Republicans and various others) avowedly wish to conserve the America of times past: in the words of Donald Trump (adopted by the Republican party since his 2016 election to the presidency): to “make America great again!” This conservative slogan assumes that America has fallen from a state of past greatness to which it can only be restored with the proper—that is to say, with conservative—leadership. The question insofar as freedom is concerned is: What is the relation between the conservative ideal of greatness and the ideal of freedom for all?
The conservative elements of the judiciary (now in the majority of the Supreme Court) generally subscribe to the judicial philosophy of “constitutional originalism,” meaning that the U.S. Constitution must be interpreted according to the perceived original intent of the framers of the constitution. Which, in effect, deifies and consecrates the “intent” of aristocratic white, male land-owners (and, mostly, slave-owners), who inarguably did not approach their task from the points of view of women, slaves, or natives, nor of landless white males for that matter, all of whom were, nonetheless, ideally included in Jefferson’s bold declaration that “all men are created equal.” The founders—all brilliant men of their time and place—naturally approached their task from the point of view of their class (despite the opportunity and encouragement to adopt a more democratic point of view under the influence of Thomas Paine: see his Common Sense and The Rights of Man). Which is to say that their concern with the relationship between freedom and equality seems to have been (in Orwell’s phrase from Animal Farm) that some be “more equal” than others.
Nevertheless, by signing on to the Declaration of Independence, with its “self-evident” assertion “that all men are created equal,” they set a high bar for judging the greatness of the nation. And in that light, it’s difficult not to conclude that the increasing number of federal and Supreme Court judges who adhere to “constitutional originalism” intend to conserve the aristocratic values and, therefore, the power of the owning/ruling class that originally framed the constitution, to the detriment of the framers’ highest ideal of freedom for all.
The conservative vision of American greatness seems best understood in terms of national power, that is, the power to impose “U.S. interests”—typically shorthand for U.S. corporate interests throughout American history—on the rest of the world. After seizing the lands of and subduing its American Indian and Mexican populations, the U.S. government swiftly began to expand its rule off the shores of the continental U.S. and to deepen its rule over Latin America (“rule,” in these cases, being primarily economic but, when perceived necessary, also military). After World War II, the U.S. took the mantle of empire from Great Britain and extended its power into the Middle East and Africa (and elsewhere), becoming the senior “superpower” of the world (the Soviet Union becoming its chief, albeit junior, competitor).
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. remains the only superpower, but its international economic (though not military) power has gradually decreased since World War II. A restoration to the conservative view of national greatness—a view shared by all historical empires—would mean the renewed and expanded subordination of the world to the national interests of the U.S. (And, to be fair, this conservative view has been equally championed by so-called “liberal” politicians, who with few exceptions embraced a militaristic foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st.)
If, however, American greatness is understood in terms of the human goal of freedom for all, then making America great again becomes a far more problematic case to make. Americans who take an honest and unvarnished look at American history must struggle with how to reconcile the freedom-for-all ideal of American greatness with the relevant historical facts: African-American slavery (which lasted for nearly the first hundred years of U.S. history, and the legacy of which still beats down African Americans); Native American genocide (in the interest of expanding U.S. territory, eventually subjugating American Indians to relative parcels of their original lands called “reservations,” and ruthlessly suppressing native languages and cultures, the effects of which suppression they continue to suffer); Japanese American internment (during World War II, in which Japanese American families were transferred, in this case by a “liberal” administration with conservative support, from their homes and socially and economically quarantined in detention areas); the Great Depression (among other lesser economic meltdowns before and since, the outcome of unfettered capitalism, that is, the god-like freedom of the corporate powers that be); the McCarthy hearings (aka, the “Communist witch hunt” of the 1950s, in which the U.S. conservative political establishment tried to purge the government of New-Deal liberals, along with silencing the free speech of other leading and liberalizing change-agents in American society); the brutal and bloody states-rights opposition of conservative southern state governments to the Civil Rights Movement (a movement that was steadfastly opposed by conservative politicians, and only reluctantly and sporadically aided, by the then so-called “liberal” federal government). These are among only the more commonly-known historical episodes that decisively refute the claim that the ideal of freedom for all played any part in the conservative vision of past American greatness.
Once the ideal of freedom for all becomes the prism through which American history is viewed, the only way to view America as having fallen from a former state of greatness is to consciously embrace white supremacy and the oppression of the working class and the poor of all ethnicities. By the same token, to remain unaware of the unfreedom that has been perpetuated by the powers that bethroughout American history is to unconsciously align yourself with it.
The American empire that emerged from the ashes of World War II—and, more specifically, from the radioactive ashes of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan—seems to have been clearly preferable to the totalitarian alternatives, had Germany and Japan been victorious, or had the Soviet Union won the subsequent Cold War. (The term “American empire” may be objectionable to some, but the term “superpower,” which is commonly employed without controversy—or embarrassment—with reference to the United States, is clearly a euphemism for empire: The 800-plus U.S. military bases that stretch across the earth—an open secret seemingly unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans—bear silent witness to ongoing American imperialism, the economic and military forces of which gradually replaced the British Empire after WWII). But as unspeakably malign and inhumane as totalitarian fascist and communist world empires would have been, the intended worldwide reign of a capitalist empire has not only not furthered but, instead, has repeatedly frustrated the prospects of freedom and democracy for the world, and has gradually assumed a kind of capitalist totalitarianism of its own (which, when practicable, substitutes economic for physical violence—economic violence being better known as “austerity”—while utilizing secretive forms of mass surveillance and media propagandizing).
All of which suggests that a view of American history that foregrounds the American ideal of freedom for all (in the context, especially, of U.S. relations with other world powers) points to the conclusion that World War II was not a conflict between good (in the form of the Allied nations) and evil (in the form of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan) but a conflict between (as Orwell pointed out) the lesser and the greater of two evils. And, fortunately—as far as prospects for at least the possibility of international movement toward the goal of freedom for all—the lesser evil won.
Since World War II, the U.S. (in the name of “spreading freedom and democracy,” as well as in the name of “national security”) has invaded and occupied Vietnam and Iraq, starting wars the immorality and stupidity of which are now matters of broad American consensus. The other invasion/occupation was (and continues to be) of Afghanistan—justified by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—resulting in the longest war in American history (if you don’t count the Korean War during the 1950s, a war which was never officially ended).
And what these wars share in common is that none were defensive wars (even the invasion of Afghanistan being a war of retribution for 9/11 that could and would, in the opinion of many experts, have been better handled by policing and intelligence activities). The other common denominator of these wars (besides all the combatant and civilian casualties) is that the U.S. has won none of them, despite overwhelming military superiority.
And now, in the name of America’s “War on Terror,” the entire world has become both a battlefield and graveyard at the hands of American militarism. (The U.S. spends more on “national defense”—a euphemism for U.S. militarism—than the next at least eight nations combined and continues to increase its military spending.)
Less well-known foreign manifestations of American imperial power include the U.S.-engineered (viathe CIA) overthrows of democratically-elected governments in Iran (in 1953), in Guatemala (in 1954), in Congo (in 1960), and in Chile (in 1973), each of whose governments threatened the corporate interests of the U.S. powers that be (and all being succeeded by brutal U.S.-backed dictators). These are only perhaps the most obvious and undeniable examples of the post-WWII legacy of U.S. power in the world. Included must be the extensive U.S. financial and military support of dictatorships (which are, thereby, employed by U.S. taxpayers—via “foreign aid” used by dictators to purchase weapons from American arms manufacturers—to protect the corporate interests of the American powers that be) all over Latin America and the Middle East. The resulting social and economic misery has driven the ongoing exodus of immigrants to the U.S., which has made it increasingly difficult—and now, under Trump, bordering impossible—for those immigrants to find refuge from their U.S.-engineered social and economic misery.
My father’s military service in World War II, like the service of the vast majority of former and current U.S. soldiers, occurred without his consciousness of the role of that service in extending the power of U.S. corporate interests (which, together with the Pentagon, were called in 1961 by former U.S. general and Republican President Eisenhower, “the military-industrial-complex”) across the earth. (Which is not to say that the international struggle against the powers of fascism was not necessary but, rather, that it —like virtually all wars—produced markedly mixed results.) Like the vast majority of Americans, soldiers have been indoctrinated by the public education system and the mainstream media into the myth of American exceptionalism—more specifically, America’s mission to “spread freedom and democracy” to the rest of the world (indoctrination into said mythology being the unspoken function of public education, which the better public-school teachers have, against the prevailing winds of standardized testing, tried to subvert by instructing their students in how to think rather than in what to think). So many American soldiers are, as was my father, surely motivated by love of country, and increasingly, by the need—among ever-diminishing employment options—to make a living; once they enter combat, their motivation (according to their own testimony) becomes largely the desire to keep themselves and each other alive. And American soldiers bring American wars home with them in forms such as PTSD, brain damage from proximity to explosions, and increasingly widespread instances of depression and suicide.
Meanwhile, a growing number of veterans have come to question the part military service plays in upholding the way things are as orchestrated by the powers that be. And more than a few have come to believe—in the less-than-familiar words of Martin Luther King, Jr. (in 1967, one year to the day before his assassination)—that the U.S. government remains “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
And so, the conservative call to “make America great again!” amounts to a call to multiply that violence to whatever extent necessary to restore American economic supremacy over the world (thus, Trump’s threats to annihilate North Korea and Iran and to overthrow, by military means if necessary, the government of Venezuela).
The post-World War II experimental blending of capitalism and socialism—most notably FDR’s New Deal, which gave Americans Social Security, and LBJ’s Great Society, which gave Americans Medicare and Medicaid—did inject a measure of working-class freedom (via greater equality) into American imperial greatness: GIs (albeit almost exclusively white ones) were welcomed home from World War II with free college educations and job training and affordable home loans, so working-class families could own homes and look forward to retiring on pensions, entering an increasingly prosperous (though, again, largely white) middle class.
Nevertheless, the very government (New Deal and Great Society) programs that facilitated this relative prosperity were bitterly opposed by conservative politicians, both at the time and thereafter, who began immediately to chip away at the newly-forged political restraints on the power of the owning/ruling class. (The three surviving New Deal and Great Society programs—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—despite their overwhelming popularity among Americans, continue to be undermined by conservative politics.) This period of relative American progress toward freedom for all(albeit largely benefitting whites) began with unprecedentedly high taxation on the wealthy (a 94% tax rate on income over $200,000, equivalent to roughly $3,000,000 today), and it continued thereafter with unprecedentedly strict regulation of big business (neither of which, taxes nor regulations, keeping the rich from getting richer, albeit not fast and furiously enough for most of them). And this period of relative American freedom and equality was already beginning to end with the “Conservative Revolution” of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The freedom-loving Reagan’s theme was that “government is the problem not the solution,” which was a shrewd case of rhetorical misdirection, and which, thereafter, became the battle cry of conservative politicians, who invariably celebrated “the Reagan Revolution.” The conservative effort to “shrink government,” allegedly minimizing its costs to taxpayers, was never applied to the by-far-most-expensive government function, called “national defense”: this has meant ever-increasing tax giveaways to (and humongous profits by) arms manufacturers, whose alignment with the Pentagon has become foundational to the U.S. economy since WWII, fueling the maintenance and expansion of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.”
For Reagan, then, government surely was the solution—via military spending—to the problem of Communism; moreover, he didn’t hesitate to use government to subsidize corporations, in the name of “tax cuts.” Where government needed shrinking, according to Reagan, was in the New Deal and Great Society programs that had benefitted the powerless, and in the taxing and regulatory functions that had been providing Americans with some relief from the socio-economic and environmental ravages of capitalism.
The truth is that government will always be problematic as far as freedom is concerned because its role is always to decrease the freedom/power of some in order to increase the freedom/power of others. As such, it is a tool. The question is in whose hands the tool of government belongs.
In the hands of the powers that be, government will be used to decrease (and, if possible, eliminate) the freedom, by blockading the power, of the people, in the interest of upholding the powers that be and expanding their power. And conservative politicians do this by means of an incessant rhetorical assault on government itself, identifying “government” not with the military spending and corporate subsidies (aka, corporate socialism) that inflate the profit margins of their corporate masters, but with the very New Deal and Great Society programs that provide an increasingly limited economic relief to—in the interest of increasing the freedom of—the powerless.
In the hands of the people, by comparison, government is a tool, at least, to limit the freedom of the powers that be to oppress the powerless, and at most, to equalize power relations in the interest of a society in which all are equally free. A government truly of, by and for the people would certainly protect, for examples, consumers from false advertising about products and from toxic substances in food and drugs, and all members of society from polluted air and water. (The passing and enforcing of legislation for these purposes in the wake of the people’s uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, mitigating the physical and environmental assaults of capitalism, resulted in unprecedented progress toward the ideal of freedom for all; since the “Conservative Revolution” of the 1980’s [and subsequent corporate deregulation] unleashed the pent-up rage of the capitalist powers that be, the adverse effects on public health have been increasingly self-evident.)
But a people’s government would not merely protect workers (who, again, comprise the vast majority of “the people”) from wage and workplace exploitation, as well as racial and sexual discrimination and abuse. A people-powered government would advance worker-owned-and-operated businesses (the success of which, where currently allowed, has been remarkable and undeniable, the best-known example being Spain’s Mondragon; in 2017, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives reported that over 350 worker co-ops exist in the U.S., with a workforce of almost 7,000 and a total gross revenue of over 400 million dollars).
Reagan called government “the problem,” not because it was an instrument in the hands of the powerful to lessen the freedom, by restraining the power, of the people, but because he believed that government’s taxing and regulatory functions were lessening the “freedom,” by restraining the power, of the powerful way too much. And, of course, he proclaimed that corporate tax cuts and the corporate profits they multiplied would eventually “trickle down” to the benefit of workers/consumers. The fact that no evidence exists to support the “trickle-down theory” of economics has not kept conservative politicians from repeating that Reagan mantra up to the present day.
The brief period (1930s to 1970s) of government-supported freedom and equality in America occurred only in response to the bottom-up pressure of the theretofore powerless, organized in labor unions and independent political parties, all of which have since been virtually squeezed out of existence by the powerful, working through the U.S. government. However, before and since the New-Deal/Great-Society period when government participated in progress toward the freedom-for-all ideal of American greatness, moments of people-power greatness, usually in defiance of the government, have occurred: the movements for the abolition of slavery, for the eight-hour workday and for the prohibition of child labor, for women’s right to vote, for African American civil rights and subsequent movements (like the Feminist and the American Indian and the Gay Rights movements) for minority rights that extend to the present day.
Which is to say that America’s greatness has never been orchestrated from the top down—bestowed by its government leaders on its people—but, instead, always erupts from below, from the demand of the powerless for freedom, that is, for their share of the power.
The 40-some years of progress (between the New Deal and “the Reagan Revolution”) toward socio-economic freedom and equality in America was gradually yet decisively undermined and overturned by a conservative movement that deconstructed—always in the name of “freedom”—the system of government taxation and regulation that protected Americans from the corporate powers that be. American corporations have historically exercised their “freedom”—besides to provide a dazzling array of products for those who can afford them—to pollute the earth, air and water (profiting the American fossil fuel industry and all its dependents); to corrupt financial markets (profiting big banks, which get bailed out and become bigger whenever they return America to recurring economic meltdowns); to imprison masses of black and brown Americans (profiting all the industries that provide services to federal and state prisons, as well as the private prison industry); and to inflame international tensions (profiting American arms manufacturers). And these are just a few of the more obvious examples of the way conservatism has represented and furthered the interests of the powerful in America, all in the name of “freedom,” all at the expense of the people of America and the rest of the world. (Today, in its denial of the scientific consensus regarding global warming, observes Noam Chomsky, political conservatism in the form of the Republican Party poses the primary threat to human survival on the planet.)
All of which is to say that when conservatives cry out for“freedom!” they are calling for the removal of restraints (in the form of taxes and regulations) from, and therefore, the full restoration of power to the traditionally powerful in American society. The fact that this full restoration of power to the already powerful in the name of “freedom” has been resulting in a continuing reversal of whatever freedom/power the people acquired during the 1960s and 1970s is, of course, an indispensable part of the plan. This is because the more power to the powerless many, the less power for the powerful few, and vice versa. The result of the ongoing conservative movement to fully restore power to the powerful few is the increasing disappearance of freedom, that is, the restoration of freedom to the invisibility of the way things are as orchestrated by the powers that be.
The conservative argument is that the notion that “all men are created equal” means that “all” should be equally free—that is, left alone by the government—to use their ability and property (their power) as they see fit. Sounds like freedom for all.
But the conservative argument studiously ignores the fact that people are born into vastly unequal circumstances as far as power is concerned. And that the precious few born into socioeconomic power (i.e., members of the owning class) are thereby securely positioned—by nothing but the luck of being “high-born”—to go on to use whatever gifts and skills they may have—or may buy—to maintain and expand their power. And they do this, of course, at the expense of the many, who are born into relative degrees of powerlessness and, therefore, whose gifts and skills can typically only increase their awareness of their powerlessness. As a variety of historical figures have been given credit for saying: nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.
This has been the rule in American history. The rags-to-riches mythology of American capitalism is pure propaganda, actual examples of which being the extreme exceptions that prove the rule. Being born into power or, even more so, rising to power is confined to a chosen few, purely—even for the most gifted and skilled—a matter of time and chance. Which leaves the many stranded, to varying degrees, in powerlessness. And for the powerless, “freedom” is a mirage, a magic word that conjures up socioeconomic hopes and dreams that, for the vast majority, remain forever, frustratingly and heartbreakingly, out of reach.
The “baby-boom generation” (born between WWII and the late 1960s, and of which I am a part) grew up in the America of the New Deal and the Great Society, naturally assuming that the middle-class comfort that the (white) majority of us enjoyed was “America,” the way it had always been and would always be. (Our parents knew better, of course, having experienced the Great Depression.) Now increasingly the elders of American society, a good many baby-boomers look back on the America of their youth as the “great” America (even some who agreed—and may continue to agree—with the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s).
It’s anything but obvious to many baby-boomers that this “America” only shortly preceded their birth and began withering away in their earlier adulthood, and that the voices that are calling so loudly for the restoration of the greatness of America, in the name of “freedom,” were crying out equally as loudly against the New Deal and Great Society programs (which those voices indignantly, and accurately, called “socialism”) that redistributed the power (moving closer to the freedom for all) that produced that middle-class prosperity that we grew up with. (Of course, the vast majority of the African and Latin and Native Americans of the baby-boom generation tend to have no such illusions about American greatness, as America has never been so great for them.)
Conservatism, in sum, has always aligned itself with the traditionally powerful and, therefore necessarily, against freedom for all—i.e., people-power/democracy—throughout its political history, being the advance guard for the protection of Madison’s “minority of the opulent.” All, of course, in the name of “freedom.”
The question remains, then, who in American politics stands for the powerless and against the powers that be? Who among them understand American greatness in terms of freedom for all?
(And, however regrettably, the answer is not, generally speaking, the Democratic Party.)
(Next: Understanding Freedom: Freedom and Politics-Part 2)
Understanding Freedom: Chapter 3 (Part 1) – Freedom and Politics
© Robert Orwell Hand – (Reprinted with Permission)
https://understandingthings.net/2019/...
In the United States, the political world is superficially divided in terms of the two-party system: Republicans (ostensibly, the defenders of “freedom”) vs. Democrats (ostensibly, the defenders of “equality”).
In deeper and far more revealing terms—terms that include the economic and social, and even spiritual, dimensions of freedom—the political sphere divides not into the interests of the two opposing political parties but into the interests of the powerful vs. the interests of the powerless.Only as political parties and ideologies are analyzed in light of relative power relations can they be adequately understood in regard to the subject of freedom.
While what are called “conservatives” like to present themselves as the champions of “freedom” (especially when it comes to the economics of “free enterprise,” “the free market,” and “free trade”), the political reality is that the freedom they champion is the exclusive property of the powers that be.
Conservatives (virtually all Republicans and various others) avowedly wish to conserve the America of times past: in the words of Donald Trump (adopted by the Republican party since his 2016 election to the presidency): to “make America great again!” This conservative slogan assumes that America has fallen from a state of past greatness to which it can only be restored with the proper—that is to say, with conservative—leadership. The question insofar as freedom is concerned is: What is the relation between the conservative ideal of greatness and the ideal of freedom for all?
The conservative elements of the judiciary (now in the majority of the Supreme Court) generally subscribe to the judicial philosophy of “constitutional originalism,” meaning that the U.S. Constitution must be interpreted according to the perceived original intent of the framers of the constitution. Which, in effect, deifies and consecrates the “intent” of aristocratic white, male land-owners (and, mostly, slave-owners), who inarguably did not approach their task from the points of view of women, slaves, or natives, nor of landless white males for that matter, all of whom were, nonetheless, ideally included in Jefferson’s bold declaration that “all men are created equal.” The founders—all brilliant men of their time and place—naturally approached their task from the point of view of their class (despite the opportunity and encouragement to adopt a more democratic point of view under the influence of Thomas Paine: see his Common Sense and The Rights of Man). Which is to say that their concern with the relationship between freedom and equality seems to have been (in Orwell’s phrase from Animal Farm) that some be “more equal” than others.
Nevertheless, by signing on to the Declaration of Independence, with its “self-evident” assertion “that all men are created equal,” they set a high bar for judging the greatness of the nation. And in that light, it’s difficult not to conclude that the increasing number of federal and Supreme Court judges who adhere to “constitutional originalism” intend to conserve the aristocratic values and, therefore, the power of the owning/ruling class that originally framed the constitution, to the detriment of the framers’ highest ideal of freedom for all.
The conservative vision of American greatness seems best understood in terms of national power, that is, the power to impose “U.S. interests”—typically shorthand for U.S. corporate interests throughout American history—on the rest of the world. After seizing the lands of and subduing its American Indian and Mexican populations, the U.S. government swiftly began to expand its rule off the shores of the continental U.S. and to deepen its rule over Latin America (“rule,” in these cases, being primarily economic but, when perceived necessary, also military). After World War II, the U.S. took the mantle of empire from Great Britain and extended its power into the Middle East and Africa (and elsewhere), becoming the senior “superpower” of the world (the Soviet Union becoming its chief, albeit junior, competitor).
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. remains the only superpower, but its international economic (though not military) power has gradually decreased since World War II. A restoration to the conservative view of national greatness—a view shared by all historical empires—would mean the renewed and expanded subordination of the world to the national interests of the U.S. (And, to be fair, this conservative view has been equally championed by so-called “liberal” politicians, who with few exceptions embraced a militaristic foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st.)
If, however, American greatness is understood in terms of the human goal of freedom for all, then making America great again becomes a far more problematic case to make. Americans who take an honest and unvarnished look at American history must struggle with how to reconcile the freedom-for-all ideal of American greatness with the relevant historical facts: African-American slavery (which lasted for nearly the first hundred years of U.S. history, and the legacy of which still beats down African Americans); Native American genocide (in the interest of expanding U.S. territory, eventually subjugating American Indians to relative parcels of their original lands called “reservations,” and ruthlessly suppressing native languages and cultures, the effects of which suppression they continue to suffer); Japanese American internment (during World War II, in which Japanese American families were transferred, in this case by a “liberal” administration with conservative support, from their homes and socially and economically quarantined in detention areas); the Great Depression (among other lesser economic meltdowns before and since, the outcome of unfettered capitalism, that is, the god-like freedom of the corporate powers that be); the McCarthy hearings (aka, the “Communist witch hunt” of the 1950s, in which the U.S. conservative political establishment tried to purge the government of New-Deal liberals, along with silencing the free speech of other leading and liberalizing change-agents in American society); the brutal and bloody states-rights opposition of conservative southern state governments to the Civil Rights Movement (a movement that was steadfastly opposed by conservative politicians, and only reluctantly and sporadically aided, by the then so-called “liberal” federal government). These are among only the more commonly-known historical episodes that decisively refute the claim that the ideal of freedom for all played any part in the conservative vision of past American greatness.
Once the ideal of freedom for all becomes the prism through which American history is viewed, the only way to view America as having fallen from a former state of greatness is to consciously embrace white supremacy and the oppression of the working class and the poor of all ethnicities. By the same token, to remain unaware of the unfreedom that has been perpetuated by the powers that bethroughout American history is to unconsciously align yourself with it.
The American empire that emerged from the ashes of World War II—and, more specifically, from the radioactive ashes of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan—seems to have been clearly preferable to the totalitarian alternatives, had Germany and Japan been victorious, or had the Soviet Union won the subsequent Cold War. (The term “American empire” may be objectionable to some, but the term “superpower,” which is commonly employed without controversy—or embarrassment—with reference to the United States, is clearly a euphemism for empire: The 800-plus U.S. military bases that stretch across the earth—an open secret seemingly unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans—bear silent witness to ongoing American imperialism, the economic and military forces of which gradually replaced the British Empire after WWII). But as unspeakably malign and inhumane as totalitarian fascist and communist world empires would have been, the intended worldwide reign of a capitalist empire has not only not furthered but, instead, has repeatedly frustrated the prospects of freedom and democracy for the world, and has gradually assumed a kind of capitalist totalitarianism of its own (which, when practicable, substitutes economic for physical violence—economic violence being better known as “austerity”—while utilizing secretive forms of mass surveillance and media propagandizing).
All of which suggests that a view of American history that foregrounds the American ideal of freedom for all (in the context, especially, of U.S. relations with other world powers) points to the conclusion that World War II was not a conflict between good (in the form of the Allied nations) and evil (in the form of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan) but a conflict between (as Orwell pointed out) the lesser and the greater of two evils. And, fortunately—as far as prospects for at least the possibility of international movement toward the goal of freedom for all—the lesser evil won.
Since World War II, the U.S. (in the name of “spreading freedom and democracy,” as well as in the name of “national security”) has invaded and occupied Vietnam and Iraq, starting wars the immorality and stupidity of which are now matters of broad American consensus. The other invasion/occupation was (and continues to be) of Afghanistan—justified by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—resulting in the longest war in American history (if you don’t count the Korean War during the 1950s, a war which was never officially ended).
And what these wars share in common is that none were defensive wars (even the invasion of Afghanistan being a war of retribution for 9/11 that could and would, in the opinion of many experts, have been better handled by policing and intelligence activities). The other common denominator of these wars (besides all the combatant and civilian casualties) is that the U.S. has won none of them, despite overwhelming military superiority.
And now, in the name of America’s “War on Terror,” the entire world has become both a battlefield and graveyard at the hands of American militarism. (The U.S. spends more on “national defense”—a euphemism for U.S. militarism—than the next at least eight nations combined and continues to increase its military spending.)
Less well-known foreign manifestations of American imperial power include the U.S.-engineered (viathe CIA) overthrows of democratically-elected governments in Iran (in 1953), in Guatemala (in 1954), in Congo (in 1960), and in Chile (in 1973), each of whose governments threatened the corporate interests of the U.S. powers that be (and all being succeeded by brutal U.S.-backed dictators). These are only perhaps the most obvious and undeniable examples of the post-WWII legacy of U.S. power in the world. Included must be the extensive U.S. financial and military support of dictatorships (which are, thereby, employed by U.S. taxpayers—via “foreign aid” used by dictators to purchase weapons from American arms manufacturers—to protect the corporate interests of the American powers that be) all over Latin America and the Middle East. The resulting social and economic misery has driven the ongoing exodus of immigrants to the U.S., which has made it increasingly difficult—and now, under Trump, bordering impossible—for those immigrants to find refuge from their U.S.-engineered social and economic misery.
My father’s military service in World War II, like the service of the vast majority of former and current U.S. soldiers, occurred without his consciousness of the role of that service in extending the power of U.S. corporate interests (which, together with the Pentagon, were called in 1961 by former U.S. general and Republican President Eisenhower, “the military-industrial-complex”) across the earth. (Which is not to say that the international struggle against the powers of fascism was not necessary but, rather, that it —like virtually all wars—produced markedly mixed results.) Like the vast majority of Americans, soldiers have been indoctrinated by the public education system and the mainstream media into the myth of American exceptionalism—more specifically, America’s mission to “spread freedom and democracy” to the rest of the world (indoctrination into said mythology being the unspoken function of public education, which the better public-school teachers have, against the prevailing winds of standardized testing, tried to subvert by instructing their students in how to think rather than in what to think). So many American soldiers are, as was my father, surely motivated by love of country, and increasingly, by the need—among ever-diminishing employment options—to make a living; once they enter combat, their motivation (according to their own testimony) becomes largely the desire to keep themselves and each other alive. And American soldiers bring American wars home with them in forms such as PTSD, brain damage from proximity to explosions, and increasingly widespread instances of depression and suicide.
Meanwhile, a growing number of veterans have come to question the part military service plays in upholding the way things are as orchestrated by the powers that be. And more than a few have come to believe—in the less-than-familiar words of Martin Luther King, Jr. (in 1967, one year to the day before his assassination)—that the U.S. government remains “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
And so, the conservative call to “make America great again!” amounts to a call to multiply that violence to whatever extent necessary to restore American economic supremacy over the world (thus, Trump’s threats to annihilate North Korea and Iran and to overthrow, by military means if necessary, the government of Venezuela).
The post-World War II experimental blending of capitalism and socialism—most notably FDR’s New Deal, which gave Americans Social Security, and LBJ’s Great Society, which gave Americans Medicare and Medicaid—did inject a measure of working-class freedom (via greater equality) into American imperial greatness: GIs (albeit almost exclusively white ones) were welcomed home from World War II with free college educations and job training and affordable home loans, so working-class families could own homes and look forward to retiring on pensions, entering an increasingly prosperous (though, again, largely white) middle class.
Nevertheless, the very government (New Deal and Great Society) programs that facilitated this relative prosperity were bitterly opposed by conservative politicians, both at the time and thereafter, who began immediately to chip away at the newly-forged political restraints on the power of the owning/ruling class. (The three surviving New Deal and Great Society programs—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—despite their overwhelming popularity among Americans, continue to be undermined by conservative politics.) This period of relative American progress toward freedom for all(albeit largely benefitting whites) began with unprecedentedly high taxation on the wealthy (a 94% tax rate on income over $200,000, equivalent to roughly $3,000,000 today), and it continued thereafter with unprecedentedly strict regulation of big business (neither of which, taxes nor regulations, keeping the rich from getting richer, albeit not fast and furiously enough for most of them). And this period of relative American freedom and equality was already beginning to end with the “Conservative Revolution” of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The freedom-loving Reagan’s theme was that “government is the problem not the solution,” which was a shrewd case of rhetorical misdirection, and which, thereafter, became the battle cry of conservative politicians, who invariably celebrated “the Reagan Revolution.” The conservative effort to “shrink government,” allegedly minimizing its costs to taxpayers, was never applied to the by-far-most-expensive government function, called “national defense”: this has meant ever-increasing tax giveaways to (and humongous profits by) arms manufacturers, whose alignment with the Pentagon has become foundational to the U.S. economy since WWII, fueling the maintenance and expansion of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.”
For Reagan, then, government surely was the solution—via military spending—to the problem of Communism; moreover, he didn’t hesitate to use government to subsidize corporations, in the name of “tax cuts.” Where government needed shrinking, according to Reagan, was in the New Deal and Great Society programs that had benefitted the powerless, and in the taxing and regulatory functions that had been providing Americans with some relief from the socio-economic and environmental ravages of capitalism.
The truth is that government will always be problematic as far as freedom is concerned because its role is always to decrease the freedom/power of some in order to increase the freedom/power of others. As such, it is a tool. The question is in whose hands the tool of government belongs.
In the hands of the powers that be, government will be used to decrease (and, if possible, eliminate) the freedom, by blockading the power, of the people, in the interest of upholding the powers that be and expanding their power. And conservative politicians do this by means of an incessant rhetorical assault on government itself, identifying “government” not with the military spending and corporate subsidies (aka, corporate socialism) that inflate the profit margins of their corporate masters, but with the very New Deal and Great Society programs that provide an increasingly limited economic relief to—in the interest of increasing the freedom of—the powerless.
In the hands of the people, by comparison, government is a tool, at least, to limit the freedom of the powers that be to oppress the powerless, and at most, to equalize power relations in the interest of a society in which all are equally free. A government truly of, by and for the people would certainly protect, for examples, consumers from false advertising about products and from toxic substances in food and drugs, and all members of society from polluted air and water. (The passing and enforcing of legislation for these purposes in the wake of the people’s uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, mitigating the physical and environmental assaults of capitalism, resulted in unprecedented progress toward the ideal of freedom for all; since the “Conservative Revolution” of the 1980’s [and subsequent corporate deregulation] unleashed the pent-up rage of the capitalist powers that be, the adverse effects on public health have been increasingly self-evident.)
But a people’s government would not merely protect workers (who, again, comprise the vast majority of “the people”) from wage and workplace exploitation, as well as racial and sexual discrimination and abuse. A people-powered government would advance worker-owned-and-operated businesses (the success of which, where currently allowed, has been remarkable and undeniable, the best-known example being Spain’s Mondragon; in 2017, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives reported that over 350 worker co-ops exist in the U.S., with a workforce of almost 7,000 and a total gross revenue of over 400 million dollars).
Reagan called government “the problem,” not because it was an instrument in the hands of the powerful to lessen the freedom, by restraining the power, of the people, but because he believed that government’s taxing and regulatory functions were lessening the “freedom,” by restraining the power, of the powerful way too much. And, of course, he proclaimed that corporate tax cuts and the corporate profits they multiplied would eventually “trickle down” to the benefit of workers/consumers. The fact that no evidence exists to support the “trickle-down theory” of economics has not kept conservative politicians from repeating that Reagan mantra up to the present day.
The brief period (1930s to 1970s) of government-supported freedom and equality in America occurred only in response to the bottom-up pressure of the theretofore powerless, organized in labor unions and independent political parties, all of which have since been virtually squeezed out of existence by the powerful, working through the U.S. government. However, before and since the New-Deal/Great-Society period when government participated in progress toward the freedom-for-all ideal of American greatness, moments of people-power greatness, usually in defiance of the government, have occurred: the movements for the abolition of slavery, for the eight-hour workday and for the prohibition of child labor, for women’s right to vote, for African American civil rights and subsequent movements (like the Feminist and the American Indian and the Gay Rights movements) for minority rights that extend to the present day.
Which is to say that America’s greatness has never been orchestrated from the top down—bestowed by its government leaders on its people—but, instead, always erupts from below, from the demand of the powerless for freedom, that is, for their share of the power.
The 40-some years of progress (between the New Deal and “the Reagan Revolution”) toward socio-economic freedom and equality in America was gradually yet decisively undermined and overturned by a conservative movement that deconstructed—always in the name of “freedom”—the system of government taxation and regulation that protected Americans from the corporate powers that be. American corporations have historically exercised their “freedom”—besides to provide a dazzling array of products for those who can afford them—to pollute the earth, air and water (profiting the American fossil fuel industry and all its dependents); to corrupt financial markets (profiting big banks, which get bailed out and become bigger whenever they return America to recurring economic meltdowns); to imprison masses of black and brown Americans (profiting all the industries that provide services to federal and state prisons, as well as the private prison industry); and to inflame international tensions (profiting American arms manufacturers). And these are just a few of the more obvious examples of the way conservatism has represented and furthered the interests of the powerful in America, all in the name of “freedom,” all at the expense of the people of America and the rest of the world. (Today, in its denial of the scientific consensus regarding global warming, observes Noam Chomsky, political conservatism in the form of the Republican Party poses the primary threat to human survival on the planet.)
All of which is to say that when conservatives cry out for“freedom!” they are calling for the removal of restraints (in the form of taxes and regulations) from, and therefore, the full restoration of power to the traditionally powerful in American society. The fact that this full restoration of power to the already powerful in the name of “freedom” has been resulting in a continuing reversal of whatever freedom/power the people acquired during the 1960s and 1970s is, of course, an indispensable part of the plan. This is because the more power to the powerless many, the less power for the powerful few, and vice versa. The result of the ongoing conservative movement to fully restore power to the powerful few is the increasing disappearance of freedom, that is, the restoration of freedom to the invisibility of the way things are as orchestrated by the powers that be.
The conservative argument is that the notion that “all men are created equal” means that “all” should be equally free—that is, left alone by the government—to use their ability and property (their power) as they see fit. Sounds like freedom for all.
But the conservative argument studiously ignores the fact that people are born into vastly unequal circumstances as far as power is concerned. And that the precious few born into socioeconomic power (i.e., members of the owning class) are thereby securely positioned—by nothing but the luck of being “high-born”—to go on to use whatever gifts and skills they may have—or may buy—to maintain and expand their power. And they do this, of course, at the expense of the many, who are born into relative degrees of powerlessness and, therefore, whose gifts and skills can typically only increase their awareness of their powerlessness. As a variety of historical figures have been given credit for saying: nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.
This has been the rule in American history. The rags-to-riches mythology of American capitalism is pure propaganda, actual examples of which being the extreme exceptions that prove the rule. Being born into power or, even more so, rising to power is confined to a chosen few, purely—even for the most gifted and skilled—a matter of time and chance. Which leaves the many stranded, to varying degrees, in powerlessness. And for the powerless, “freedom” is a mirage, a magic word that conjures up socioeconomic hopes and dreams that, for the vast majority, remain forever, frustratingly and heartbreakingly, out of reach.
The “baby-boom generation” (born between WWII and the late 1960s, and of which I am a part) grew up in the America of the New Deal and the Great Society, naturally assuming that the middle-class comfort that the (white) majority of us enjoyed was “America,” the way it had always been and would always be. (Our parents knew better, of course, having experienced the Great Depression.) Now increasingly the elders of American society, a good many baby-boomers look back on the America of their youth as the “great” America (even some who agreed—and may continue to agree—with the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s).
It’s anything but obvious to many baby-boomers that this “America” only shortly preceded their birth and began withering away in their earlier adulthood, and that the voices that are calling so loudly for the restoration of the greatness of America, in the name of “freedom,” were crying out equally as loudly against the New Deal and Great Society programs (which those voices indignantly, and accurately, called “socialism”) that redistributed the power (moving closer to the freedom for all) that produced that middle-class prosperity that we grew up with. (Of course, the vast majority of the African and Latin and Native Americans of the baby-boom generation tend to have no such illusions about American greatness, as America has never been so great for them.)
Conservatism, in sum, has always aligned itself with the traditionally powerful and, therefore necessarily, against freedom for all—i.e., people-power/democracy—throughout its political history, being the advance guard for the protection of Madison’s “minority of the opulent.” All, of course, in the name of “freedom.”
The question remains, then, who in American politics stands for the powerless and against the powers that be? Who among them understand American greatness in terms of freedom for all?
(And, however regrettably, the answer is not, generally speaking, the Democratic Party.)
(Next: Understanding Freedom: Freedom and Politics-Part 2)
Understanding Freedom: Freedom and Politics – Part 1
© Robert Orwell Hand – (Reprinted with Permission)
https://understandingthings.net/2019/...
In the United States, the political world is superficially divided in terms of the two-party system: Republicans (ostensibly, the defenders of “freedom”) vs. Democrats (ostensibly, the defenders of “equality”).
In deeper and far more revealing terms—terms that include the economic and social, and even spiritual, dimensions of freedom—the political sphere divides not into the interests of the two opposing political parties but into the interests of the powerful vs. the interests of the powerless.Only as political parties and ideologies are analyzed in light of relative power relations can they be adequately understood in regard to the subject of freedom.
While what are called “conservatives” like to present themselves as the champions of “freedom” (especially when it comes to the economics of “free enterprise,” “the free market,” and “free trade”), the political reality is that the freedom they champion is the exclusive property of the powers that be.
Conservatives (virtually all Republicans and various others) avowedly wish to conserve the America of times past: in the words of Donald Trump (adopted by the Republican party since his 2016 election to the presidency): to “make America great again!” This conservative slogan assumes that America has fallen from a state of past greatness to which it can only be restored with the proper—that is to say, with conservative—leadership. The question insofar as freedom is concerned is: What is the relation between the conservative ideal of greatness and the ideal of freedom for all?
The conservative elements of the judiciary (now in the majority of the Supreme Court) generally subscribe to the judicial philosophy of “constitutional originalism,” meaning that the U.S. Constitution must be interpreted according to the perceived original intent of the framers of the constitution. Which, in effect, deifies and consecrates the “intent” of aristocratic white, male land-owners (and, mostly, slave-owners), who inarguably did not approach their task from the points of view of women, slaves, or natives, nor of landless white males for that matter, all of whom were, nonetheless, ideally included in Jefferson’s bold declaration that “all men are created equal.” The founders—all brilliant men of their time and place—naturally approached their task from the point of view of their class (despite the opportunity and encouragement to adopt a more democratic point of view under the influence of Thomas Paine: see his Common Sense and The Rights of Man). Which is to say that their concern with the relationship between freedom and equality seems to have been (in Orwell’s phrase from Animal Farm) that some be “more equal” than others.
Nevertheless, by signing on to the Declaration of Independence, with its “self-evident” assertion “that all men are created equal,” they set a high bar for judging the greatness of the nation. And in that light, it’s difficult not to conclude that the increasing number of federal and Supreme Court judges who adhere to “constitutional originalism” intend to conserve the aristocratic values and, therefore, the power of the owning/ruling class that originally framed the constitution, to the detriment of the framers’ highest ideal of freedom for all.
The conservative vision of American greatness seems best understood in terms of national power, that is, the power to impose “U.S. interests”—typically shorthand for U.S. corporate interests throughout American history—on the rest of the world. After seizing the lands of and subduing its American Indian and Mexican populations, the U.S. government swiftly began to expand its rule off the shores of the continental U.S. and to deepen its rule over Latin America (“rule,” in these cases, being primarily economic but, when perceived necessary, also military). After World War II, the U.S. took the mantle of empire from Great Britain and extended its power into the Middle East and Africa (and elsewhere), becoming the senior “superpower” of the world (the Soviet Union becoming its chief, albeit junior, competitor).
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. remains the only superpower, but its international economic (though not military) power has gradually decreased since World War II. A restoration to the conservative view of national greatness—a view shared by all historical empires—would mean the renewed and expanded subordination of the world to the national interests of the U.S. (And, to be fair, this conservative view has been equally championed by so-called “liberal” politicians, who with few exceptions embraced a militaristic foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st.)
If, however, American greatness is understood in terms of the human goal of freedom for all, then making America great again becomes a far more problematic case to make. Americans who take an honest and unvarnished look at American history must struggle with how to reconcile the freedom-for-all ideal of American greatness with the relevant historical facts: African-American slavery (which lasted for nearly the first hundred years of U.S. history, and the legacy of which still beats down African Americans); Native American genocide (in the interest of expanding U.S. territory, eventually subjugating American Indians to relative parcels of their original lands called “reservations,” and ruthlessly suppressing native languages and cultures, the effects of which suppression they continue to suffer); Japanese American internment (during World War II, in which Japanese American families were transferred, in this case by a “liberal” administration with conservative support, from their homes and socially and economically quarantined in detention areas); the Great Depression (among other lesser economic meltdowns before and since, the outcome of unfettered capitalism, that is, the god-like freedom of the corporate powers that be); the McCarthy hearings (aka, the “Communist witch hunt” of the 1950s, in which the U.S. conservative political establishment tried to purge the government of New-Deal liberals, along with silencing the free speech of other leading and liberalizing change-agents in American society); the brutal and bloody states-rights opposition of conservative southern state governments to the Civil Rights Movement (a movement that was steadfastly opposed by conservative politicians, and only reluctantly and sporadically aided, by the then so-called “liberal” federal government). These are among only the more commonly-known historical episodes that decisively refute the claim that the ideal of freedom for all played any part in the conservative vision of past American greatness.
Once the ideal of freedom for all becomes the prism through which American history is viewed, the only way to view America as having fallen from a former state of greatness is to consciously embrace white supremacy and the oppression of the working class and the poor of all ethnicities. By the same token, to remain unaware of the unfreedom that has been perpetuated by the powers that bethroughout American history is to unconsciously align yourself with it.
The American empire that emerged from the ashes of World War II—and, more specifically, from the radioactive ashes of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan—seems to have been clearly preferable to the totalitarian alternatives, had Germany and Japan been victorious, or had the Soviet Union won the subsequent Cold War. (The term “American empire” may be objectionable to some, but the term “superpower,” which is commonly employed without controversy—or embarrassment—with reference to the United States, is clearly a euphemism for empire: The 800-plus U.S. military bases that stretch across the earth—an open secret seemingly unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans—bear silent witness to ongoing American imperialism, the economic and military forces of which gradually replaced the British Empire after WWII). But as unspeakably malign and inhumane as totalitarian fascist and communist world empires would have been, the intended worldwide reign of a capitalist empire has not only not furthered but, instead, has repeatedly frustrated the prospects of freedom and democracy for the world, and has gradually assumed a kind of capitalist totalitarianism of its own (which, when practicable, substitutes economic for physical violence—economic violence being better known as “austerity”—while utilizing secretive forms of mass surveillance and media propagandizing).
All of which suggests that a view of American history that foregrounds the American ideal of freedom for all (in the context, especially, of U.S. relations with other world powers) points to the conclusion that World War II was not a conflict between good (in the form of the Allied nations) and evil (in the form of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan) but a conflict between (as Orwell pointed out) the lesser and the greater of two evils. And, fortunately—as far as prospects for at least the possibility of international movement toward the goal of freedom for all—the lesser evil won.
Since World War II, the U.S. (in the name of “spreading freedom and democracy,” as well as in the name of “national security”) has invaded and occupied Vietnam and Iraq, starting wars the immorality and stupidity of which are now matters of broad American consensus. The other invasion/occupation was (and continues to be) of Afghanistan—justified by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—resulting in the longest war in American history (if you don’t count the Korean War during the 1950s, a war which was never officially ended).
And what these wars share in common is that none were defensive wars (even the invasion of Afghanistan being a war of retribution for 9/11 that could and would, in the opinion of many experts, have been better handled by policing and intelligence activities). The other common denominator of these wars (besides all the combatant and civilian casualties) is that the U.S. has won none of them, despite overwhelming military superiority.
And now, in the name of America’s “War on Terror,” the entire world has become both a battlefield and graveyard at the hands of American militarism. (The U.S. spends more on “national defense”—a euphemism for U.S. militarism—than the next at least eight nations combined and continues to increase its military spending.)
Less well-known foreign manifestations of American imperial power include the U.S.-engineered (viathe CIA) overthrows of democratically-elected governments in Iran (in 1953), in Guatemala (in 1954), in Congo (in 1960), and in Chile (in 1973), each of whose governments threatened the corporate interests of the U.S. powers that be (and all being succeeded by brutal U.S.-backed dictators). These are only perhaps the most obvious and undeniable examples of the post-WWII legacy of U.S. power in the world. Included must be the extensive U.S. financial and military support of dictatorships (which are, thereby, employed by U.S. taxpayers—via “foreign aid” used by dictators to purchase weapons from American arms manufacturers—to protect the corporate interests of the American powers that be) all over Latin America and the Middle East. The resulting social and economic misery has driven the ongoing exodus of immigrants to the U.S., which has made it increasingly difficult—and now, under Trump, bordering impossible—for those immigrants to find refuge from their U.S.-engineered social and economic misery.
My father’s military service in World War II, like the service of the vast majority of former and current U.S. soldiers, occurred without his consciousness of the role of that service in extending the power of U.S. corporate interests (which, together with the Pentagon, were called in 1961 by former U.S. general and Republican President Eisenhower, “the military-industrial-complex”) across the earth. (Which is not to say that the international struggle against the powers of fascism was not necessary but, rather, that it —like virtually all wars—produced markedly mixed results.) Like the vast majority of Americans, soldiers have been indoctrinated by the public education system and the mainstream media into the myth of American exceptionalism—more specifically, America’s mission to “spread freedom and democracy” to the rest of the world (indoctrination into said mythology being the unspoken function of public education, which the better public-school teachers have, against the prevailing winds of standardized testing, tried to subvert by instructing their students in how to think rather than in what to think). So many American soldiers are, as was my father, surely motivated by love of country, and increasingly, by the need—among ever-diminishing employment options—to make a living; once they enter combat, their motivation (according to their own testimony) becomes largely the desire to keep themselves and each other alive. And American soldiers bring American wars home with them in forms such as PTSD, brain damage from proximity to explosions, and increasingly widespread instances of depression and suicide.
Meanwhile, a growing number of veterans have come to question the part military service plays in upholding the way things are as orchestrated by the powers that be. And more than a few have come to believe—in the less-than-familiar words of Martin Luther King, Jr. (in 1967, one year to the day before his assassination)—that the U.S. government remains “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
And so, the conservative call to “make America great again!” amounts to a call to multiply that violence to whatever extent necessary to restore American economic supremacy over the world (thus, Trump’s threats to annihilate North Korea and Iran and to overthrow, by military means if necessary, the government of Venezuela).
The post-World War II experimental blending of capitalism and socialism—most notably FDR’s New Deal, which gave Americans Social Security, and LBJ’s Great Society, which gave Americans Medicare and Medicaid—did inject a measure of working-class freedom (via greater equality) into American imperial greatness: GIs (albeit almost exclusively white ones) were welcomed home from World War II with free college educations and job training and affordable home loans, so working-class families could own homes and look forward to retiring on pensions, entering an increasingly prosperous (though, again, largely white) middle class.
Nevertheless, the very government (New Deal and Great Society) programs that facilitated this relative prosperity were bitterly opposed by conservative politicians, both at the time and thereafter, who began immediately to chip away at the newly-forged political restraints on the power of the owning/ruling class. (The three surviving New Deal and Great Society programs—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—despite their overwhelming popularity among Americans, continue to be undermined by conservative politics.) This period of relative American progress toward freedom for all(albeit largely benefitting whites) began with unprecedentedly high taxation on the wealthy (a 94% tax rate on income over $200,000, equivalent to roughly $3,000,000 today), and it continued thereafter with unprecedentedly strict regulation of big business (neither of which, taxes nor regulations, keeping the rich from getting richer, albeit not fast and furiously enough for most of them). And this period of relative American freedom and equality was already beginning to end with the “Conservative Revolution” of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The freedom-loving Reagan’s theme was that “government is the problem not the solution,” which was a shrewd case of rhetorical misdirection, and which, thereafter, became the battle cry of conservative politicians, who invariably celebrated “the Reagan Revolution.” The conservative effort to “shrink government,” allegedly minimizing its costs to taxpayers, was never applied to the by-far-most-expensive government function, called “national defense”: this has meant ever-increasing tax giveaways to (and humongous profits by) arms manufacturers, whose alignment with the Pentagon has become foundational to the U.S. economy since WWII, fueling the maintenance and expansion of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.”
For Reagan, then, government surely was the solution—via military spending—to the problem of Communism; moreover, he didn’t hesitate to use government to subsidize corporations, in the name of “tax cuts.” Where government needed shrinking, according to Reagan, was in the New Deal and Great Society programs that had benefitted the powerless, and in the taxing and regulatory functions that had been providing Americans with some relief from the socio-economic and environmental ravages of capitalism.
The truth is that government will always be problematic as far as freedom is concerned because its role is always to decrease the freedom/power of some in order to increase the freedom/power of others. As such, it is a tool. The question is in whose hands the tool of government belongs.
In the hands of the powers that be, government will be used to decrease (and, if possible, eliminate) the freedom, by blockading the power, of the people, in the interest of upholding the powers that be and expanding their power. And conservative politicians do this by means of an incessant rhetorical assault on government itself, identifying “government” not with the military spending and corporate subsidies (aka, corporate socialism) that inflate the profit margins of their corporate masters, but with the very New Deal and Great Society programs that provide an increasingly limited economic relief to—in the interest of increasing the freedom of—the powerless.
In the hands of the people, by comparison, government is a tool, at least, to limit the freedom of the powers that be to oppress the powerless, and at most, to equalize power relations in the interest of a society in which all are equally free. A government truly of, by and for the people would certainly protect, for examples, consumers from false advertising about products and from toxic substances in food and drugs, and all members of society from polluted air and water. (The passing and enforcing of legislation for these purposes in the wake of the people’s uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, mitigating the physical and environmental assaults of capitalism, resulted in unprecedented progress toward the ideal of freedom for all; since the “Conservative Revolution” of the 1980’s [and subsequent corporate deregulation] unleashed the pent-up rage of the capitalist powers that be, the adverse effects on public health have been increasingly self-evident.)
But a people’s government would not merely protect workers (who, again, comprise the vast majority of “the people”) from wage and workplace exploitation, as well as racial and sexual discrimination and abuse. A people-powered government would advance worker-owned-and-operated businesses (the success of which, where currently allowed, has been remarkable and undeniable, the best-known example being Spain’s Mondragon; in 2017, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives reported that over 350 worker co-ops exist in the U.S., with a workforce of almost 7,000 and a total gross revenue of over 400 million dollars).
Reagan called government “the problem,” not because it was an instrument in the hands of the powerful to lessen the freedom, by restraining the power, of the people, but because he believed that government’s taxing and regulatory functions were lessening the “freedom,” by restraining the power, of the powerful way too much. And, of course, he proclaimed that corporate tax cuts and the corporate profits they multiplied would eventually “trickle down” to the benefit of workers/consumers. The fact that no evidence exists to support the “trickle-down theory” of economics has not kept conservative politicians from repeating that Reagan mantra up to the present day.
The brief period (1930s to 1970s) of government-supported freedom and equality in America occurred only in response to the bottom-up pressure of the theretofore powerless, organized in labor unions and independent political parties, all of which have since been virtually squeezed out of existence by the powerful, working through the U.S. government. However, before and since the New-Deal/Great-Society period when government participated in progress toward the freedom-for-all ideal of American greatness, moments of people-power greatness, usually in defiance of the government, have occurred: the movements for the abolition of slavery, for the eight-hour workday and for the prohibition of child labor, for women’s right to vote, for African American civil rights and subsequent movements (like the Feminist and the American Indian and the Gay Rights movements) for minority rights that extend to the present day.
Which is to say that America’s greatness has never been orchestrated from the top down—bestowed by its government leaders on its people—but, instead, always erupts from below, from the demand of the powerless for freedom, that is, for their share of the power.
The 40-some years of progress (between the New Deal and “the Reagan Revolution”) toward socio-economic freedom and equality in America was gradually yet decisively undermined and overturned by a conservative movement that deconstructed—always in the name of “freedom”—the system of government taxation and regulation that protected Americans from the corporate powers that be. American corporations have historically exercised their “freedom”—besides to provide a dazzling array of products for those who can afford them—to pollute the earth, air and water (profiting the American fossil fuel industry and all its dependents); to corrupt financial markets (profiting big banks, which get bailed out and become bigger whenever they return America to recurring economic meltdowns); to imprison masses of black and brown Americans (profiting all the industries that provide services to federal and state prisons, as well as the private prison industry); and to inflame international tensions (profiting American arms manufacturers). And these are just a few of the more obvious examples of the way conservatism has represented and furthered the interests of the powerful in America, all in the name of “freedom,” all at the expense of the people of America and the rest of the world. (Today, in its denial of the scientific consensus regarding global warming, observes Noam Chomsky, political conservatism in the form of the Republican Party poses the primary threat to human survival on the planet.)
All of which is to say that when conservatives cry out for“freedom!” they are calling for the removal of restraints (in the form of taxes and regulations) from, and therefore, the full restoration of power to the traditionally powerful in American society. The fact that this full restoration of power to the already powerful in the name of “freedom” has been resulting in a continuing reversal of whatever freedom/power the people acquired during the 1960s and 1970s is, of course, an indispensable part of the plan. This is because the more power to the powerless many, the less power for the powerful few, and vice versa. The result of the ongoing conservative movement to fully restore power to the powerful few is the increasing disappearance of freedom, that is, the restoration of freedom to the invisibility of the way things are as orchestrated by the powers that be.
The conservative argument is that the notion that “all men are created equal” means that “all” should be equally free—that is, left alone by the government—to use their ability and property (their power) as they see fit. Sounds like freedom for all.
But the conservative argument studiously ignores the fact that people are born into vastly unequal circumstances as far as power is concerned. And that the precious few born into socioeconomic power (i.e., members of the owning class) are thereby securely positioned—by nothing but the luck of being “high-born”—to go on to use whatever gifts and skills they may have—or may buy—to maintain and expand their power. And they do this, of course, at the expense of the many, who are born into relative degrees of powerlessness and, therefore, whose gifts and skills can typically only increase their awareness of their powerlessness. As a variety of historical figures have been given credit for saying: nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.
This has been the rule in American history. The rags-to-riches mythology of American capitalism is pure propaganda, actual examples of which being the extreme exceptions that prove the rule. Being born into power or, even more so, rising to power is confined to a chosen few, purely—even for the most gifted and skilled—a matter of time and chance. Which leaves the many stranded, to varying degrees, in powerlessness. And for the powerless, “freedom” is a mirage, a magic word that conjures up socioeconomic hopes and dreams that, for the vast majority, remain forever, frustratingly and heartbreakingly, out of reach.
The “baby-boom generation” (born between WWII and the late 1960s, and of which I am a part) grew up in the America of the New Deal and the Great Society, naturally assuming that the middle-class comfort that the (white) majority of us enjoyed was “America,” the way it had always been and would always be. (Our parents knew better, of course, having experienced the Great Depression.) Now increasingly the elders of American society, a good many baby-boomers look back on the America of their youth as the “great” America (even some who agreed—and may continue to agree—with the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s).
It’s anything but obvious to many baby-boomers that this “America” only shortly preceded their birth and began withering away in their earlier adulthood, and that the voices that are calling so loudly for the restoration of the greatness of America, in the name of “freedom,” were crying out equally as loudly against the New Deal and Great Society programs (which those voices indignantly, and accurately, called “socialism”) that redistributed the power (moving closer to the freedom for all) that produced that middle-class prosperity that we grew up with. (Of course, the vast majority of the African and Latin and Native Americans of the baby-boom generation tend to have no such illusions about American greatness, as America has never been so great for them.)
Conservatism, in sum, has always aligned itself with the traditionally powerful and, therefore necessarily, against freedom for all—i.e., people-power/democracy—throughout its political history, being the advance guard for the protection of Madison’s “minority of the opulent.” All, of course, in the name of “freedom.”
The question remains, then, who in American politics stands for the powerless and against the powers that be? Who among them understand American greatness in terms of freedom for all?
(And, however regrettably, the answer is not, generally speaking, the Democratic Party.)
(Next installment: Part V. Freedom and Politics [cont.])
January 15, 2020
God and the Meaning of Life – Thaddeus Metz
[image error][image error]Cambridge University Press has just published a 62-page book by my friend Thaddeus Metz: God, Soul and the Meaning of Life. It is part of the Cambridge Elements series which provides concise introductions to many academic topics in the arts and sciences. Here is the description of the book from its back cover:
This Element critically explores the potential relevance of God or a soul for life’s meaning as discussed in recent Anglo-American philosophical literature. There have been four broad views: God or a soul is necessary for meaning in our lives; neither is necessary for it; one or both would greatly enhance the meaning in our lives; one or both would substantially detract from it. This Element familiarizes readers with all four positions, paying particular attention to the latter two …
The binary views that meaning completely depends or doesn’t depend at all on a God or soul are familiar to many. Fewer are familiar with more recent views such as 1) the view among supernaturalists that meaning in life isn’t impossible without a God or soul but the existence of one or more of them greatly enhances meaning; or 2) the view that a God or soul would actually detract from life’s meaning. Professor Metz isn’t defending any specific conclusion in these matters; rather his aim is to contribute to the discussion by clarifying the issues involved.
Professor Metz is Humanities Research Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of around one hundred professional journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, on a variety of topics in ethical, political, and legal philosophy. He is also one of the foremost scholars today on the topic of the meaning of life. (His major works on this topic include Meaning in Life[image error] (Oxford); Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide (Wiley-Blackwell); and the superb entry on the meaning of life in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His is perhaps the best and most impartial guide to these matters alive today. I highly recommend this work.
January 12, 2020
Understanding Freedom: Chapter 2 (Part 2) – Freedom & Government
© Robert Orwell Hand – (Reprinted with Permission) https://understandingthings.net/2019/...
Virtually everyone knows, and most of us would at least pay lip service to, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But another “Golden Rule” seems to correspond far more directly with most people’s lived experience: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
Which is just another way of saying that the powers that be decide the way things are. And to protect and preserve their prerogative to do so, they organize the way things are so as to indoctrinate the people without the gold into believing that the way things are is preordained, and so, that resistance is futile. This is accomplished systematically by such institutions as public education (despite the best subversive efforts of many excellent teachers) and organized religion (which, with some exceptions, habitually confuses the powers that be with “the will of God”). From the medieval religious doctrine of “the divine right of kings” to the modern economic doctrine of “irresistible market forces,” the way things are is clothed in the robes of omnipotence and omnipresence.
And so, the way things are is such that the freedom of the few (the owners) depends on the slavery of the many (the workers), who are indoctrinated—by the education system, organized religion and the mainstream media—into believing that they are free. This kind of governing system is called “capitalist democracy.” What it means is that the owners have bought the government (most obviously but not only, by funding political campaigns) whereby they offer the electorate a choice between candidates who (regardless of party) are beholden to them.
As a result, the government becomes the instrument of the owning class, which ensures that government policies and priorities not only allow but also enable the owners, in the name of “economic freedom,” to take virtually full possession of the wealth produced by workers.
The owners maximize their profits by paying their workers as little as they can and charging consumers as much as they can (and since workers and consumers are the same people, they get screwed on both ends). This concentration of economic power is called capitalism (the ideology, ipso facto, shared by the owning class). By securing economic power in the hands of the owning class (i.e., the few), capitalism assures that the working class (i.e., the many) remains economically and, therefore, politically powerless.
The ostensible function of labor unions is to access the potential leverage of the many (the workers) over the few (the owners), primarily through the threat of strikes. But, after (and because of) significant early-to-mid-20th century victories in improving working conditions and increasing workers’ wages, labor unions have been effectively suppressed and co-opted to the point of near impotence by America’s owning class via government domestic policy.
The division between the owning/ruling class and the working/serving class is, of course, more complicated, in that small business owners are typically also workers, who employ themselves to participate in the labor for which they also employ a relatively small group of others; these owners/workers, as far as political power is concerned, find themselves among the working class rather than the owning class. That is, unless and until (and against the odds) they grow their businesses to the epic proportions that could elevate them to owning-class status, in which case they will likely be bought out by one or another already-big business to which they have become an economic threat. Thus the creation and expansion of monopolies (exposing the fact that capitalism is only about competition until the winners buy out their competitors, thus disposing of the competition). Which is to say that the owning/ruling class, while not altogether impenetrable, seems determined to remain as few as possible.
Capitalists love to identify capitalism with freedom: free enterprise, free markets, free trade. What the rhetoric of capitalism carefully omits is the fact that its brand of “freedom” is strictly limited to the capitalists themselves: the owners who turn what they can of what they own into capital, that is, into sources of revenue. Their “freedom” is the unhindered power to acquire and possess and employ whatever sources of revenue they can and will for the purpose of acquiring the maximum profit therefrom.
And the owning class justifiably, in its own eyes, exploits the working class because owners see themselves as superior to workers; rather than viewing workers as their equals (as if they were really supposed to believe that “all men are created equal”), owners used to call themselves their workers’ “betters.” And the proof of their superiority (in their eyes) is their wealth, despite the fact that, in a growing majority of cases, that wealth is inherited rather than earned. And, of course, even when earned, their wealth is “earned” by the toil of workers, who are typically viewed by owners as—at least potentially—lazy, shiftless and dishonest. A point of view, again, that serves to justify owners’ exploitation of their workers.
Of course, workers are “free,” but only to sell their labor (assuming they can find owners who will buy it) or face the consequences of unemployment. Consumers are “free” to buy what they can afford (based, of course, on the wages the owners pay them as workers). For their part, owners are free (barring government “infringements,” such as a minimum wage, on their freedom) to pay their workers as little as they can, with little or no regard for their workers’ wants and needs, either within or outside of the workplace, and charge consumers (who are, again, mostly workers) as much as they can. And this, for products made as cheaply as possible, at further expense to the health and well-being of both workers and consumers.
A perusal of the history of the powers that be, at least in Western Civilization, suggests that the former place of kings and emperors—always buttressed by power-worshiping religious establishments and their ability to extract wealth from and instill subservience in the masses—has been taken not so much by the presidents and dictators of the world, but rather by the capitalists who own the global corporations—the financing and manufacturing conglomerates—that pull the strings of the governments, whether democracies or dictatorships, now in the name of “free markets.” What is called “globalization” amounts to the effort to incorporate the entire world into the Western capitalist orbit, all in the name of the “freedom” of capitalists—with the perennial support of many religious establishments—to pillage and plunder the planet. Capitalist “freedom,” then, is a euphemism for greed.
Many actual and aspiring capitalists deny the equation of capitalism with greed on the grounds that owners with moral and social conscience exist who adequately, and even generously, compensate their workers. To whatever extent this may be true, however, capitalism as a system bends owners decisively toward the priority of profit at the expense of whatever (or whoever, in the case of workers and consumers), would threaten to lessen or limit profits. Which is to say that the system itself preys upon the moral weaknesses of owners, the most powerful of whom—and, therefore, those in position to do the most damage—live at such a social distance from everyday people that their ability to empathize (integral to a moral and social conscience) has withered away under the heavy hand of their wealth.
And, of course, some capitalists (and their Wall Street enablers) have joyfully sold their souls to Mammon, inspired even yet by the Reagan-era ethic: “Greed is good!”
No one, of course, can deny the dazzling array of products that the engines of capitalism have made available to consumers (to those, again, who can afford them). Neither can anyone deny the rise of the advertising industry, whose function is to subconsciously persuade consumers that they need those products, even if they must consign themselves to unending and unpayable debt to acquire them. Whatever the benefits of capitalism, its costs to the quality of human life (and the quantity of human lives) are increasingly evident.
And within capitalism lie the seeds of its own demise. When the mass of workers are underpaid to the extent that they, as consumers, cannot afford to purchase the collective fruit of their own collective labor from their owners, the system is plunged into a crisis of over-production and under-distribution. When workers/consumers are trapped in a vicious cycle of unpayable debt, the bottom eventually falls out of an increasingly financialized economy. And the U.S. government (increasingly since the 1970s) worsens the problem (as it did in 2008) by bailing out banks and corporations while allowing the working class to sink ever deeper into economic despair.
Thus the necessity of government regulation of capitalism—that is, restraints on the “freedom” of capitalists, if only in the interest of saving capitalism from itself. But far more importantly to the vast majority of people, capitalism must be regulated in the interest of the safety of workers (i.e., safe working conditions) and consumers (regarding the food they eat, the cars they drive, the planes in which they fly, the water they drink, the air they breath, etc., etc.). All of this, combined with the endless, and inevitable, boom and bust cycle of even a modestly regulated capitalism (not to mention the increasingly unregulated capitalism that resulted most recently in the economic crash of 2008), would suggest that the ideal of freedom for all demands a better way.
But the political establishment carries on, by either demonizing (by Republicans) or marginalizing (by Democrats) socialism, as if there were no viable economic and political alternative to the capitalist system.
Critics of socialism point to the Soviet Union and Communist China as examples of socialism’s undemocratic character and, therefore, its incompatibility with freedom. These critics ignore the fact, however, that both of these so-called “socialist” states did not disperse power throughout the working class but, instead, concentrated power in their respective Communist parties, reducing the workers of their societies to servants of the state. George Orwell wrote (in his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm) that “nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country,” due to which “I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement [in England].”
Which is to say that “socialism” without democracy—as characterized the Soviet Union and continues to characterize Communist China—is not socialism in anything but name. (Noam Chomsky points out that shortly after the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and prior to the subsequent Russian civil war, Lenin began to dissolve the soviets—the worker councils that had formed to govern the new republic democratically—in favor of concentrating power in his own and in the hands of what became the Communist Party; after Lenin, Stalin simply consolidated and intensified the centralizing tendencies of Leninism, thereby producing the subsequent horrors of Stalinism.)
Another alleged problem with socialism is human nature: critics argue that workers would not be motivated to produce apart from the capitalist incentives, positively, of wage increases and the “upward mobility” provided by the hierarchical (i.e., top-down) capitalist system and, negatively, of the fear of losing their jobs. This argument has no answer, however, for the question of why workers who jointly owned the companies in which they worked would not be fully motivated to use their gifts and skills to make their companies as productive as possible, while at the same time protecting their communities from the environmental and social damage so often caused by capitalist “free enterprise.” (The increasingly successful rise of “co-ops,” that is, worker-owned enterprises, in both the U.S. and Europe is a potent counterargument to disingenuous critiques of the impracticality and unfeasibility of socialism as an economic system.)
Most importantly, perhaps, critics of socialism have no answer for the question of how democracy, a political system that identifies “freedom” with the power of the many (who work), can co-exist with capitalism, an economic system that identifies “freedom” with the power of the few (who own). In historical fact, the pressure of democratic movements (i.e., movements of the people: women, blacks, natives, environmentalists, and other working people) has been the only counterweight to the overriding tendency of capitalism, in its all-consuming drive for profit, to commodify all aspects of American life, placing a profit-value on every person, place and thing. (For a wealth of detailed examples of people-powered movements, see Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.)
In the U.S., the powers that be have portrayed (through public education and mass media, among other purveyors of political propaganda) capitalism and democracy as proceeding together triumphantly in the interest of social progress. Which has been to paint the picture of the powerful and the powerless, singing in harmony and marching hand-in-hand into an ever happier and more prosperous national future.
American history is far more accurately understood as the unending—and grossly unequal—conflict between capitalism and democracy. And—as illustrated by the rise of fascism in Europe between World War I and World War II—the extent to which capitalism prevails over democracy is arguably the extent to which democracy is replaced by fascism (i.e., the authoritarian merger of government and corporations, characterized by white nationalism and militarism and imperialism, among other noxious -isms).
The unrestrained capitalism—that is, free enterprise, unregulated by government—of the early 20thcentury (in America, the “Gilded Age” of the capitalist “robber barons”) resulted in the worldwide Great Depression, the results of which included impoverished European workers turning from governments that had failed to protect them from the predations of capitalism to fascist dictators like Spain’s Franco, Italy’s Mussolini, and of course, Germany’s Hitler. These fascist ghouls promised workers a restoration of their dignity and status, at the expense, of course, of minorities and immigrants and dissidents, plunging Europe into World War II and resulting in the Holocaust.
The U.S. was spared the European turn to fascism in response to the Great Depression by FDR’s New Deal reforms—under the pressure from below of the growing organizations of American socialists, unionists, and communists—which promised and, to some extent, delivered economic relief to U.S. workers, who subsequently became the soldiers who helped the anti-fascist allied forces of Great Britain and the Soviet Union to win World War II. The injection of socialism into the American capitalist system—in the form of Social Security and government-provided jobs, along with the dramatic raising of taxes on the wealthy and the strict regulation of corporations—in the aftermath of World War II resulted in the birth and growth of a prosperous (albeit almost exclusively white) American middle class.
No sooner had this unprecedented rise of the working class to relative prosperity begun, however, then the powers that be—unwilling to be denied any measure of their prerogative to orchestrate the way things are—began demonizing and deconstructing the forces of capitalist reform. The socialist, unionist and communist organizations, and their allies in the education system and the entertainment industry, were ruthlessly repressed by the U.S. government via the “Communist witch hunt” of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s. Despite the counter-cultural anti-war and civil-rights social uprisings of the 1960s, by the end of the 1970s the powers that be had succeeded in shaking off the regulatory chains that had been imposed on the American capitalist beast.
The result was the gradual return to, and intensification of, the “freedom” of the powers that be to financialize and commodify all aspects of human existence—now known as “neoliberalism.” In turn have come levels of income inequality not seen since before (and that resulted in) the Great Depression, increasingly destructive climate-change events, and endless warfare across the face of the earth.
And just as in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929, so with the Great Recession of 2008 has erupted a global turn to fascism, the inevitable outcome whenever the powers that be are fully unleashed: allowed the freedom to organize the way things are precisely as they wish them to be.
But this time, instead of a New Deal that would provide enough socialism to persuade U.S. workers to reject their fascist impulses (i.e., the dark side of human nature), they have been offered an American brand of neo-fascism in the form of an arch-capitalist, President Donald Trump.
In sum, contrary to the unrelenting rhetorical efforts of the powerful to characterize socialism as the enemy of freedom, the practical reality is, quite simply, that socialism is economic democracy: the freedom/power of the people over their own working lives (work consuming the vast majority of people’s waking hours and, therefore, their lives). In that the vast majority of people are workers, the power of the people in economic terms translates to the power of workers. The more power workers in a society have over their labor and its fruits, the more democratic is that society. Which is to say, the freer is that society.
A functioning democracy, then, consists of ways and means of diffusing socioeconomic-and-political power among all the people, and dissolving concentrations of power in the hands of individuals or groups, in the interest of “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Which is to say, in the interest of freedom for all. Bringing this about—or, as per usual, sabotaging every effort to do so—is what politics is all about.
(Next: Understanding Freedom: Freedom and Politics-Part 1)
Understanding Freedom: Freedom & Government – Part 2
© Robert Orwell Hand – (Reprinted with Permission) https://understandingthings.net/2019/...
Virtually everyone knows, and most of us would at least pay lip service to, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But another “Golden Rule” seems to correspond far more directly with most people’s lived experience: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
Which is just another way of saying that the powers that be decide the way things are. And to protect and preserve their prerogative to do so, they organize the way things are so as to indoctrinate the people without the gold into believing that the way things are is preordained, and so, that resistance is futile. This is accomplished systematically by such institutions as public education (despite the best subversive efforts of many excellent teachers) and organized religion (which, with some exceptions, habitually confuses the powers that be with “the will of God”). From the medieval religious doctrine of “the divine right of kings” to the modern economic doctrine of “irresistible market forces,” the way things are is clothed in the robes of omnipotence and omnipresence.
And so, the way things are is such that the freedom of the few (the owners) depends on the slavery of the many (the workers), who are indoctrinated—by the education system, organized religion and the mainstream media—into believing that they are free. This kind of governing system is called “capitalist democracy.” What it means is that the owners have bought the government (most obviously but not only, by funding political campaigns) whereby they offer the electorate a choice between candidates who (regardless of party) are beholden to them.
As a result, the government becomes the instrument of the owning class, which ensures that government policies and priorities not only allow but also enable the owners, in the name of “economic freedom,” to take virtually full possession of the wealth produced by workers.
The owners maximize their profits by paying their workers as little as they can and charging consumers as much as they can (and since workers and consumers are the same people, they get screwed on both ends). This concentration of economic power is called capitalism (the ideology, ipso facto, shared by the owning class). By securing economic power in the hands of the owning class (i.e., the few), capitalism assures that the working class (i.e., the many) remains economically and, therefore, politically powerless.
The ostensible function of labor unions is to access the potential leverage of the many (the workers) over the few (the owners), primarily through the threat of strikes. But, after (and because of) significant early-to-mid-20th century victories in improving working conditions and increasing workers’ wages, labor unions have been effectively suppressed and co-opted to the point of near impotence by America’s owning class via government domestic policy.
The division between the owning/ruling class and the working/serving class is, of course, more complicated, in that small business owners are typically also workers, who employ themselves to participate in the labor for which they also employ a relatively small group of others; these owners/workers, as far as political power is concerned, find themselves among the working class rather than the owning class. That is, unless and until (and against the odds) they grow their businesses to the epic proportions that could elevate them to owning-class status, in which case they will likely be bought out by one or another already-big business to which they have become an economic threat. Thus the creation and expansion of monopolies (exposing the fact that capitalism is only about competition until the winners buy out their competitors, thus disposing of the competition). Which is to say that the owning/ruling class, while not altogether impenetrable, seems determined to remain as few as possible.
Capitalists love to identify capitalism with freedom: free enterprise, free markets, free trade. What the rhetoric of capitalism carefully omits is the fact that its brand of “freedom” is strictly limited to the capitalists themselves: the owners who turn what they can of what they own into capital, that is, into sources of revenue. Their “freedom” is the unhindered power to acquire and possess and employ whatever sources of revenue they can and will for the purpose of acquiring the maximum profit therefrom.
And the owning class justifiably, in its own eyes, exploits the working class because owners see themselves as superior to workers; rather than viewing workers as their equals (as if they were really supposed to believe that “all men are created equal”), owners used to call themselves their workers’ “betters.” And the proof of their superiority (in their eyes) is their wealth, despite the fact that, in a growing majority of cases, that wealth is inherited rather than earned. And, of course, even when earned, their wealth is “earned” by the toil of workers, who are typically viewed by owners as—at least potentially—lazy, shiftless and dishonest. A point of view, again, that serves to justify owners’ exploitation of their workers.
Of course, workers are “free,” but only to sell their labor (assuming they can find owners who will buy it) or face the consequences of unemployment. Consumers are “free” to buy what they can afford (based, of course, on the wages the owners pay them as workers). For their part, owners are free (barring government “infringements,” such as a minimum wage, on their freedom) to pay their workers as little as they can, with little or no regard for their workers’ wants and needs, either within or outside of the workplace, and charge consumers (who are, again, mostly workers) as much as they can. And this, for products made as cheaply as possible, at further expense to the health and well-being of both workers and consumers.
A perusal of the history of the powers that be, at least in Western Civilization, suggests that the former place of kings and emperors—always buttressed by power-worshiping religious establishments and their ability to extract wealth from and instill subservience in the masses—has been taken not so much by the presidents and dictators of the world, but rather by the capitalists who own the global corporations—the financing and manufacturing conglomerates—that pull the strings of the governments, whether democracies or dictatorships, now in the name of “free markets.” What is called “globalization” amounts to the effort to incorporate the entire world into the Western capitalist orbit, all in the name of the “freedom” of capitalists—with the perennial support of many religious establishments—to pillage and plunder the planet. Capitalist “freedom,” then, is a euphemism for greed.
Many actual and aspiring capitalists deny the equation of capitalism with greed on the grounds that owners with moral and social conscience exist who adequately, and even generously, compensate their workers. To whatever extent this may be true, however, capitalism as a system bends owners decisively toward the priority of profit at the expense of whatever (or whoever, in the case of workers and consumers), would threaten to lessen or limit profits. Which is to say that the system itself preys upon the moral weaknesses of owners, the most powerful of whom—and, therefore, those in position to do the most damage—live at such a social distance from everyday people that their ability to empathize (integral to a moral and social conscience) has withered away under the heavy hand of their wealth.
And, of course, some capitalists (and their Wall Street enablers) have joyfully sold their souls to Mammon, inspired even yet by the Reagan-era ethic: “Greed is good!”
No one, of course, can deny the dazzling array of products that the engines of capitalism have made available to consumers (to those, again, who can afford them). Neither can anyone deny the rise of the advertising industry, whose function is to subconsciously persuade consumers that they need those products, even if they must consign themselves to unending and unpayable debt to acquire them. Whatever the benefits of capitalism, its costs to the quality of human life (and the quantity of human lives) are increasingly evident.
And within capitalism lie the seeds of its own demise. When the mass of workers are underpaid to the extent that they, as consumers, cannot afford to purchase the collective fruit of their own collective labor from their owners, the system is plunged into a crisis of over-production and under-distribution. When workers/consumers are trapped in a vicious cycle of unpayable debt, the bottom eventually falls out of an increasingly financialized economy. And the U.S. government (increasingly since the 1970s) worsens the problem (as it did in 2008) by bailing out banks and corporations while allowing the working class to sink ever deeper into economic despair.
Thus the necessity of government regulation of capitalism—that is, restraints on the “freedom” of capitalists, if only in the interest of saving capitalism from itself. But far more importantly to the vast majority of people, capitalism must be regulated in the interest of the safety of workers (i.e., safe working conditions) and consumers (regarding the food they eat, the cars they drive, the planes in which they fly, the water they drink, the air they breath, etc., etc.). All of this, combined with the endless, and inevitable, boom and bust cycle of even a modestly regulated capitalism (not to mention the increasingly unregulated capitalism that resulted most recently in the economic crash of 2008), would suggest that the ideal of freedom for all demands a better way.
But the political establishment carries on, by either demonizing (by Republicans) or marginalizing (by Democrats) socialism, as if there were no viable economic and political alternative to the capitalist system.
Critics of socialism point to the Soviet Union and Communist China as examples of socialism’s undemocratic character and, therefore, its incompatibility with freedom. These critics ignore the fact, however, that both of these so-called “socialist” states did not disperse power throughout the working class but, instead, concentrated power in their respective Communist parties, reducing the workers of their societies to servants of the state. George Orwell wrote (in his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm) that “nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country,” due to which “I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement [in England].”
Which is to say that “socialism” without democracy—as characterized the Soviet Union and continues to characterize Communist China—is not socialism in anything but name. (Noam Chomsky points out that shortly after the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and prior to the subsequent Russian civil war, Lenin began to dissolve the soviets—the worker councils that had formed to govern the new republic democratically—in favor of concentrating power in his own and in the hands of what became the Communist Party; after Lenin, Stalin simply consolidated and intensified the centralizing tendencies of Leninism, thereby producing the subsequent horrors of Stalinism.)
Another alleged problem with socialism is human nature: critics argue that workers would not be motivated to produce apart from the capitalist incentives, positively, of wage increases and the “upward mobility” provided by the hierarchical (i.e., top-down) capitalist system and, negatively, of the fear of losing their jobs. This argument has no answer, however, for the question of why workers who jointly owned the companies in which they worked would not be fully motivated to use their gifts and skills to make their companies as productive as possible, while at the same time protecting their communities from the environmental and social damage so often caused by capitalist “free enterprise.” (The increasingly successful rise of “co-ops,” that is, worker-owned enterprises, in both the U.S. and Europe is a potent counterargument to disingenuous critiques of the impracticality and unfeasibility of socialism as an economic system.)
Most importantly, perhaps, critics of socialism have no answer for the question of how democracy, a political system that identifies “freedom” with the power of the many (who work), can co-exist with capitalism, an economic system that identifies “freedom” with the power of the few (who own). In historical fact, the pressure of democratic movements (i.e., movements of the people: women, blacks, natives, environmentalists, and other working people) has been the only counterweight to the overriding tendency of capitalism, in its all-consuming drive for profit, to commodify all aspects of American life, placing a profit-value on every person, place and thing. (For a wealth of detailed examples of people-powered movements, see Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.)
In the U.S., the powers that be have portrayed (through public education and mass media, among other purveyors of political propaganda) capitalism and democracy as proceeding together triumphantly in the interest of social progress. Which has been to paint the picture of the powerful and the powerless, singing in harmony and marching hand-in-hand into an ever happier and more prosperous national future.
American history is far more accurately understood as the unending—and grossly unequal—conflict between capitalism and democracy. And—as illustrated by the rise of fascism in Europe between World War I and World War II—the extent to which capitalism prevails over democracy is arguably the extent to which democracy is replaced by fascism (i.e., the authoritarian merger of government and corporations, characterized by white nationalism and militarism and imperialism, among other noxious -isms).
The unrestrained capitalism—that is, free enterprise, unregulated by government—of the early 20thcentury (in America, the “Gilded Age” of the capitalist “robber barons”) resulted in the worldwide Great Depression, the results of which included impoverished European workers turning from governments that had failed to protect them from the predations of capitalism to fascist dictators like Spain’s Franco, Italy’s Mussolini, and of course, Germany’s Hitler. These fascist ghouls promised workers a restoration of their dignity and status, at the expense, of course, of minorities and immigrants and dissidents, plunging Europe into World War II and resulting in the Holocaust.
The U.S. was spared the European turn to fascism in response to the Great Depression by FDR’s New Deal reforms—under the pressure from below of the growing organizations of American socialists, unionists, and communists—which promised and, to some extent, delivered economic relief to U.S. workers, who subsequently became the soldiers who helped the anti-fascist allied forces of Great Britain and the Soviet Union to win World War II. The injection of socialism into the American capitalist system—in the form of Social Security and government-provided jobs, along with the dramatic raising of taxes on the wealthy and the strict regulation of corporations—in the aftermath of World War II resulted in the birth and growth of a prosperous (albeit almost exclusively white) American middle class.
No sooner had this unprecedented rise of the working class to relative prosperity begun, however, then the powers that be—unwilling to be denied any measure of their prerogative to orchestrate the way things are—began demonizing and deconstructing the forces of capitalist reform. The socialist, unionist and communist organizations, and their allies in the education system and the entertainment industry, were ruthlessly repressed by the U.S. government via the “Communist witch hunt” of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s. Despite the counter-cultural anti-war and civil-rights social uprisings of the 1960s, by the end of the 1970s the powers that be had succeeded in shaking off the regulatory chains that had been imposed on the American capitalist beast.
The result was the gradual return to, and intensification of, the “freedom” of the powers that be to financialize and commodify all aspects of human existence—now known as “neoliberalism.” In turn have come levels of income inequality not seen since before (and that resulted in) the Great Depression, increasingly destructive climate-change events, and endless warfare across the face of the earth.
And just as in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929, so with the Great Recession of 2008 has erupted a global turn to fascism, the inevitable outcome whenever the powers that be are fully unleashed: allowed the freedom to organize the way things are precisely as they wish them to be.
But this time, instead of a New Deal that would provide enough socialism to persuade U.S. workers to reject their fascist impulses (i.e., the dark side of human nature), they have been offered an American brand of neo-fascism in the form of an arch-capitalist, President Donald Trump.
In sum, contrary to the unrelenting rhetorical efforts of the powerful to characterize socialism as the enemy of freedom, the practical reality is, quite simply, that socialism is economic democracy: the freedom/power of the people over their own working lives (work consuming the vast majority of people’s waking hours and, therefore, their lives). In that the vast majority of people are workers, the power of the people in economic terms translates to the power of workers. The more power workers in a society have over their labor and its fruits, the more democratic is that society. Which is to say, the freer is that society.
A functioning democracy, then, consists of ways and means of diffusing socioeconomic-and-political power among all the people, and dissolving concentrations of power in the hands of individuals or groups, in the interest of “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Which is to say, in the interest of freedom for all. Bringing this about—or, as per usual, sabotaging every effort to do so—is what politics is all about.
(Next: Understanding Freedom: Freedom and Politics)
January 8, 2020
Playing Poker
Before applying to graduate school at the age of 30, I had spent almost eight years playing a lot of (relatively) high stakes poker. I’ll begin with a disclaimer. I’ve hesitated to publish this post—it reveals my youthful immaturity and recklessness. But at the urging of my son-in-law, I’ll publish it nonetheless. So here is my story of playing poker.
In 1977, a few friends and I decided to play poker one night. The game was 10 cent limit. I think I won a few dollars and it was fun. As best as I remember the next night we played 15 cent limit. Soon we were playing $1 limit. Being a poor college student I quickly realized that I didn’t have the funds to lose $20 or $30 so I went to the library and found a few poker books. They weren’t good and also were dated.
Next, I went to a bookstore in the mall (remember when they had them?) and found Amarillo Slim’s Play Poker to Win: Million Dollar Strategies from the Legendary World Series of Poker Winner. (The link is to a revised edition.) The 1970s edition of the book I read didn’t have many details about poker playing but it was new and provide some good insights. Most importantly it discussed the game of Texas Holdem which I introduced into our game. This gave me an edge as no one else was familiar with it.
Soon a few of my older and wealthier acquaintances started playing pot limit with a $100 maximum bet. Being competitive I wanted to play in the game but didn’t have the funds. So I kept playing in the small game trying to build my bankroll. At about the same time, I saw an advertisement for a $100 poker book—over $400 in today’s money—How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker. (The book has evolved into Doyle Brunson’s Super System[image error].) I studied it closely and somehow got a few hundred dollars together and took a shot in the big game. Through a combination of luck and skill I quickly had about $3000. ($11,300 today.) Soon my buddies didn’t want to play with me so in January 1979, armed with my small bankroll and a BA in philosophy in hand, I took off for Las Vegas.
Brunson had written that the 10-20 Holdem game at the Golden Nugget casino was the toughest game in the world so I sat right down at it. I didn’t do well in the game so I started playing smaller limit games to keep my bankroll intact. I did play in one of the first Holdem tournaments ever held with a $200 buy-in. Of about 100 entrants I came in 10th but received no prize money. I also played in the side games of both the Super Bowl of Poker and the World Series of Poker. During my time in Vegas, I competed against poker legends such as Amarillo Slim, Puggy Pearson, Sailor Roberts, and Tom McEvoy. My problem was I’d make a little money, step up to a bigger game, and typically lose.
I did meet a number of memorable people in my time. A casino manager was very nice to me and gave me a job years later as a blackjack dealer. An older poker player actually discussed a little philosophy with me. And a Vietnam war vet with whom I became friends once asked to borrow a couple of dollars. I searched for quarters until he told me that $2 in Vegas meant $200!
The most memorable person from those days was a mobster from Detroit. I didn’t know his identity initially but multiple people told me to not leave the casino with him and told me of his mob connections. Subsequent experience and evidence confirmed that they were giving me good advice. Nonetheless, I spent a lot of time playing poker and conversing with this guy. He made his money as a con man in those days and he cheated me out of money a few times. I slowly learned not to be so naive.
After leaving Las Vegas I started a new phase of playing in the worst neighborhoods in north St. Louis. I played in high-stakes cash games in neighborhoods with some of the highest, if not the highest murder rates in the USA. This was extraordinarily stupid, but I was immature. I did encounter some scary situations—here is the story of the worst one.
We were playing one night with a guy who was obviously disturbed. I told my buddy that we had to leave because the guy was desperate and going to blow at any moment. But my friend convinced me there was nothing to worry about. (I wasn’t convinced but I was winning easily so what the heck.) We survived the night and left with about $2000 in cash as best as I can remember (about $8,000 today.) Needless to say a lot of cash to be carrying in a ghetto.
A few months later my friend called and screamed into the phone: “Did you see the front page of the paper?” (The St. Louis Post Dispatch ) I looked and saw a familiar face. The man I had been playing poker with murdered multiple people about six months later. Again I’m not boasting about his; I’m admitting my youthful stupidity. I’m lucky to have survived.
I played off and on for the next few years to supplement my income—avoiding the bad neighborhoods though. I did win consistently but games were hard to find. I wanted to go to grad school but didn’t think I could afford it with a young family. Then in 1984, I found some more big games. Soon I had about $6,000 (about $15,000 today.) This led to again playing with people I didn’t know and I was cheated out of all my money. This round of play culminated with a guy showing up at my door with (what appeared to be a gun in his coat pocket) demanding money. I never played poker again.
Still, we moved to Vegas in 1985 as I had a guarantee of a job dealing blackjack. But, even with poker rooms all around, I never played. I also had the chance to work one of the best-paying casino jobs at the time. Probably would have made six-figures which was a lot in 1985. But I didn’t want to deal cards and finally went to graduate school. I’m glad I did.
I do have a final story. Remember the Italian mafioso I knew? I hadn’t seen him since 1979 but ran into him in 1985. I asked him if he could give me some of the money he had cheated me out of. After all, I had a wife and 2 kids. He reached into his pocket pulling out a wad of hundred-dollar bills and said, “Sorry I’m broke.” He did buy me dinner again though! He also told me that he was now collecting for the mob—knocking on doors and asking for a cut of various illegal activities in exchange for “protection” if you know what I mean. By 1985 I was smart enough not to pursue this relationship. I never saw him again.
To reiterate I’m not proud of all this and was inspired to write it so my readers know I wasn’t always a (relatively wise) philosopher (although I always wanted to be.) But then it takes time to grow up—assuming I have. Yet I learned some things in those years about avarice, violence, and the like. I evened leaned on those experiences a bit in my post “Yes, America Is Descending Into Totalitarianism.” (The relevant material is toward the end of the entry.) I suppose I should be grateful for those experiences, but if I had it to do over again I would never play poker.
Finally, I’m glad I wasn’t held responsible for the stupid things I did when I was young. Research shows that our brains aren’t fully developed until age 25 or 30. This raises questions of, for example, why the young are given long prison sentences. We would be a much more civilized society if we were more lenient in this regard. The injustice of some being held responsible for youthful indiscretions while others, especially the wealthy, never being held accountable is depressing. But then if you expect the world to be fair, you will be disappointed; and if you think it is fair, you are deceiving yourself.
