Posts Tagged 'social contract'

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The Importance of Public Education

Published September 28, 2016 on Schools 5 Comments
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“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” So said Aristotle and likewise a number of others such as  St. Francis Xavier to whom the quotation is sometimes attributed. Even Adolf Hitler took credit for this quotation and recently an American billionaire speaking about the importance of early childhood education. Aristotle lives as his thoughts are being cribbed more than 2000 years later. To paraphrase another famous quote – a great phrase has a thousand authors and that’s because Aristotle’s statement rings true to this day, the proof of this pudding is the eagerness to destroy and privatize public education especially as seen in billionaires from Rupert Murdoch to Bill Gates, and right-wing politicians.

  It is inarguable that to be fully functioning responsible members of any society children must be properly educated, a process that is thousands of years old because it is indisputably vital to the community interest. Consequently, in our times, we must beware of the politicization of the public discourse aimed at disparaging public schools and public school educators.  How can authentic education happen when it is reduced to ingestion, regurgitation, and controlled performance not unlike the training of seals? We must ask how can an educative process take place when children’s noses are pressed against computer screens informing only themselves in a controlled, circumscribed, and contrived personal world and not always in a classroom with other children? We must also ask: What is the purpose of this recent interest in public education by people and groups that have no training and no expertise in the field? Can it be simply that Rupert Murdoch sees K through 12 education as a “$500 billion sector in the US alone” that is his for the taking with the help of ambitious politicians? Yes, it could be about money but profit is neither a humane nor a socially constructive motive. I believe childhood education must be more than that; a civil society depends on it.

If you wanted to control any society where would you start? With the health and welfare of the general public perhaps? Or maybe civil courts where well-paid insurance company lawyers beat back attempts to hold culpable parties responsible? How about ubiquitous universal surveillance of your activities, phone calls, and internet browsing? Controlling the public narrative is especially effective and important because so many people don’t look beyond what they see and hear in the media or the circumstances of their own lives; they often don’t look beyond information that confirms their beliefs or feeds their fears.

If you are in it for the long game wouldn’t public education be the best place to start your agenda? And what would the “long game” be about? I believe the long game is about social control.  Historically, while propaganda has been one of the central tactics used to create and maintain social control so too has childhood education. An often used tactic today is funding charter schools and taking money from traditional public schools. Couple this with a continual disparagement of public school educators who work long hours with pay that falls far short of their education and dedication who are replaced in many of the new schools with cheaper to hire staff who in many cases are not trained as teachers. In some states educational management organizations (EMOs) are running 30% of all charter schools and of those 16% are for-profit operations. There are also “virtual” charter schools where instruction is provided at home over the internet further distancing children from the socializing aspects of public schools.

The foundational conception of public education is neither capitalism or socialism, it is not about Republicans or Democrats, and it has never been, before now, about profit. Public education has always been about the development of each child as an individual to the fullest extent of their abilities for the ultimate benefit of society. Public schools are about Community, about Democracy, about civility. The antithesis of self-centeredness is Community and Community means all of us working together, learning and teaching, not grasping whatever can be at whatever cost to others, oblivious to an inclusive  social contract. Public education is where children learn and practice these values.

The proper focus of authentic education is not ingestion and disgorgement of information like trained seals clapping their flippers on command but a process of development that leads to critical thinking and life-long learning skills. Information can readily be absorbed when that information is relevant to human purpose and life as it is lived. I have been writing about this question for a long time, I taught about it for several years at one of the world’s great universities and it worries me to see politicians and non-educators controlling children’s lives as a form of self-promotion, as profit centers. It is well worth repeating now: it is what Aristotle was telling us so many centuries ago.

   

It’s About Groceries

Published September 21, 2016 Uncategorized Closed
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It seems at times that the world is what it must be like for a fly climbing a window pane. You can see it all out there but you can’t get to it. The window is transparent but, is what you are seeing the truth? How could you know? How could you be sure? Reality is itself a construct which you accept or not at your own peril. We suffer an opaque political system working overtime, as it does, to corrupt itself at every turn while trying to convince us it isn’t. The sensational hour by hour revelations about or for each candidate become a yawn for some people or raw meat thrown to a madding crowd for others. The final political question eventually devolves to how many times we must hold our collective noses and vote for a lesser evil before the political system crumbles into the darkness of chaos?

Required reading for one of the classes I taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Radical School Reform, was Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals”. It was published the same year I started teaching, 1972. I still keep the book on my desk and pick it up from time-to-time scanning through for a random jewel, perhaps a random memory. My favorite passage has always been the concluding paragraph. “The great American dream that reached out to the stars has been lost to the stripes. We have forgotten where we came from, we don’t know where we are, and we fear where we may be going. … When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We must believe that it is darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world we will see when we believe it.”

It is indeed about believing. We live in a complex world believing in, among other things, truth, equality, other people to fear, and something called “fairness”, and a world in which people are asked to believe in an economic system that favors a few at the disadvantage of many. As with religious dogma our economic belief system, Capitalism, may not be challenged in spite of clear evidence that it is destroying social contracts and the environment globally. If you doubt this you haven’t been paying attention to the exodus of American business to other countries, places where there are little or no health and safety regulations and pay scales that are a fraction of those in the US.. In many of those offshore countries workers earn less in a day than what Americans doing the same work earned in an hour. The irony, of course, is that those goods now being made abroad are brought to the US for Americans to “consume”. At the same time that the general public is being impoverished, infrastructure is crumbling across the country to pay for the perpetual and profitable war machine. It is reasonable, I believe, to ask what our values are as a nation when people are without medical care, and children without sufficient daily meals or a proper education? Are our voices not heard at the seats of power or are our voices simply inconsequential?

Capitalism, a zero sum enterprise that ultimately has only one winner has become both a belief system and an economic system. In the words of S.D. King in, When The Money Runs Out, “In reality, the financial system prices beliefs – and beliefs – not ultimate truth.” The economic pie is just one size and as someone else’s slice gets bigger someone else’s inevitably becomes smaller. In the end, regardless of Calvin Coolidge’s belief that “The business of the American people is business”, what really makes for a healthy equitable society is truth and the truth is about groceries not overseas bank accounts. It’s supermarket shoppers trying to put a meal on the table every day who are the real economy and who make the economy function; that’s what keeps a civil society alive and healthy.

Circling The Drain

Published August 27, 2016 Economics , on Society 5 Comments
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In mathematics there is a concept called Pareto efficiency, it describes the impossibility for one side of an equation to keep taking without depriving or diminishing  the other side. A common sense idea in which the losing side inevitably goes to zero. Because of the finite quality of available resources namely money, Capitalism is a Pareto efficient economic system – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In other words it is a zero-sum game – I win and you lose. This raises an interesting question: how can a so-called “Democratic” society  tolerate or thrive within a anti-democratic economic model? As a consequence of too few having too much too many have too little of this stuff to spend. It doesn’t require a PhD in Economics to figure out that if too few have to little to spend the general economy will suffer. So, a truthful Economics 101 should tell us that the imbalance caused by greed is a foundational cause of economic failure and, eventually, social collapse.

It is important to understand that aside from accumulating as much as possible, there is no moral or ethical code associated with the Capitalist belief system. To understand this consider: A pharmaceuticals company acquires the rights to a vital medicine which has been selling at $56.64 per dose they raise the price overnight to $317.82 for the same amount and at the same time raise the compensation of their CEO from $2,453,456.00 to $18,931,068.00. The drug went up 461%  and the CEO’s salary went up 671%. As they say, nice work if you can get it and pity the people who need the drug to survive.

Pick up any economics texts and you’ll be treated to an amazing variety of theories explaining why we had a crash in 2008 or why the world’s (and our) economy has failed to regenerate from said crash in spite of various governmental interventions. One theory after another is generated by learned professors at various universities and think-tanks. Of course none of this wisdom accords with what we experience in our everyday lives but it sounds profound. The reason why the economy isn’t recovering is actually quite simple – we live in a Pareto efficient economic system, that is to say, too few people have too much of available monetary resources and too many have too little.

The totality of economics can be expressed this way: 2+2=4 and 4-2=2 but more importantly, 4-4=0. That’s it, that’s the whole story in a nut shell. For all of us unwashed, economics is a simple matter of you either have it or you don’t. As of July of this year 13% of men between the ages of 25 and 54 have dropped out of the labor force consequently they don’t have any “it” to spend. The unemployment rate continues to hover around 4.9% of which 26.6% are considered long-term unemployed. Also, what the numbers don’t tell you is what kinds of jobs are available and what wages they are paying. Do they pay minimum wage? Can people support their families on this level of income? Can employed people afford health care? Is there such a thing as “disposable” income? Did you know that a large percentage of enlisted military families rely on food stamps or that the US has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the entire world? That’s real world economics, folks.

Capitalism is a dualistic belief system which, while promising fair distribution of material and social wealth, delivers quite the opposite. Now that 1% of the population owns 40% of the United States’ wealth it seems plain to see things are out of balance. Although many writers such as Thomas Piketty and Charles Lehmann, have produced incontrovertible evidence  of the imbalance, the general public seems to be in denial. To argue against inequality earns you various imprecations such as, you are a Socialist or even worse a Communist. Most using these terms don’t have a clue as to what Socialism is or means, it becomes name calling because Communists, are, as we all know, evil and totalitarian and who knows what socialists are?

Given the Pareto efficient aspect of Capitalism, the imbalance, cannot be treated with doses of feel-good Kumbaya or patriotic exhortations; eventually something has to give. A bigger question remains. When there is nothing left for the majority how long can belief in the social contract survive? Are we circling the drain? Inevitably we are going to find out.

It Can’t Happen Here

Published August 17, 2016 Books of Interest 2 Comments
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Book Review – “It Can’t Happen Here” – Sinclair Lewis

Yes it can happen here, and some would say it’s already happening. Written in 1935, Sinclair Lewis’ prescient novel, “It Can’t Happen Here” tells what happens to a country when people are complacent and compliant. The novel is an allegory, a morality tale, a story depicting the unquenchable quest for renown, power, and oftentimes wealth in a “go along to get along” complacent society. The story accords both with what is referred to as Big Man theory and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). The Big Man, often inflicted with NPD, dispenses favors, employment, and material gain to sycophants in return for loyalty and support. Maintaining the requisite plots and sub-plots requires a great deal of coercion and effort.

Lewis describes the pathology that infects both sides of the current Democrat/Republican equation as well as other organizations from local politics to labor unions. It’s a two way street. The “leader” generally requires obsequious feedback and loyalty and the followers require favors in return for their affirmation and adoration. Everyone in the game has a handful of “gimme” and a mouthful of “much obliged”. It often doesn’t matter what the actors receive so long as they get “something”; a vote, a ride in a limo, a free meal, or simply an “atta boy” pat on the back. Such “leaders” possess an innate primal instinct to identify and exploit weaknesses that is crucial to their success.

As the antagonist, Berzelius Windrip, climbs his way to absolute power the protagonist, Doremus   Jessup, whittles his life down to as low a profile as he can manage to avoid attention. Windrip, an ambition driven politician, eventually becomes the “President” surrounded by Yes Men and a vigilante posse, the CORPOs, who kill or jail anyone who opposes his and their rule. Jessup, a small town newspaper editor eventually loses his paper and thus his soapbox. Life in the small Vermont town in which most of the action takes place is slowly but surely reduced to imprisonment or sniveling obeisance. Dissenters are jailed or outright murdered by the newly ascendant former underclass CORPOs. Eventually the tide envelops Jessup — he is arrested and finds himself trying to escape into Canada.

The reader is encouraged to consider the following symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder as described by the DSM-5 diagnostic text and to ask yourself if you recognize any of these in the current political milieu.

  1. 1.   Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from others
  2. Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
  3. Self-perception of being unique, superior and associated with high-status people and institutions
  4. Needing constant admiration from others
  5. Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
  6. Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
  7. Unwilling to empathize with others’ feelings, wishes, or needs

The obvious parallels are manifested in Windrip’s startling resemblance to two of the current candidates running for President of the US and Jessup’s avuncular resemblance to a sidelined populist former candidate for President.  Yes, history does indeed repeat itself as I vividly recall the turmoil of 1968 and the populist candidacy of Eugene McCarthy. As you read this valuable prescient book I believe you’ll find yourself wondering if things ever actually change and what is our fate as a society if we cannot do better than this. Think of “It Can’t Happen Here” as an early warning call to action.

  Gliding Into Dreamtime

Published August 8, 2016 on Society Closed
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  We are not living at the dawning of a new Age of Aquarius. We are more living in a necessary Dreamtime. In the Aboriginal “Dreamtime” people connect to their ancestral past and to truth. Today, civilized populations live in a Dreamtime in which there is no truth, and no personal responsibility for the world as it is. There are others to carry that burden. It’s a simplistic cosmology populated with good guys and bad guys. It’s a philosophy that relieves believers of responsibility for the world as they find it; someone else has caused it, someone else will take care of it. Beliefs, dualisms, and fantasies govern this dream world displacing blame and handing off problems to higher supernatural authority.

The world we live in is defined by constant tension and turmoil between believing and knowing. Beliefs simultaneously energize and constrain, they have been the foundation stones of all social contracts from the onset of human experience to this day. Many common belief systems are religious and imaginary projections of characteristics attributed to other belief systems, other individuals – “others” in general. What people believe about anything or anyone often counts for more than what may or can actually be known or proven. Speaking to and stoking belief is a favorite tactic of politicians, demagogues, and despots. Scare people sufficiently and enough of them will follow you anywhere, even to war. History is a continuum of wars waged over beliefs.

Politicians peddle belief as much as clergy. Politicians pay pollsters sacks of money to determine what people believe and what they would believe. Politicians peddle what they learn back to you often via some well known “personality”. A lot of money and effort are spent crafting a believable Dreamtime pitch just for you, just for what you believe, just for what you want to believe. For the most part, this works. Why? Because people generally want their beliefs affirmed and when they hear it from a famous speaker they are validated. Demagogues are especially good at this form of salesmanship holding a fat thumb on the scales of truth.   

The belief / knowledge dualism is built into the humane psyche with belief being, in all probability, the most foundational survival mechanism – one that cannot be extinguished. The dualisms of modern life mirror those of past times. Life and death, wealth and poverty, good and evil, peace and war, health and sickness, gain and loss, power and impotence, justice and injustice. Fear is also belief, particularly with regard to mortality. The sixty-four-dollar question being, what happens after death? Belief in an afterlife, whether a welcoming host of heavenly angels with golden harps or a thousand virgins for every jihadist, is the anodyne of mortality. Belief in Heaven and Hell resolves the dualism of good and evil providing the ultimate distribution of justice. Death is the only unequivocal answer to your questions.

We have to question, I believe, the life expectancy of belief systems foundational to any social contract, capitalist or otherwise, that would impoverish and leave jobless formerly middle-class people.  In many communities across the United States, for example, there is no living wage employment in a vacuum left in the wake of businesses exiting for low wage foreign countries – nothing left behind but mortgage  foreclosures, and food stamps. Ironically, many full-time workers are relying on food stamps, their wages being insufficient to feed their families. In a final irony, some state Legislatures and Governors restrict or outright deny food stamps to those in need often subjecting them to humiliating drug tests. The same is true with subsidized health care and unemployment benefits.

We must ask how much destructive inhumanity any social contract can withstand before erupting into rebellion. The long glide into a dystopian Dreamtime will not be anesthetized by watching Archie Bunker reruns. It’s going to be painful.

Comes The Revolution …..

Published June 30, 2016 on Society 2 Comments
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Comes The Revolution

In the Broadway production of Ballyhoo of 1932, Willie Howard and his brother Eugene played in a widely popular Depression-era comedy routine describing the inanities of government programs in which a soap-box orator told some New York City bums about the glories of Communism. “Comes the revolution,” the orator declared, everyone will live the good life and eat strawberries and cream. “I don’t like strawberries and cream!” responded one of his listeners. “Comes the revolution,” the orator declared, “You’ll eat strawberries and cream—and like it!”

Many years ago I belonged to a unionized carpentry cooperative that framed buildings for general contractors. The cooperative was named after the Bolshevik great-grandfather of one of the coop’s founders, whose favorite rejoinder, adopted by our entire crew was, “Comes the revolution.”, complete with a dramatically rolled “r”. Nearly every carpenter in the group was a college graduate and at that time I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our conversations were lively and the politics ranged from liberal to revolutionary. We all entertained visions of strawberries and cream for the human race. That was a long time ago but I am still reminded of those conversations when confronted by today’s politics especially the multitude and variety of beliefs swarming within the body politic not the least of which are attempts to inject religious beliefs into the political discourse when the Constitution clearly states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”.

In these modern times the economic system, Capitalism, seems to have evolved into a quasi-religious political belief system. Like religious dogma, Capitalism may not be questioned without accusatory and punitive response in spite of clear evidence it is destroying social contracts, consuming and sequestering wealth in un-taxable accounts globally. Capitalism has become a belief system which, while promising fair distribution of material and social wealth, is delivering quite the opposite. Now that 85 people, according to Oxfam, own nearly half of the world’s wealth and closer to home, .01% of the US population owns nearly 40% of this nation’s wealth, it is plain to see things are out of balance and in a multitude of ways. Forbes, not exactly a left wing organization, reports that currently 76 million Americans are struggling financially. A Harris poll found that 43% of the jobless have given up looking for work and the US government reported that 94.7 million Americans are now considered as not being in the labor force. To argue against these imbalances can earn you various imprecations such as, you’re a Socialist or even worse a Communist. Many people who use these terms haven’t a clue as to what socialism is. It is simply name – calling because Communists and Socialists, are, as we all know, evil.

We have to wonder how long a life expectancy any social contract, Capitalist or otherwise, has that impoverishes and leaves jobless so many formerly middle-class people as their employers close and, in the name of profit, move operations out of the United States to places with little or no health and safety regulations and pay scales that are a fraction of those in the US. This past March the Carrier Corporation announced it was closing its Indianapolis air conditioning manufacturing and moving those jobs to Mexico at the loss of 1400 American jobs. Carrier moved jobs to Mexico where workers earn approximately $19.00 a day compared to, on average, $15 to $26 an hour in Indiana. The total annual compensation of the chief executive of United Technologies, Carrier’s owners,  is, by the way , $5.7 million. In many communities throughout the United States, especially in the mid-West, gainful employment is drying up except for low paying menial jobs – not much remains but mortgage  foreclosures, and food stamps.  There are many full-time workers who rely on food stamps as their wages are insufficient to feed their families.

Unemployment numbers are suspect as many no longer qualify and have dropped off the roles allowing politicians to cite low unemployment. In the face of this tragic situation several states Legislatures and Governors (most notably Maine), while touting their religiosity are even restricting or outright denying food stamps to those in need and subjecting applicants to humiliating drug testing. We have to wonder and must talk openly about where all this is going to end up. The national conversation needs to be about these things otherwise it’s going to be either, “Just eat your ice cream and strawberries and shut up!” or “… comes the revolution”. A choice is going to have be made by one way or another.

 

The Henny Penny Syndrome

Published May 14, 2016 on Society 1 Comment
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Do you remember Henny Penny, a.k.a. “Chicken Little”, who became convinced the sky was falling when an acorn dropped on her head? As a consequence of Henny’s alarm, a number of her panicked chicken colleagues were eaten by a wolf. All of this the result of just one acorn falling. It is only in the general, the sum total of a number of particulars, that we become able to correctly see larger patterns, the tectonic shifts in the social contract for example, and the proximate causes that tell us if the sky is really falling.  Presently there are very many particulars going around and it’s a challenge to properly identify, characterize, and project them as indicators of future possibilities. These days, if you pay attention to the news, it’s difficult not to be somewhere between the extremes of outrage and fear.

Are we, as a society, as cohesive and secure as we believe we are or are we kidding ourselves? Rousseau defined the social contract as a collective moral body and I think he would be challenged to find such in the United States today. Would such populist sloganeering and propaganda as “America First” or “Take Back America” be politically useful if large segments of the population were not feeling an acute sense of insecurity? It’s hard to judge from the extremes of protestation and acting out behavior going on across the country. Supporters of one populist candidate have staged violent demonstrations with out of control tempers, brandished guns, blows being struck, and people bloodied. Much of it seems to be about emotional racism and unarticulated class resentment.   

True Believers are striking out at the “usual suspects” those being people of color or non-standard sexual orientation. Where people pee is inspiring death threats. And while protestors seem inarticulate about their grievances and unable to describe what exactly the source of their angst is, they are certain their candidate will solve it for them. Given the enormous disparity of wealth and opportunity this is certainly not surprising.

Obviously when an economic system permits the export of well paying and even marginal jobs in search of people desperate enough to work for low wages, the inevitable consequence is unemployment in the society being abandoned. With chronic unemployment comes impoverishment, and with poverty the inability to sustain a viable much less a vibrant economy. Fear, resentment, and anger are the inevitable byproducts. People who are powerless resent their sense of impotence and tend to take their frustration out on others and politicians are ruthlessly taking advantage of this dynamic.

The present election cycle has exposed a deep body of unfocused acrimony and repressed anger caused by an economic system that has impoverished and disadvantaged many. There are company towns with no company. Angry Americans want a fence. But, while a fence might keep migrants out it certainly won’t keep jobs in.

At root, the underlying problem is the perception fostered over time that Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous. Capitalism, the driving force behind the foregoing social problems has achieved quasi-religious and patriotic status and is thus cannot be questioned. Capitalism has replaced Democracy as the foundation stone of our social contract. Social Democracy remains an experiment and not a delivered reality. Although the United States has never been a true Democracy it is even less so now. Oligarchy has existed far longer than Democracy and is going strong in this country concentrating wealth, influence, and power much more intensely and narrowly than ever before.

Experiment and experience derive from the same root, we experiment in order to experience an idea – imagination is the inspiration. An important quality of experiments is that there is no failure. We experiment seeking outcomes or results, it is a learning experience. And, brother, are we ever learning these days that Democracy remains an ongoing experiment. Maybe the sky is falling.

The Power Of Belief

Published March 19, 2016 on Society , Uncategorized 1 Comment
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The philosopher Donald Davidson once pointed out that, “Truth is beautifully transparent compared to belief …”. As human beings our vanity is that we believe we act rationally when, in fact, the vast majority of human activity is motivated by belief. Throughout the course of history social contracts have been based on belief systems regardless of truth, as for example, “… all men are created equal”.  No form of social contract, from so-called Democracy to totalitarian states can exist and function unless people believe its tenets, be they true or not. This necessary belief may be coerced or delusional, condign or voluntary, but is always foundational to all social contracts. It cannot be any other way. Because of this any discussion about social contracts must include what people believe in a specific social context, that is to say, their belief system. Liars, public and private, and politicians know and exploit this dynamic simply by telling people what they want to hear based on what they need to believe.  It’s how cons, in and out of politics, work their magic selling the Brooklyn Bridge.

The US government has already built, at not inconsiderable expense, a wall and fence along the border with Mexico to keep out people many of whom are refugees fleeing violence in their home countries. The GW Bush administration built around 670 miles of fence along the border at an estimated cost of $2.4 billion to keep people out. One former Republican presidential candidate, Marco Rubio, made fencing the border a major component of his campaign agenda. Not to be outdone, Donald Trump went Rubio one better promising a 2000 mile wall along the entire border and, he said, Mexico will pay for it. How do politicians get away with this nonsense? Belief – the belief by  their audience that such a fence will make them safe, keep out the threatening undesirable refugees (including children), and that Mexico will pay for it. It’s a con playing to ignorance. It’s a con. People have been playing to fear since white people first set  foot on this continent. Demonized Italians, Frenchmen, Poles, Lithuanians, Irish, you name them and just about every group that came to this country has been demonized at one time or another by a group that had themselves been previously demonized.  Every protester who now wants to pull up the gangplank owes their citizenship to an immigrant ancestor including those who came across the Bearing  Straits land bridge 16 to 13,000 years ago.

Recently a group of individuals took over a federal facility in Oregon, claiming their rights as “sovereign citizens”. “Sovereign” generally refers to royalty; however, as an adjective sovereign implies ultimate power, and in a democracy that supreme power is said to rest with the “people”. It is important to note that the group in Oregon consisted mainly of white males who were armed and who had, in this staged drama damaged or destroyed public property. So what do these protesters believe sovereign means? Do they believe they can enjoy the benefits accruing to citizens of the US without communal duties or responsibilities, a notion that has been regularly rejected by the courts? Their belief is strong enough for one of them to get shot to death by police and others to be jailed.

Perhaps one possible explanation to these questions lies in the power of false and contrived political identity born of a lack of a sense of authentic political and  social identity.  In short, they believe they have to declare themselves sovereign to be authentic. Another observable authenticity scam is the skilled use of false identity by politicians to divide their believers from others. Donald Trump is a master of this kind of demagoguery.  Fear is the belief system being appealed to no different from Hitler demonizing Jews. Believers are easily conned because what they are really afraid of is not truth but what they believe.

The Social Consequences of Injustice

Published February 4, 2016 on Society Closed
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Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, “Tragedy of the Commons” inspired a stream of writing by all manner of scholars particularly economists. The essence of Hardin’s thesis is actually a common sense observation that limited resources can tragically be depleted or destroyed when thoughtless unlimited use is made of them. When people disregard the consequences of their use and abuse of limited resources those actions invariably affect others who need or use those same goods. In other words, when people behave selfishly it is essentially anti-social.

 

Selfish behavior is a moral issue contrary to what two well known University of Chicago economists, S.D. Levitt and S.J. Dunbar claim. Their blunt appraisal is, “.. economics simply doesn’t traffic in morality.”; in their opinion it seems, any resulting inequality from over use of the commons has no moral dimension, an attitude which, in one form or another, seems to have become pervasive in our society and around the world. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Nestle, the largest food producing and water bottling company in the world, recently stated: “Human beings have no right to water.” If people want water they must buy it – preferably from him, of course. I suppose it is only fair to ask if is air next? We are living, it seems, in a time of unprecedented venality, an era of social behavior separated from moral consideration and consequence.

 

I believe the commons and the social contract are interchangeable. In a just society there is a relationship between the equitable distribution of wealth, justice, and economic opportunity as essential goods of the commons. Truthfulness and belief are also vital parts of that equation. A healthy functioning social contract cannot be a Potemkin Village of lies, injustice, and public relations flack. The two most corrosive recent Supreme Court decisions, the 2000 coronation of George W. Bush and granting corporations human status in 2010 were poisonous to the commons, to the social contract. As a result of the latter we have a Congress controlled by business lobbyists and not by any measure a Congress of the people. A society in which the wealth of six people in one family is equal to the entire bottom 30% of Americans is not a healthy society. A “Let them eat cake.” mind set didn’t work for Marie Antoinette; ultimately it isn’t going to work for today’s 1% either. Something is going to have to give either as a result of increased political consciousness or other less civil means. If the history of civilization is any guide, a tipping point will be reached sooner or later.

 

What demagogues of all stripes fail to remember is that there has always been a price to be paid when a critical mass of disbelief and inequality is reached. Lies have lasting effect and are inevitably found out either by disclosure or by turn of events. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently stated that voting rights are “entitlements”. Either he is ignorant of the Constitution, he doesn’t grasp the Constitution, or he is a bald face liar. There are no further possibilities and lying seems the most likely based on his presumption of stupidity on the part of the rest of us, or, in other words, his obvious arrogance. “The most irreducibly bad thing about lies is that they contrive to interfere with, and impair, our natural effort to apprehend the real state of affairs.” is how Harry G. Frankfurt puts it in his charming and insightful book, “On Truth”. Lies from the Supreme Court bench indisputably distort the “real state of affairs”.

 

What is the “real” state of affairs in this case? Here is the definitive statement of voting rights which Scalia and John Roberts want us to believe they don’t get:

15TH AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

[Ratified February 3, 1870]

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. 

The Massachusetts Secretary of State, William Galvin, in response to Roberts’ assertion during the trial that Massachusetts had the worst white to black voter ratio turnout in the U.S. gets to the heart of this discussion: “I’m disturbed, first of all, that he is distorting information. You would expect better conduct from the chief justice of the United States. I’m a lawyer, he’s a lawyer, lawyers are not supposed to provide disinformation in the course of a case. It’s supposed to be based on truth.”

 

Of course you would have to be new to the planet of you thought lawyers have a universal commitment to the truth. You might notice in a court proceeding that everyone must take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Everyone that is except the lawyers. I once questioned an officer of the Lawyers Disciplinary Board, a group that is charged with overseeing the conduct of lawyers, about this anomaly. I was told that lawyers may “interpret” in their speech to a jury. This assertion flies in the face of what is called the “Duty of Candor Before the Tribunal” to which all lawyers are required to adhere. Nowhere in the literature of the American Bar Association will you find an exception to this duty. In practice however lying is sanctioned in a Kafka-worthy “interpretation” by regulators. If truth is not the absolute coin of the realm in court where could it ever be? How could there be justice?

 

I agree with the social philosopher, Philippa Foot, who said, “… it makes sense to speak of those who are lovers of justice – as of those who are lovers of truth.” we must then conclude that the lawyering business has a questionable relationship with both truth and justice if their standard for truth is a moveable feast, fabrication in the guise of “interpretation” to suit their needs. As Mr. Galvin cast it, “… lawyers are not supposed to provide disinformation in the course of a case. It’s supposed to be based on truth.” I once conducted a simple survey of lawyers asking the question: “Is your duty before the court to seek justice or to win?” I never did get a straight answer. If the motto is “winning is everything” the corollary must inevitably be, “Society and Justice be damned.” It follows from this that not all people are equal before the law but rather it depends upon who has the lawyer most willing to “interpret” the “facts” in a manner favorable to the client.

 

A society cannot long exist without truth which is the bedrock of justice, it cannot long live a lie. In the final analysis the Social Contract is both a perception and a belief. When the substance of life in a society as it is lived is perceived to fail our natural expectations of truth and justice, our belief in the social contract is betrayed and cynicism follows; with that the commitment to the commons is destroyed. When there is no social contract it becomes everyone for themselves with all which that entails.

 

 

 

ABOUT JUSTICE

Published January 15, 2016 on Society Closed
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John Dewey wrote, “We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, Justice, or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, unique.”

Alexander Saxton wrote, “To move from the particular to the general is an exercise in humility because it forces one to recognize the particulars – even those privileged details one’s own individual existence – remain meaningless and essentially useless to other people unless they can be shown to typify, or illuminate larger streams of human experience.”

For a word that has been chiseled into stone monuments for centuries we could reasonably hope society would by now have the practice and understanding of Justice down cold. However, more often than not, as Justice is experienced personally but spoken of generally we struggle to find understanding in the “larger stream”. Justice is variously defined as being fair and being fair defined as being just and just as being fair and so on. For centuries thinkers and doers have tried to grasp and define Justice in all of its manifestations concretely. This philosophic and semantic project has haunted virtually all societies throughout history. Almost every philosopher from Plato’s argument via Socrates about just persons and a just state to Aristotle and onwards across centuries to John Dewey and Alasdair MacIntyre, Amartya Sen, John Rawls and Alexander Saxton among recent others, has given us a take on Justice.

If, over so many centuries, so many brilliant people have struggled for so long and so hard to arrive at a definitive exegesis of Justice what they have been seeking may not exist, at least not in a form they were hoping for. Justice in all its manifestations seems to be like beauty, living in the hearts and minds of the observers be they beneficiaries or victims. Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just? Only in the eyes of the perpetrators. It seems to me there is no such thing as Justice except as an everlasting quest for justification. In that case Justice will remain always a fluid and beautiful idea, an aspiration at that, but in the end there will be no absolute, it will always be, “ … specific, concrete, unique” to the moment.

First and foremost it is necessary, I believe, to acknowledge that Justice is a construct – a moveable definition which, not unlike a sheen of oil on water, changes century to century, culture to culture, moment to moment, observer to observer. Like belief systems, Justice is fluid, always in motion. There exists no concrete, immutable, definition of Justice – no demonstration you can point to, take to the bank, or teach the young. What is Justice for you can be injustice to your neighbors. It remains, however, the most appealing and illusive of ideas and much like quick-silver, “Liberty and Justice for all … ” slips away at the touch.

A few quick police pistol shots and an unarmed 12 year old named Tamir Rice received an instant irreversible summary Justice not found in a court of law but in a public park. By late 2015, police in the US had summarily shot and executed 1103 “suspects” of whom 161 were unarmed. In the US, police summarily execute people, generally people of color, nearly on a daily basis. Once dead the “suspects” no longer have access to any semblance of Justice. Why then do we pretend Justice for all exists? Because we must. Like Equality, Justice is an essential myth an illusion without which our social contract would be impossible .

Injustice is not only the taking of lives but the diminishing of lives as well given an economic system that systematically concentrates wealth to a very few and harms many. Throughout the United States economic injustice manifests concretely in hunger, access to medical care, education, legal representation, and opportunity often determined by the color of one’s skin. Like any manifestation of inequality, lack of Economic Justice is corrosive disease and eats at the heart and soul of society. In Louisianna the Governor recently removed 31,000 jobless people from receiving food stamps, in Wisconsin that Governor removed 15,000, in Indiana 50,000,  and in Maine 40,000. Whose definition of Economic Justice is this?  Whose definition of morality, humanity, and common sense? Adults, and even more, children who are not well fed and well housed cannot possibly thrive and succeed are thus condemned to a diminished existence and, as a consequence, with what kind of commitment to a social contract? 

In courts of law Justice has fast become the last thing sought – winning is the goal. Prosecutors, with a firm thumb on the scales of Justice, are especially fond of, ex parte proceedings in police shooting cases where no contrary testimony is permitted. I once surveyed a fairly disparate group of lawyers with the question: “At trial what is most important to you – winning or Justice?” Needless to say, I suppose, winning was the winner. So much for Justice. How is this? Well, if you are a lawyer who works for insurance companies, for example, you make your living and your reputation defeating liability claims. It’s a no-brainer. Also, keep in mind that at trial the only participants who do not swear to tell the truth are the lawyers. It’s all about winning not about Truth and certainly not about Justice. It’s about profit.

We live in a time when sociopathy permeates society. The question is not how much worse can it get but how much longer can it go on without a total breakdown of civility and and order? There are, after all, consequences. Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, put it this way: In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community’s  good for man, there can no longer either be any substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good.”  The possibility of a civil society is foreclosed.

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