The Dragon Talking

Mysticism, Myth and Make-Believe

2011-12-29T12:39:00.000-08:00

Religious teachings and ideas consist of three things: mysticism, myth, and make-believe. Or, as I've said somewhat less precisely in another context, inspired wisdom and comic-book stuff.

Where does religion originally come from? Of course one may provide a cynical answer to this question; one may assert that religion comes from a desire for power on the part of a priesthood, or from a desire to explain the unexplained, or from a desire for immortality or fear of death, or from a desire for certainty in an uncertain world. But while all of these are factors in determining the beliefs that make up a religion, there is one other element without which religion wouldn't even exist: mysticism.

By "mysticism" I mean the direct personal experience of -- well, of those things that mystics experience. Call it the Underlying Reality, or UR for short. Any words I might use to describe exactly what the UR is would be metaphorical at best and misleading at worst. If you reading this have undergone mystical experience, you know what I mean. If you haven't, unfortunately, I can't tell you. But there are states of consciousness which the human mind can achieve either spontaneously or by various methods, and in which one comes to an intuitive understanding regarding one's identity and place in the cosmos. Mystical awareness has been called many things: communion with God, union with God, communion or union with the universe, eradication of the ego or of the self, awakening from sleep or from a dream, penetration of the illusion to find reality. All of these are metaphors, which is why I'm using a vague term here like UR, which really doesn't mean anything and so, if it fails to inform, should at least also not confuse. Again, if you've been there, you know.

One thing that has sometimes happened is that mystics have felt a compulsion to communicate their teachings to other people. I guess most of us go through that desire at some point or other (and look, here I am surrendering to it yet again). Something interesting happens when they do. Two interesting things, actually. The first is that hardly anyone understands them (only other mystics, who don't need the instruction, can really comprehend it). But the second is that what they say often resonates with a kind of unconscious awareness we all have. It's as if the understanding of mystics is stored inside our brains where we can't normally get at it, and pops up to say "Hey! Here I am!" whenever it gets any encouragement. And so when a person reads a parable of Jesus from the Gospels or the teachings of the Buddha from the Sutras or the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tze or some of the more seminal passages of the Baghavad Gita, the thoughts expressed in those words touch off little explosions deep inside the soul. And so the mystics attract followers who don't really understand what their teacher or guru or whatever is talking about, but know that they like it and want to follow it.

And then another thing happens when the mystic teacher dies, as is of course inevitable. The written teachings are then all that's left, and there is usually no one around anymore who really understands them, but there remain enthusiastic followers who want to believe. And that's where all those other contributions to religious thought come in: the desire for power, to explain the unexplained, to deny death, or to achieve certainty.

Now, within most religions or at least within an esoteric branch of them one can always find a framework for pursuing mystical enlightenment, together with techniques for achieving it. Since it's only possible to know the UR by personally experiencing it, this sort of instruction within a religion -- instruction as to how to personally experience it -- is the only religious knowledge that can be conveyed directly and straightforwardly. That's mysticism: the first category of religious teaching.

One can also find plenty of myth, and by that I mean ideas and stories that provide metaphorical descriptions of the UR or some aspect of it. Myths, like the teachings of great mystics, resonate in the brain's hidden recesses. But we must always remember that myths are metaphors; its their resonance with the buried mystical awareness that's important, not their literal truth. The central Christian myth of the Resurrection is a perfect example. Many Christians actually believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead; I regard that as extremely improbable for obvious reasons, but that's not really the point here. The point is that the Resurrection as myth is more important than the Resurrection as fact even if it IS fact. What this story says about the process of awakening and the experience a mystic goes through to come to that point is what's important here. And the same is true of other myths in other religions. It's not important whether the Buddha was actually raised with such imposed naivety that he never saw sickness or poverty or death until he became a teenager and jumped over Daddy's royal wall. (Yeah, like he never suffered a childhood disease . . .) It's not important whether his mother had a dream in which she was impregnated by a white elephant. It's not important whether Moses really brought monstrous plagues down on Egypt or caused the sea to part or obtained God's will inscribed on stone tablets by the divine hand itself. What's important in every case is the symbolic power of these stories, the way they resonate (once again) with that hidden knowledge we all carry.

The final category of religious thought is make-believe. Now, make-believe can have the same contents as myth sometimes. In fact, that's very often the case. Those that believe a myth to be literally real and (more importantly) make a big deal of this, so that it sets their religion apart from all others, are engaging in make-believe.

Make-believe in religious thought and teachings generates a narrative that aggrandizes a religon's power and importance.

God, the creator of the universe, selected one particular tribe of humans as his particular servants, and expects more of them than from others, and visits them with blessings when they live up to these expectations and with tribulations when they fall short.

God sent his son to sacrifice himself for the sins of the world, so that those who follow his religion can be saved from hell and achieve eternal life in bliss.

God has addressed mankind via a series of prophets, and we who follow the last of the prophets have his real, true teachings, all previous prophetic teachings having been either superseded or corrupted or both.

See the pattern? In reality, awareness of the UR is something that all human beings have as a potential. It's there, separate from any religion, ready to guide and lead. The experience of finding it is something often hinted at in the teachings of all religions, and all religions should consider themselves to be signposts pointing the way towards the reality at which they can only hint. When all religious teachings are properly understood to be what they are -- myths and metaphors -- how can any religion ever claim to possess THE truth, or to be true while all others are false? Literally speaking, there is no such thing as a "true metaphor." (Or, of course, a false one.) When a religion takes this kind of humble approach and accepts that its teachings are not THE truth, but only one version, one myth, one pointer towards the knowable-but-not-tellable, then it will leave make-believe behind and deal only in mysticism and myth.

But when it obsesses over the make-believe aspects of its teachings, then it ceases to be a guide to the UR and becomes a barrier between it and the believer. And that is also when it becomes potentially something dangerous.

No matter how sophisticated our knowledge of the universe becomes, there will always be a place for both mysticism and myth. But there really should be no place for make-believe outside of fiction.

Time to Amend the Constitution

2011-12-21T14:12:00.000-08:00

Blocking the port operations on West Coast is all well and good as a show of strength and a demonstration that the Occupy movement still breathes, but otherwise it is only tangentially related to the purposes for which the movement exists. That probably explains why the participation in the activity is small compared to earlier efforts. There is, I'm sure, considerable ambivalence about it.

What we need to consider is an action that will be more than symbolic, and I think I know exactly what it should be: a state-by-state petition and call for a new Constitutional Convention.

Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that 2/3 of the state legislatures may call for a convention to propose amendments to the document. This has never been done before, except for the original convention that drafted the original Constitution itself. But given the Supreme Court's rulings, plutocracy will prevail until the Constitution is amended to break the false equivalence between money and speech, and a corrupt Congress is most unlikely to pass such an amendment with the 2/3 majority of both houses required. The other method of amending the Constitution, a convention called by the state legislatures, bypasses Congress altogether.

In formulating the petition, we should also make sure to specify how the delegates to the Constitutional convention are to be selected. It might suffice for the state legislatures to select delegates, although the ideal method would be through direct election. Most certainly the delegates should not be selected by the U.S. Congress! And we should also insist that a money-is-not-speech amendment be among the issues addressed by the convention, in specific terms.

A resolution of this nature, passed by 2/3 of the states, would be a much better demonstration of Occupy's influence than closing down the nation's ports.

The Premature Implosion of the GOP

2011-12-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting election season that hasn't started yet. The important action of this election in its primary and caucus phase will of course be on the Republican side, as there is an incumbent Democratic president who has a lock on the nomination. So the fact that the Republicans are in the election news at this point is no surprise. What is rather surprising and, if I'm not mistaken, unprecedented is that the nomination is being largely decided before the first primary or caucus has been held.

Over the past few months, we have seen several Republican candidates rise in the polls only to sink again as either weird policy positions, poor debating performance, or skeletons emerging from their closets have lost them support among Republican voters. First it was Michelle Bachmann. She was riding high for a while, but doubts about her ability to handle the economy and the entry of Rick Perry into the race dramatically cut her support, and at this point she has little chance to win the nomination.

After Bachmann came Perry. A meteoric rise in the polls was followed by an equally-rapid fall as Perry revealed policy positions that were not in line with what Republican voters were looking for and displayed a truly clumsy and lamentable performance in the debates. Now Perry has sunk, too, but his fall has not resulted in a restoration of Bachmann as the political right's darling.

Instead, the focus moved to Herman Cain. Again, briefly, Cain was the man of the hour (the problem being that the hour occurred LONG before the nomination is to be officially decided). Cain has fallen, too (and unlike the others has actually suspended his campaign), partly because his gimmicky 9-9-9 tax plan looks awful to the degree people understand it, partly because of sexual indiscretions in his past.

Now, the white hat seems to be worn by Newt Gingrich, who has yet to implode and fall. But at this point, the first caucus of the campaign season is still almost a month away (Iowa is scheduled for January 3, 2012.) So there's still time for Gingrich, too, to self-destruct.

The Republican Party seems to be self-destructing, but what's particularly interesting to me is that this is happening so prematurely. The primary season hasn't even started yet, but the party is looking over and discarding candidate after candidate. It's as if the real decision occurs ahead of time through some other process, and the actual primaries and caucuses serve only as validations of that prior decision-making.

And that is in fact what I believe is happening. The decision-making is taking place largely over social media and Internet conversations among Republicans, in a form of Internet-based direct democracy. This is a variant of the same process that has given us the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the amazing volatility of the stock markets over the past year.

What I believe we are seeing is a fundamental transformation in the way decisions are reached in our society. Institutions and values, culture and politics, all of these follow the lead of technological change. All adapt to material circumstances, and those circumstances are themselves altered by technology. When it comes to collective decision-making, communication technology is what's important. A simple and deceptively innocuous invention, the printing press, led first to a rebellion against the Catholic Church that split Christendom to the core, and later to a massive, wide-spread movement across Europe and America to replace monarchies with democratic republics. All this just from a technique for cheaply reproducing written material -- which made widespread literacy economically feasible and led to demands first for the right of believers to read Scripture for themselves, and then for participation by literate citizens in the political process.

The Internet is a similar widespread change, dramatically accelerating the ability of people to communicate and interact. That's especially true of social media, which permit two-way communication on a scale and at a speed unprecedented. This change increases the ability of people to reach collective decisions independent of official authorities and political processes -- and thereby increases the capacity for direct, as opposed to representative, democracy.

I've written a pamphlet on the subject of direct democracy on a national scale which you can download free from here. But perhaps the larger transformation is what is happening not on this scale, but under the hood. The Republican Party's voters are making their decision about their 2012 candidate before the year 2012 even begins, and they are doing it on line in discussions about the candidates outside the official channels.

The Roman Republic and the Three Forms of Government

2011-07-27T18:46:00.001-07:00

Although there are, in one sense, many different forms of government – parliamentary democracies, unitary republics, federal republics, dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, oligarchic republics – in actual practice it comes down to just three archetypal forms, as one might put it. All real-world governments can be described in terms of how much they lean towards one or another of these ideal archetypes. The forms are monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The key dynamic of all politics is the desire of aristocrats (with or without titles) to maximize their own power. Both monarchy and democracy are opposed to their doing this, and so aristocrats strive to limit the power of both kings and people, and to gather all control of the government and of life itself into their hands. In American national patriotic mythos (America being founded by an aristocratic rebellion against a monarchy), kings are portrayed as the enemies of popular liberty; in reality, though, while it’s true that kings, monarchs, dictators, absolute rulers in general, can at times be despots, for the most part they are a danger to aristocrats, not to the common people, who have more to fear from aristocrats than from kings.

As it happens, history holds a wonderful real-time example of how these three forms mix and what lessons we can learn from them.

That real-world example is Rome, which in its long life prior to the collapse of the Roman Empire was first a monarchy, then a naked aristocracy (very briefly), then an aristocracy with democratic pretensions, then a monarchy again. Rome does not give us anything approaching real (as opposed to pretend) democracy, but for the purposes of this writing that’s actually a benefit. Let me explain what I mean.

Rome began life as an agricultural and trading city-state on an Italian river and on a trade route for salt. Like most city-states, it was ruled by a monarch, but in the case of Rome, for a long time the monarch was a foreigner, an Etruscan, which nation had somehow established political control over central Italy, including Rome. The details of this we don’t know, but the usual structure of government in the city-states of the ancient world consisted of a class of hereditary nobles, whose wealth came from land holdings and who traditionally served as the city-state’s elite warriors and war-leaders, with a king at the top of the governing structure. That was the case with Rome, as we can see from the institutions which survived the overthrow of the monarchy. The King of Rome was advised by the Senate, which consisted of the heads of the great aristocratic families, originally an even one hundred in number. (It was increased in size later on.) The Senate possessed considerable power and authority, as did each Patrician (the original Roman nobility) in his own lands and over his own people. But the authority of the King served to moderate and mitigate that of the aristocrats.

There are stories told about the heinous tyranny of the seventh and last King of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, which may or may not contain elements of truth. What is undeniably true is that, whether they were goaded by the rule of a particularly offensive monarch or for some other reason, towards the end of the sixth century BCE the Roman aristocrats overthrew their King and created a new government, the Roman Republic. (The conflict of interest between monarchs and aristocrats is illustrated by the stories of King Tarquinius. It’s said that he murdered members of the Senate whom he suspected of supporting his predecessor, King Servius Tullus, who had usurped the rule after the death of Tarquinius’ father, King Tarquinius Priscus, and failed to replace the murdered Senators with new members. It’s also said that he ruled without properly consulting the Senate, as an absolute monarch or, in the strict sense of the word, a tyrant. And finally, there’s a story that the King’s son raped a noblewoman named Lucretia, who then committed suicide, driving her widowed husband and her family to overthrow the king out of personal outrage.)

The story of the Republic’s founding, complete with the alleged perfidies of King Tarquinius Superbus, is presented by Roman writers and those sympathetic to the Republic in later times as a triumph of liberty. The reality is not so simple. We must always ask ourselves two questions. Liberty for whom? Liberty to do what?

What was the governing structure of the Roman Republic actually like? As we shall see, it was a structure designed to maintain aristocratic rule. To that end, it contained both anti-democratic and anti-monarchical structures. Some of its structures served to concentrate power in the hands of the nobility and exclude it from anyone outside those ranks, or from the common people as a whole. Other structures served as checks and balances designed to prevent any one aristocrat – as opposed to the class of aristocrats – from gaining too much power. If the people became strong, if a genuine democracy was created, the aristocrats might lose their power and privileges in the face of popular resentment. On the other hand, if any one aristocrat became too strong, he might make himself a king, and restrain aristocratic rapacity from above. The Republic, in short, was not designed to protect the liberty of the common people. It was designed to maximize the privileges of the aristocracy, and to subjugate and plunder the common people not to protect them. That was the reality, and any claim to the contrary was mere pretense.

The official or at least semi-official title of the Republic was “Senatus Populusque Romanus,” or “The Senate and the People of Rome.” The Senate continued to exist in more or less the same form and with more or less the same powers as it had possessed under the monarchy. The People were a new creation, or perhaps an evolution of something that had existed in embryonic form under the monarchy. Note the capitalization. The People of Rome were not the same thing as the people or Rome or the citizenry of Rome. It was a formal body, a name for four different legislative and judicial Assemblies that passed the laws and conducted many, although not all, trials. These Assemblies were, from oldest to youngest, the Curiate Assembly (Comitia Curiata), the Assembly of the Centuries (Comitia Centuriata), the Assembly of the People or of the Tribes (Comitia Tributa) and the Assembly of the Plebeians (Concilium Plebis) In addition to the Senate and the Assemblies, the Republic included various elected magistrates who presided over the day-to-day governing of the city.

The Curiate Assembly was really important only in the first twenty years of the Republic, before the Plebeian Revolt. In the beginning, this Assembly passed all the laws and elected the consuls (at this time the only magistrates, later on the most senior magistrates), and conducted trials. It consisted only of aristocrats, and so was a true, naked aristocratic body of rule. Here was the actual motivation behind the Roman revolution, blatantly – perhaps too blatantly – on display. Within two decades after the founding of the Republic, in the face of plebeian unrest, most of the powers of the Curiate Assembly were transferred to the other Assemblies, which (as we shall see) were in practice just as lopsidedly aristocratic, but could more successfully pretend otherwise.

The Assembly of the Centuries elected the highest magistrates, the consuls and praetors, after this power was transferred to it from the Curiate Assembly. It also conducted trials for high treason and could (but rarely did) pass legislation. In this Assembly, the voters were divided into economic classes, with the richest Roman citizens in the First Class, and those of lower means assigned to the Second through the Fifth Classes, while the poorest were denied any vote at all in this Assembly. Each Class was further divided into Centuries (hence the Assembly’s name), which for the First Class actually consisted of 100 men each. (Women could not vote. There were very few, if any, ancient societies that practiced voting that granted the franchise to women, so that was not especially noteworthy on the part of the Romans.) The number of men per Century increased through the classes, so that a Century of the Fifth Class consisted of many more men than one of the First Class. When electing magistrates or voting on a law, each member voted within his Century, and the majority within the Century determined the vote of that Century. Because of the variation in Century size from one Class to the next, the very wealthy Romans (which of course meant the aristocrats) had a more influential vote than the poorer citizens. Voting in this Assembly proceeded from the Centuries of the First Class on down. Most of the time, a majority of the Centuries was achieved by the time the first two Classes had voted, so that in practice very few Romans had a vote. But in theory, any Roman citizen except the very poorest had at least some voice in the Assembly, so, unlike the Curiate Assembly, it possessed a veneer, a pretense of democracy.

The Comitia Tributa or Assembly of the People had a different structure. It was not organized by wealth. Instead, each citizen belonged to one of the thirty-five “tribes” of the Roman people. But the common people were almost all lumped into four huge “urban” tribes (in fact, most of the common people were in just two of them), while the aristocrats were distributed across the thirty-one “rural” tribes. In elections and legislation, each citizen voted within his tribe, and it was his tribe’s vote, as determined by the majority of its citizens, that actually counted. What this means is that the common people had just four votes, while the aristocrats had thirty-one. But here again, a veneer or pretense of democracy existed, because every Roman citizen could vote. In fact, even the poorest Romans had a vote. It just didn’t count for anything.

The Concilium Plebis or Plebeian Assembly had a structure very much like the Assembly of the People, except that it excluded the Patricians from voting. The Patricians were the original Roman aristocrats. One could be a Patrician only by right of birth or adoption, and Patricians could not vote in the Plebeian Assembly. In the beginning, the Plebeian Assembly had no legislative powers; after the Plebeian Revolt, however, it was granted such powers – and at the same time, the nobility began to admit the very wealthiest of Plebeians into the ranks of the aristocrats. Such men were still not considered Patrician, but they could enter the Senate, could run for the magistracies, and had almost all of the same privileges as Patricians. And again, the rich, aristocratic Plebeians joined the Patricians in the thirty-one “rural” tribes, while everyone else still got dumped into the four “urban” tribes. Here we see the mechanism of control at its best and most deceptive. The Plebeian Assembly, in spite of these measures, could at times be a subversive, almost democratic body, but there were sufficient checks on its powers through cooption and rigged voting that most of the time it served to reinforce the powers of the aristocrats, even though many of those aristocrats could not vote in it.

These four Assemblies are what was meant by “the Roman People” in the official name of the Republic: not the collection of all Roman citizens in some democratic fashion, but rather the bodies that passed the laws, and were designed to maintain aristocratic rule.

The laws were all passed in one of the Assemblies or another. But the day-to-day running of the Republic was done by the magistrates and by the Senate. The Senate was originally restricted to Patrician membership, but at the same time as the rich Plebeians began to be coopted into the aristocracy, the door was opened for them to enter the Senate as well. Even so, the Senate remained a thoroughly aristocratic body, because only the richest of Romans could belong to it. Its decrees did not have the force of law, and could be overridden by a vote of an Assembly. But the Senate controlled the public purse, foreign policy, and military practice, and could direct the actions of the government on a regular basis as long as no Assembly actually did vote to override its authority. Here was the most aristocratic of the Republic’s governing institutions, with no pretense to democracy at all.

The magistrates were elected for one year at a time, and it is perhaps in them most of all that we can see the other side of the Republic’s protection of aristocratic power, because in them more than anything else resided the checks and balances that kept too much power out of the hands of any one man. Theoretically, any Roman citizen could run for any magistracy, but in practice most of the offices were reserved for aristocrats. Even the office of Tribune of the Plebeians was the prerogative of wealthy men and men with aristocratic names (although they could not be Patricians). As for the consuls, those at the head of the government, only the most august of families could in most cases stand any chance of running and winning.

But the power of any man who held high office was carefully circumscribed. The government was led not by one man but by two, both of whom held the title of consul. The term of office was only one year. By law, no man could run for consul a second time until ten years had passed since the last time he held the office. And the entire aristocracy would combine to oppose any man who rose too high and became too popular, too strong, too much a threat to dominate his peers.

So that was the Roman Republic: a veneer of democracy over what was in practice a completely aristocratic government. It was limited neither from below by democratic accountability to the people, nor from above by a king. From the standpoint of the common people, it was incredibly rapacious and led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a powerful few, leaving most Romans with very little. (In fact, below the level of even the poorest citizen was an enormous number of slaves, the true lowest of the lower classes.)

Over time, as Rome expanded in power and the size of her empire, this structure of government ran into difficulties from both the lack of democracy at one end and the inefficiency involved in preventing too much power going to any one man at the other. One problem was that the conquests resulted in wealth flowing into the society, which concentrated into the hands of the aristocrats, further amplifying their power and the resentment of the common people. Revolts occurred from time to time, led by aristocrats who were either honestly motivated by a desire for social justice or willing to make use of popular resentment to advance their own power and fortune. The other problem was that emergencies arose that the Republic’s deliberately weak and inefficient central government could not easily handle. Whether these consisted of revolts in the provinces, military threats from abroad, or piracy on the seas, it became necessary to step outside the Republic’s constitutional restraints again and again in order to prevent the empire from disintegrating from within, being conquered by barbarians, or having its trade strangled. In the end, the two cracks in the system met and a very popular and liberal-minded leader of immense administrative and military ability – a Patrician, ironically enough, named Gaius Julius Caesar – established dictatorial rule, and after his assassination his chosen heir implemented a new monarchy.

Now this has been a long-winded discourse on the political structure and history of a nation that no longer exists, but it does have relevance for our own situation in America particularly – although in other countries as well – today. Although America has no titled, official nobility, it can’t be denied that we do have aristocrats. These aristocrats run the biggest corporations, dominate our government through bribery of elected officials, and impose a form of censorship through corporate ownership of the major media. And as always happens, too much power in the hands of aristocrats is bad news for everyone who isn’t one of them.

Like all aristocracies, ours is concerned with limiting the power of government, which is the only thing that can easily limit their rapaciousness on an ongoing basis. As with all aristocracies, ours is concerned with preventing both democracy – the exercise of government power at the behest of the people – and monarchy – the rise of a popular, powerful individual that can swing the state against the interests of the rich.

This is the real motivation behind the political attempt to cut down the size of government. It is not to protect the liberty of the common people. It is to protect the privileges of the wealthy, and reduce the rest of us to servitude. Because for ordinary people, it is not the king, let alone any truly democratic government, that is the enemy of freedom. It is the aristocracy.

It is the rich.

On the Death of Osama bin Ladin

2011-05-04T22:15:00.001-07:00

Every victory should be regarded with sadness, like a funeral. The only thing worse is a defeat. Having no need for victory is the real victory. Victory is merely avoidance of the appalling in favor of the barely tolerable. Thus it is with the recent slaying of Osama bin Ladin. It's better that it succeeded than if it had failed. Victory is better than defeat. But only just barely. It cannot make up for the great tragedy that either one, victory OR defeat, had to happen. We should not have had to do it. And some thought should be given to how to avoid having to do it in the future.

I use the word "tragedy" here in the classic Greek sense: misfortune arising from one's own flaws. Osama bin Ladin was our nemesis, the fruit of our hubris as a nation. He should never have existed, and if we had not betrayed our own values and our own identity as a nation he never would have. Or if he had, he would have been someone else's nemesis, not ours.

There are so many intertwined threads of truth to the death of Osama bin Ladin.

Start with the surface. He was a violent, evil man who was responsible for the slaughter of thousands. His death is no great loss to the world. On this, most everyone agrees. The only exceptions would be those who share his particularly twisted brand of violent Islamic ideology. (It's "Islamic" in the same sense as the Christian Identity movement is "Christian." I call it that because I don't know what else to call it. Normal Muslims may take exception, just as normal Christians may take exception to having racist neo-Nazi monstrosities lumped in with them. I shall here merely note the likely unhappiness, acknowledge that very few Muslims bear much resemblance in their beliefs to bin Ladin, and move on.)

But that's just the surface, taking bin Ladin's death as if it existed in isolation. It doesn't, of course. It's the most recent significant development in a saga that has included a lot of stupid, inept, opportunistic, and downright wrong-headed moves on the part of the United States. Starting from the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001, our first wrong move was President Bush's choice of words to describe what we were engaged in: "War on Terrorism." (Or "War on Terror." It depended on his mood on any given day, or perhaps on how much he'd had to drink recently.) We cannot, of course, wage war on a military tactic, nor on a loose-knit criminal organization. We can fight them, as we speak of fighting crime. But this fight cannot be a "war." War is inevitably fought by armies and navies in service to nations, one national government against another. So that was our first mistake. We took a criminal act and improperly dignified it by calling it an act of war, as if al-Qaeda were a nation and Osama bin Ladin its government. This error of terminology -- if it was an error and not a brilliant and wicked deception -- led us to the invasion of Afghanistan and later of Iraq, to the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people and the deaths and maiming of thousands of our own citizens. None of these actions did anything much against the organization that attacked us in 2001. But because we were "at war," we sought enemies that could be vaguely connected with al-Qaeda (and whose conquest could prove advantageous either in geopolitical terms or in service to corporate bottom lines) on which to spend the might of our vast military machine, so much of which was useless against al-Qaeda itself.

At the same time as we emphasized the wrong targets, due to the illusion cast by that word "war," we downplayed the right targets and the right tactics. At one point, after bin Ladin escaped at Bora Bora, President Bush actually stated that he considered capturing or killing the al-Qaeda leader a low priority. What we saw recently was the success of an approach that should have been emphasized from the beginning: an approach that avoids being mystified by (or seizing the opportunity presented by) that misleading term "war."

So much for the immediate layer below the surface. But now let's dig a little deeper still. Why did Osama bin Ladin choose the United States as his primary target?

There was a certain amount of calculation in his doing so. Osama bin Ladin's long-term goal was to create a new Caliphate, uniting all Muslims under a single rule, a return to the Medieval greatness of Islam. (Preferably with himself as Caliph, one imagines.) The Muslim world is, of course, far from united. But one classic, time-honored way to unite squabbling peoples is to present them with a common enemy. By provoking the Untied States into taking ill-considered aggressive action in the Middle East, he hoped to enrage Muslims enough to have them set aside their differences in order to fight us. That didn't work as well as he'd hoped, but it explains why he launched the attack.

What it doesn't explain, however, is why he launched it at us. Why were we the right choice, the obvious choice, as the common foe of Islam? Why not attack some target in London, or in Tokyo, or in Brussels, or in Moscow? It doesn't take a whole lot of thought to arrive at the answer. America -- not Britain, Japan, the European Union, or the Russian Republic -- is the greatest of superpowers, the world's hegemon, the great power that must be defeated if Islam is to achieve greatness. America is the backer of Israel, the supporter of tyrants throughout the Muslim world, the new Rome.

And at root, that is where we went wrong, before bin Ladin was even born, and long before he launched his attacks in New York and Washington. That is why Osama bin Ladin exists, and why we had to kill him. Because we are not, in the national vision of our founders, supposed to be an empire, a superpower. We are supposed to be a land of liberty. We are supposed to be a democracy. And there is no such thing as a democratic empire. The two are incompatible, and one or the other must in the end be lost.

It's difficult for Americans nowadays to understand, because throughout my lifetime and for some years earlier we have had the world's most powerful military, so that it has come to seem normal. In reality, it is an anomaly of American history. Our nation has until the end of World War II always had a distrust of standing armies and a parsimony about military expenditure. We kept a small professional force, a cadre of officers, and when war loomed we would recruit or conscript an army around that tiny core and march off to face the enemy. During the major wars of our history -- the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I -- we built powerful but temporary armies. When the war ended, the citizens who had rallied to the flag to meet the emergency laid down their arms and returned gratefully and happily to their civilian pursuits. The military budget shrank to nearly nothing, and so it remained during the years of peace, until the next war threatened. On the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States had one of the weakest armies in the world.

As part and parcel of this, we went to war only rarely. Of the major wars the U.S. has engaged in, all but World War II were at the instigation of Americans themselves (the Civil War included, because the Confederates who started the war were Americans, too). Without a powerful standing army, we were seldom tempted to do this. Wars meant raising taxes, taking an economic hit, and of course sending young men off to die; they were not popular and we lacked the standing force to make the decision easier.

At the end of World War II, we had, once again, an enormous military force. It had been necessary to build this force in order to defeat the Axis, of course. But the common expectation was that, once again, as before, we would send all the boys home, and go back to our peaceful pursuits, retaining only that tiny cadre of trained military experts around which to build an army the next time war threatened. But for some reason things were done differently this time.

The Soviet Union presented a permanent enemy, a way to justify keeping a powerful military in times of peace. Why did we do this? It's a mystery to which there may be no one right answer. Maybe people in government genuinely believed in the Communist threat. Maybe it was the arms industry and others who profited off this massive government largesse. Maybe it was something hidden in the halls of power in Washington, desirous of empire and national power. Maybe it was a combination of all three. Whatever the motives, though, the actions in service to them are plain enough. We retained a huge military force. We built a chain of military bases all over the world. We supported puppet governments either to have allies in the Cold War or for economic reasons. We found ourselves continuously at war somewhere in the world. We were never, or almost never, wholly at peace.

We built a national-security apparatus, a government within a government, operating in secrecy, unaccountable to the voters, barely controlled by the President and not at all by Congress -- a clear violation of all the principles on which America is supposedly based. This is not new in the world, although it was new for us, and wrong for us. It's the way every empire in history has always operated. It's the way empires have to operate. Empire and democracy are incompatible. We cannot have both. That means that empire and America are incompatible. We cannot have both. We have become something other than America, something that our ancestors would look upon in horror.

In 1991, we were presented with a golden opportunity to set all this aside, bring the empire to an end, and become once more America. The Soviet Union, our opponent in the Cold War and the justification for empire from 1945 until then, ceased to exist. We could have shut down the bases, dismantled most of our armed forces, declared victory and gone home. We didn't. And that surely proves that by that time the empire was pursued for its own sake and the Cold War had become merely an excuse -- if it had ever been otherwise.

Today, we have a military force that costs as much as that of the entire rest of the world combined. We have hundreds of military bases in every corner of the world. We have the ability to invade any country on earth that we choose to invade, and we have arrogated to ourselves the willingness to use that ability whenever we choose, on whatever pretext we like, or on none. We have a government unaccountable to its people, that claims the authority to detain without trial, without rights, anyone -- citizen or foreigner -- that it labels as an "enemy combatant."

That is not America. It is the American Empire. And it was the American Empire, not America the land of liberty, that Osama bin Ladin attacked on 9/11/01. He was our nemesis, attacking in response to our hubris. The entire affair of the last ten years has been our tragedy.

Now he is dead. But the tragedy goes on, and will until the American Empire, too, is laid to rest.

Quote from a rich guy: "Tax me more."

2010-09-27T11:42:00.001-07:00

Before presenting what is to follow, I have to apologize for neglecting this journal. My bad. I do have an excuse, mainly that I've been devoting my writing energy to fiction. I've finished the second novel in the Star Mages series and am getting it together pre-publication at this point. So that's good, but my feeling is that although it might seem like a decent excuse, I made a commitment here, I failed to keep it, and there is no excuse apart from physical or mental incapacity neither of which applies. (Yet. Knock wood.) :)

So I'll try to make up for that failure. To start with, I ran across an editorial in the LA Times by venture capitalist Garrett Gruener, who said some important things in it that people need to understand and, thanks to trickle-down propaganda, often don't. Here's the link to his article:

tax me more

Some excerpts that are particularly important:

"I'm a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur. Over the past three decades, I've made both good and bad investments. I've created successful companies and ones that didn't do so well. Overall, I'm proud that my investments have created jobs and led to some interesting innovations. And I've done well financially; I'm one of the fortunate few who are in the top echelon of American earners.

"For nearly the last decade, I've paid income taxes at the lowest rates of my professional career. Before that, I paid at higher rates. And if you want the simple, honest truth, from my perspective as an entrepreneur, the fluctuation didn't affect what I did with my money. None of my investments has ever been motivated by the rate at which I would have to pay personal income tax. . . .

"When inequality gets too far out of balance, as it did over the course of the last decade, the wealthy end up saving too much while members of the middle class can't afford to spend much unless they borrow excessively. Eventually, the economy stalls for lack of demand, and we see the kind of deflationary spiral we find ourselves in now. I believe it is no coincidence that the two highest peaks in American income inequality came in 1929 and 2008, and that the following years were marked by low economic activity and significant unemployment.

"What American businesspeople know, and have known since Henry Ford insisted that his employees be able to afford to buy the cars they made, is that a thriving economy doesn't just need investors; it needs people who can buy the goods and services businesses create. For the overall economy to do well, everyday Americans have to do well. . . .

"Remember, paying slightly more in personal income taxes won't change my investment choices at all, and I don't think a higher tax rate will change the investment decisions of most other high earners.

"What will change my investment decisions is if I see an economy doing better, one in which there is demand for the goods and services my investments produce. I am far more likely to invest if I see a country laying the foundation for future growth. In order to get there, we first need to let the Bush-era tax cuts for the upper 2% lapse. It is time to tax me more."

It's not surprising that a venture capitalist "gets it" about what limits investment in job-creating ventures: not availability of capital (i.e., not how much money rich investors have lying around), but expected return. What's more, the main thing that drives expected return is not how much the investor can expect to keep after taxes, but rather how much demand exists for the goods and services the investment is supposed to produce. As I said, it's not surprising a venture capitalist gets this; if he didn't know why he invests in one area rather than another, say in business rather than in financial instruments, he would not likely be successful at what he does. We ought to listen to him when he says things like this. I mean, when someone says, "Raise MY taxes," we can be pretty certain he's not speaking out of duplicitous self-interest. Unless he's a masochist or something.

But I'm going to take this argument one step further. Mr. Gruener says that small changes in his tax rate have no effect on his investment decisions. But what about big ones? What about the effect of the original Reagan tax cuts that dropped top marginal rates from the 60-70 percent range down into the 30s? On the other hand, what would be the effect of creating new tax brackets with very high taxes applied to very high incomes? What about a 95% tax on personal income over a million dollars a year?

Before continuing with this, maybe an explanation is in order about how "marginal" tax rates work. Right now, the top tax rate is 35% on incomes above $373,650. Does that mean that if someone makes $400k a year, he'll pay 35% of his income in federal income tax? No, it's a bit more complex than that. He'll pay that 35% only on taxable income above $373,650, which is to say, on $400,000 - $373,650, or $26,350. (That's if the $400k represents taxable income not total income, of course.) He pays at a lower rate on all the rest of his income. On the first part of what he earns for the year, he pays no taxes, just like everyone else.

So a 95% tax on income above a million dollars doesn't work to impoverish millionaires. What it does is to impose a personal income ceiling. Nobody is going to bother making over a million dollars in taxable income when Uncle Sweetie is going to make off with almost all of it. It won't hurt you to make more than a million (remember, all the income below a million is still taxed at the lower rates), but it won't help you much, either. So investors will stop investing in anything that would push their income above that point, and that will hurt the economy, right?

Well, not so fast. To begin with, most investments, and all of the ones we really want, are tax-deductible and so don't count as taxable income. If you start a business, most of the start-up costs are not taxed. (There are some exceptions involving heavy-equipment purchases, where the tax deduction is split over a number of years.) Wages you pay to employees are never taxed as your income. (As the employee's income, yes.) So what a confiscatory tax on really high income actually does is to give the person making that kind of scratch a really strong incentive to find places to invest that money where it will eventually pay off, but won't be taxable in the meantime. So -- provided we choose which investments to encourage through tax write-offs wisely -- this could actually spur investment rather than discouraging it.

Another consideration besides tax deduction is how quickly an investment pays off. The thing about investing in real business (that is, making stuff or providing services) is that it's a long-term project. You don't expect a quick payoff in the first year. Ask anyone who's ever started a business. You expect to lose money the first year, maybe the second year, maybe even longer depending on exactly what business you're in. Down the road, though, you do expect things to pick up to the point where you've recouped all those losses and made a profit. (It doesn't always happen that way, but you do expect it or you wouldn't have made the investment to begin with.) There are other kinds of investments, though, that can pay off very quickly. A good example is short-term trading on the stock market, where you're not trying to acquire stock for the long haul but rather to buy low and sell high, conceivably in a single day. Even better examples are the kinds of financial trading that resulted recently in the near-collapse of our financial system. To be sure, those particular investments went bad, but the point is that when they pay off they pay off quickly. That makes them preferable to investments in real business if you want a quick gain that can be reinvested for a multiplier effect.

What a confiscatory tax rate on very high income would discourage is this sort of investment. Why seek a quick payoff -- that is, a payoff this year -- if 95% of it goes to the federal government? Under that regimen, it makes a lot more sense to defer financial gains.

To illustrate, consider this. Let's say someone is making half a million normally. The person has another half million to invest. For sake of simplicity, he has two choices, either of which will return that half million and another million dollars on top of it. He can invest it in short-term financial manipulation that will give him the whole million and a half by year's-end. Or he can invest it instead in a start-up company making widgets, take a loss the first year, and recoup his investment plus another million over the next ten years.

If he chooses the latter route, he gets back an average of $150k a year, and in no year does the net return exceed $300k (let's say). Now: if he's going to see that investment return taxed at 35% no matter which way he goes, then he's better off investing in the short-term instrument. His net profit after taxes is $650k, and if he does the quick-return bit, he'll have all that to reinvest next year for more return still. But with the confiscatory tax in place, he'll be much better off investing in the slow road, because his net return with the short-term financial investment is only $50,000, while the return with the long-term investment is much higher, since none of it crosses that million-dollar line and so all of it avoids the confiscatory tax.

Bear in mind he's going to invest the money anyway. The only question is in what. Since investment in making things and providing services is what we want (that's what creates jobs), we want to encourage that and discourage the kind of investment that just plays with money.

Prosperity: What's An Economy For?

2010-07-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be writing a series on what I have come to call "Money-Free Economics." By this I don't mean economics of a barter system or of an economy without money; rather, I mean economics that ignores money and goes to the underlying real-wealth economy that money facilitates. I acknowledge up front that this creates a certain amount of distortion. There are features and processes of a modern economy that can't be understood without addressing money, among them interest rates, the effects of government fiscal policies, and speculative investment -- to name but three of many. But money also creates distortions. In particular, schools of economics that address money without touching on the underlying economy of goods and services often create severe distortions by treating money as if it existed and operated independently of the goods and services for which it is a token of exchange -- as if only money, not stuff, mattered. Moreover, those features of an economy that require addressing money to understand are already covered well by professional economists in their various schools. On these matters they don't require any help from me (often it's the other way around). But when economists present something as stupid as, for example, the laissez-faire interpretations of the Laffer Curve, or explanations for recession that rely entirely on monetary factors and ignore the distribution of wealth, I know that they have focused on money to the point where they have forgotten that it is just a token of exchange and not real wealth, because when you put those in money-free terms their nonsensical nature becomes obvious. So, to address the follies of economists and the politicians who quote them, I shall engage in an exercise, presenting economic concepts in ways that don't use money at all.

I'll begin today with an examination of what an economy is and what it's for in money-free terms.

An economy is, to begin with, a social arrangement. It involves assigning of ownership, division of labor, and rules of exchange and trade. In a modern society it is always a function of law. That wasn't always so, because human beings have not always lived under the rule of law, but even in pre-civilized times when there was no law as such and no formal government, there were still rules about who owned what, who was supposed to do what, and who got what in the end.

What this social arrangement is meant to do is to regulate and facilitate the production and distribution of wealth. Wealth, as I pointed out in the last entry, consists of goods and services. Going into a bit more detail, wealth consists of eight things: food, clothing, shelter, tools, toys, entertainment, advice, and assistance. Everything you or anyone else ever buys or sells falls into one or more of those categories. The economy is a social arrangement whereby these eight things are produced and gotten to the people who want and can use them. Those are the two criteria of economic success. As long as those eight things can be produced in enough quality and quantity and distributed to everyone who needs and wants them, the economy is a success. When either of these functions fails, the economy fails. If not enough food can be grown, or if the food that is grown can't be gotten to the people who need to eat it, there is famine. If not enough housing can be built, or if housing is built but sits vacant while people are homeless, there is a housing crisis. And so on.

Every failure of the economy, every depression, every recession, every instance of runaway inflation, every bubble collapse, even the economic failure that occurs after a military defeat, manifests ultimately in a failure either of production or of distribution or both. Even when the cause (or at least the trigger) of the economic problems is fiscal or monetary, such as a stock-market crash or the collapse of a housing or real estate or some other bubble, it always comes down in the end to a failure to produce or a failure to distribute. If it does not, then it is a nonexistent problem as far as the overall economy is concerned.

Problems can occur on either the production or the distribution side. An example of a production-side problem is a severe drought that results in crop failure. This creates a shortage of food and starvation. Another example is the devastation created by war, as for example in Germany during and after World War II, when Allied bombing and Allied and Soviet invasion destroyed German factories and industrial capacity, as well as German roads and railroads. A third example, more subtle, is the impact on the U.S. economy of the OPEC oil embargo from 1973 until 1983, which caused shortages of a crucial raw material. An economy that is in a pre-industrial state and is trying to industrialize also faces production challenges, not in the sense of losing production but in the sense of wanting to increase it. In general, production of wealth requires raw materials, labor, knowledge, and organization, and a shortage of any of these (for whatever reason) results in a deficit of production.

Problems of production are severe, but problems of distribution can be equally severe. The Irish potato famine was, at root, a distribution problem. It had a proximate cause on the production side, a potato disease that caused crop failures, but this would not have resulted in famine except that the Irish wheat lands were all in the control of aristocratic landholders who were entitled to the wheat crops for export purposes. That's the reason why ordinary Irish people were dependent on a potato diet in the first place. A more nearly equal distribution of Ireland's food crops would have meant that when the potato harvest failed, the people could eat other foods. Severe maldistribution of the nation's agricultural wealth meant that the potato blight became the potato famine.

The Great Depression and similar breakdowns in the years before it (for example the Long Depression that began in 1873 and lasted longer than the Great Depression itself, although it was not quite as severe) were also breakdowns of distribution. The economies of the advanced nations, such as the United States, suffered no shortages of raw materials, labor, knowledge, or organization, and there were initially no problems of production. But the goods produced were not distributed to the people who would use them. Because of the system of private capital property ownership, the goods produced in a factory (say) belonged to the factory's owner, and anyone who wanted those goods had to exchange items of value for them (by way of money, of course). Since not enough of the people who wanted the goods had the value to exchange for them, they could not be sold and so sat in warehouses being of no use to anyone.

The distorting effect of money can be easily seen in this entire sequence of events, which were caused by a desire on the part of capital property owners to keep to themselves as much of the wealth produced as they could. As long as we think in terms of money, this is perfectly understandable: the rich wanted to become richer. But if we think in money-free terms, the silliness of it becomes clearer. How much in the way of food, clothing, shelter, tools, toys, entertainment, advice, and assistance does even the richest person need? How much of these things does he even want? How much can he use? After a certain point, all that stuff is wanted not for use but for sale, and if a relatively few rich people own almost everything of value, for what can it be sold?

Here is the fundamental flaw of capitalism. It is predicated and focused on the accumulation of individual fortunes, which means that ultimately it undercuts its own basis resulting in economic breakdowns due to maldistribution of wealth and consequent depressed demand. Economists have gone to great lengths to refuse to acknowledge this. There is, or used to be, a concept in economics called "overproduction" or "surplus production" which meant that the economy was producing more stuff than people could use, so that in order to maintain full employment and productivity it needed to be sold abroad. But the economy has not historically ever actually produced more stuff than people could use (although that's theoretically possible). It has just produced more stuff than the people who wanted to use it could buy. That's a very different thing. The demand for goods and services depends not only on people's desire for things, but also on what they have to trade for them, and for most people the latter is exhausted long before the former. (Those for whom it is not, exhaust their desire to buy instead. Either way, stuff remains unsold.)

One of the things about economics today, even more than its disconnect from the economy of stuff and its focus on the arcane economy of money, is the refusal of many of its practitioners to think about the elephant in the room: the distribution of wealth. Even when an economist (by this stage of the game usually one long dead) takes a money-free approach, it often suffers from this flaw. A good example is Say's Law.

Say's Law is an economic principle attributed (somewhat incorrectly, but that's by-the-way) to the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who lived and worked in the late 18th and early 19th century. Say argued that there could never be a general glut of goods -- too much on the market to be sold -- because all goods produced created value with which to buy other goods, and goods are exchanged only for goods even when they are exchanged by way of money. As far as it goes, that's true -- but it also very much matters whether the goods produced are owned, and so exchangeable, by those who desire the other goods produced. Or in other words, it matters how widely wealth is shared. The fact that wealth exists to exchange for all products produced in the form of other products does no good on a practical basis unless those goods are in possession of those who wish to make the purchase.

One finds many critiques of Say's Law among economists, but rarely will one find this fundamental flaw recognized. John Maynard Keynes, for example, identified three assumptions underlying Say's Law: a barter model of money (goods are exchanged for goods), flexible prices (that can rapidly adjust upwards or downwards with little or no "stickyness"), and no government intervention. Keynes himself disputed the second assumption, arguing that prices are not necessarily flexible. Others have disputed the first or the third. (And here one does run into the distorting effect that arises from money-free economics, because there are aspects of a money economy which do not perfectly mirror a barter economy. However, that is not the real problem with Say's Law.) It's true that the idea does rest on at least the first two of those assumptions, but it also rests on another which is self-evidently false: the equal or near-equal distribution of wealth.

It's a curious thing, this refusal even of a supposedly "progressive" economist such as Keynes to address the central problem of inequality even though his own work naturally lends itself to doing so. Those who do address it usually seem to confine themselves to the moral aspects of it without considering the economic aspects. But the economic aspects are also real and also important.

Returning to the two functions of an economy, production and distribution of wealth, we may consider the template to be the economy of a pre-civilized community, in which a small band of human beings own all capital property in common and share tasks and wealth more or less equally. Production-side problems arose often enough in the form of shortages, but distribution-side problems did not. Even when production problems happened, it was never due to failures of organization, but only of natural resources, knowledge, or labor. The economy functioned in the manner Marx described as "communism," the end-state of his theoretical economic progression: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Now, my personal opinion is that Marx had to have been smoking something to believe that an advanced economy, whose essence is impersonality, could ever operate communistically in this fashion. But we may nonetheless take that ancient pattern as, in terms of distribution and of the organization of labor and natural resources, the ideal, and evaluate our modern substitutes in terms of how closely they approximate this ideal. The truth is, of course, that they fall far short -- but in fairness, they have a much more complicated problem to solve.

In future posts, I'll consider historical economies that worked better than the one we have now, along with some spectacular historical failures. Finally, I'll speculate about alternatives to capitalism as it currently exists. In all cases, I'll approach the questions through money-free economics, in order to keep it as simple and non-arcane as possible.

"Making Money"

2010-06-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

Our language has many peculiarities that shape thought in hidden ways. One example is the phrase "make money."

Strictly speaking, nobody "makes money" in this country except the mint. Money is legal tender, and neither private individuals nor corporations are authorized to "make" it. To do so is a felony. When we say that someone "makes money," what we really mean is that the person takes money: he persuades other people to give him money in exchange for something else, be it goods, services, promises, or deception. No money is actually made in these transactions, by which I mean that the overall money supply does not increase; what money the person who is "making" it gains, his customers lose in an exact one-for-one correspondence. Of course, that's not necessarily a bad thing for the customers, since money also has no intrinsic value whatsoever; it gains value only in exchange for other things that DO have intrinsic value, and the only reason anyone is willing to take intrinsically worthless money in exchange for intrinsically valuable things is because the money so acquired can then be given away to someone else in exchange for other things of value. Money is at root a confidence game in the literal sense of requiring a faith in the system of government that backs it and a confidence that it can be exchanged for items of value, even though it has no value of its own, and because of this disconnect, this one-off between the medium of exchange and the items of actual value, it can also be a confidence game in the figurative sense.

Really it all comes down, not to money, but to stuff: goods, services, promises, or deception. Money is not wealth. Goods and services are wealth; money is only a token exchangeable for wealth. One cannot "make money," but one can make wealth, by making goods or performing services. Ideally, that is how a person or a corporation "makes money" -- by making wealth, and exchanging the wealth for money, which can then be re-exchanged for more wealth. The amount of money doesn't increase, but the amount of wealth does. As a straightforward exchange, there is nothing objectionable about this. But the fact that we employ money rather than barter -- the fact that we exchange wealth not for wealth but for tokens exchangeable for wealth -- means that the potential for abuse, and for confidence games in the figurative sense, creeps in.

Start with the fact that goods and services are, almost without exception, produced collectively, not individually. That is, their creation requires the cooperative effort of more than one person. Most of the people who work to create the wealth have no ownership interest in it (as I explored in an earlier post) and must accept (or reject) a payment in money for helping to create it according to the terms that the owner (usually a corporation) is willing to offer. The potential for abuse in that transaction is of course well known to anyone who has studied the history of the labor movement.

Then there's the fact that money can be exchanged not just for real wealth, but for potential wealth. This is called "investing." Money is paid not for goods or services, but for the potential of being repaid more money than one paid out in the future, which can then be re-exchanged for real wealth. Investments, however, don't always pay off. Sometimes an investor loses money instead of gaining it. This means that a person or a corporation can "make" (or take) money by attracting investors rather than by offering wealth in exchange. To make things more wonderfully and woefully complex still, the person "selling" the investment can then turn around and re-invest the money so gained himself in the hopes that it will pay off more than he ends up paying back to the original investor. And so on, in a tangle of investment and reinvestment. There are whole industries built around this sort of thing, producing no wealth whatsoever but "making" lots of money.

Now the justification for this sort of financial goings-on is that at least some of the money is ultimately used to fund the production of wealth, which, under the rules of our economic game, requires money in order to be done. But it doesn't have to be done that way. All that's really necessary in order for an investment scheme to "make money" is that people who have money be convinced to invest it. A financier can "make money" all day long without producing a damned thing, merely by moving around intrinsically worthless tokens, taking money from others in exchange for promises or, in some cases, for deception.

Even when the money that is being "made" is acquired in the more straightforward fashion, by producing actual wealth and selling it, there is still plenty of room for practices that are anything but straightforward. British Petroleum, for example, is certainly producing wealth (or it intended to anyway) from its deep-water oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But it acquired ownership of the oil it hoped to pump through a process of leasing the mineral rights from the government that involves a highly questionable exchange of value. Arguably, since the land in question is government property, it belongs to the people of the United States, yet the people get precious little return for it; if BP had to buy the rights for something approximating their real value, that could fund a lot in the way of public services, tax cuts, and/or deficit reduction. On the other end, as what actually happened with that well demonstrates, the law requires the people to pay to clean up any messes that result, after the corporation pays out an amount of money limited by law and, in the instant case, only a tiny fraction of the actual damages. In this particular case, due to the publicity involved and the magnitude of the disaster, BP may find itself unable to make use of that sweetheart deal, but the Gulf oil leak is only a larger-scale version of similar environmental accidents that happen all the time, and other damage that isn't accidental at all.

Running through our economy are rules and practices that twist and warp what should be a straightforward process of producing wealth and distributing it to people into one sort or another of theft. Theft of people's earnings, their savings, their livelihoods, their hopes and dreams, their health, and their lives. And yet, because of the peculiarities of the language we speak, we call all of that "making money."

A curious thing, I say.

The Value of Labor

2010-06-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to establish a monetary value for labor. Both of those ways are economically sound, depending on the purpose for which labor is being evaluated. For purposes of this writing, both are equally important, as what I wish to discuss is the difference between the two.

The first (and simplest) way of determining the value of labor is through the labor market. This follows the tautology that everything is “worth” what its customer will pay for it. A merchant (in this case a worker) will seek the highest price (wage) possible, while a buyer (employer) will seek the lowest price (wage) possible, and the balance in bargaining power between the two determines the outcome. In the labor market, that balance is affected by the number of workers available to do a particular type of work (supply), the number of such jobs open (demand), the ability of workers to bargain collectively (organization), and the parameters set by law and regulation (rules of the game). Supply, demand, organization, and rules of the game are what determine the “value” of labor – in this sense. Let us call this the market value of labor.

The second way of determining labor’s value is in terms of the value of what it produces. All labor produces goods or services which are then offered for sale (or at least could be), and these goods and services have a market value of their own. In the context of any business, the “value” of labor in this sense is equal to the market value of all goods and services produced by it, net of any non-labor costs of production and marketing. This we may call the productive value of labor.

It should be self-evident that the market value of labor is always less than its productive value. In a capitalist economy this is entirely unavoidable, and as a practical matter it may be unavoidable in any economy, since some portion of the wealth produced must be set aside as capital to be reinvested. But in a capitalist economy, the entire point is to maximize, as much as practical, the difference between labor’s productive value and its market value, because the difference between these two is the margin of profit, and the purpose of a capitalist economy is to maximize profit.

Putting it another way, the purpose of a capitalist economy is to maximize the gap between the market value of what is produced, and the share of that wealth which goes to those who do the work of producing it. Or, more simply, a capitalist economy has as a condition of its defining purpose, the secondary purpose of keeping labor down.

METHODS OF INCREASING THE LABOR VALUE GAP

The goal of capitalism, in service to its ultimate goal of maximizing profit, is to increase as much as possible, and to maintain at as high a level as possible, the labor value gap – that is, the gap between labor’s productive value and its market value. How is this done?

Let us first recognize that capital cannot arbitrarily set wages anywhere it wants. If it could, it would get all labor for free. The market value of labor is determined by the factors of supply, demand, organization, and rules of the game. If capital is to influence the price of labor, therefore, it must influence these four factors. As a practical matter, though, there is limited influence that can be brought to bear by an individual business on any of them. An employer may certainly use organization and machinery to improve efficiency of production and so reduce its demand for labor; it may also use techniques of intimidation and propaganda to prevent the formation of labor unions and so reduce organization; in the modern world, it may in some cases outsource production to foreign countries and in this way increase the supply of labor. But to truly keep the cost of labor down and so maximize the labor value gap and hence maximize profit, business must exert influence over the government, which controls the rules of the game absolutely, and the other three factors to a very large degree.

The manner in which capital influences government is outside the scope of this article, but well known enough that it should need little elaboration; suffice it to say that bribery, either directly through payments to legislators or somewhat less blatantly through campaign contributions, buys access and influence, and turns the government to the service of capital much more than it would turn if it were truly answering the will of the people in democratic fashion. The results may be seen throughout history. It’s also interesting to see how the methods change from time to time depending on circumstances, but always work towards the same outcome.

At one time, the government influenced the supply of labor by encouraging high immigration rates, especially of refugees faced with even more brutal treatment in their home countries. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, this flood of immigrants almost by itself kept wages suppressed in basic industries such as mining, railroads, agriculture, and manufacturing. Today, immigration is still a factor in government policy to increase labor supply, but a less important one. The government encourages high rates of legal immigration of skilled labor today, at the request of the computer industry and others needing technical expertise. With respect to unskilled labor, the rules of the game have changed enough since the 1930s (for reasons I’ll go into in the next section) that legal immigration no longer suffices. A combination of illegal immigration and outsourcing has replaced it as the desired source of labor, since neither illegal immigrants nor foreign workers in their own countries benefit from U.S. labor laws and regulations.

Decreasing the market value of labor is only one side of the process. It’s also been the historical desire of capital to increase labor’s productive value. If this is done without increasing, or better still while decreasing, the market value of labor, then the labor value gap is increased that way as well. In the past, prior to globalization, capital has often sought high tariffs for this reason. Tariffs reduced foreign competition, and allowed higher prices to be set on goods, thus increasing the productive value of the labor that produced them. Of course, improving the productivity of labor through organization and mechanization also increases the productive value of labor. There have been times, however, when capital has been willing to see labor’s productive value actually decreased, as long as its market value was decreased more. A perfect example is the outsourcing of manufacturing that occurs today in response to the historically enlightened rules of the game governing American labor at this time. By moving manufacturing operations to countries where labor is paid only a small fraction of what American workers would have to be paid, manufacturers have been able to substantially reduce prices, and they have done so – not nearly as much as their labor costs have declined, but considerably. In this way, they have been able to continue selling higher quantities of goods to American consumers, whose paychecks have declined because of the loss of labor demand. So it isn’t about either maximizing price or minimizing wages by themselves. Rather, it’s about maximizing the gap between the two.

LIMITS ON THE LABOR VALUE GAP - POLITICAL

There are limits on how wide the labor value gap can become. These fall into two categories, the political and the economic. The political limits arise from the fact that everyone wants what they perceive as a fair shake. For workers, that means payment for their work that constitutes a living wage, and that they perceive as being a fair share of the wealth that their labor produces. A capitalist economy, by systematically increasing the labor value gap, incurs opposition and incites rebellion. The wider this gap becomes, and especially the worse off in real material terms the working class is compared to its expectations, the more opposition and rebellion will occur.

This rebellion may take the form of union organizing and strikes, of sabotage and assault, or, at its greatest extreme, of actual armed rebellion. The response to it, both by private capital and by capital-influenced government, tends initially to be repressive, but over time incorporates elements of reform and compromise. We may see this in the history of all capitalist economies to date, with the oldest such economies (those of the U.S. and western Europe) today exhibiting rules of the game that favor labor much more than was the case in the past. Repeatedly, the level of political unrest has reached a point where the more enlightened capitalists saw a need to offer reform of the system in order to allow it to continue functioning at all. Over time, this has resulted in a more humane and less brutal form of capitalism, incorporating many socialist features.

It’s important to recognize, though, that these reforms do not represent a defeat of the capitalists; they are not a revolution. Rather, they represent evidence that capitalist control of the state and of the economy is not and never has been absolute; it has always been possible to resist. If pushed hard enough, the government will institute reforms, and when the pressure becomes sufficiently strong, capitalists themselves will acquiesce in this reform, since it is preferable to revolution. The truly revolutionary change would be at root political, depriving capital of its monetary influence over government. Until that occurs, it’s questionable just how far the process of reform can go, and certain that any set of reforms will at times be undercut and reversed, or ways found around them, as has happened today with globalization and outsourcing.

LIMITS ON THE LABOR VALUE GAP - ECONOMIC

The other limit on how wide the labor value gap can become is economic. It arises because wages for work serve a dual function. On the one hand, they are a necessary cost of doing business, which capital seeks to minimize. On the other, they are what create a market for the goods and services offered. The market value of labor, therefore, is a limiting factor on the productive value of labor, and this means that in the long run too great a gap between the two will be unsustainable.

Economic history shows this clearly. The U.S. economy in its early phase was one of periodic crisis (1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929) that wiped out small businesses and brought great suffering to working people. These were more than just “recessions.” No recession during the period from the end of World War II until the election of Ronald Reagan ever reached the horrid depths of the financial panics that occurred about every 20 years, almost like clockwork, in the pre-Depression economy, when double-digit unemployment was the norm in such downturns, and the economy experienced nearly as many years in depression as it did out of it. Many people think of the panic of 1929 – called the “Great Depression” – as somehow extraordinary. It was not really that extraordinary. It was the longest of the depressions of that time by a couple of years, but otherwise not the worst; that dubious laurel goes to the depression of 1893. What distinguishes the Great Depression from its predecessors is not its severity, nor even its length, but the reforms that arose from it.

Why did these panics occur? Why was the economy as often depressed as otherwise? Because a high labor value gap means a depressed consumer market, sustainable only by a combination of speculative investment and credit. This is unavoidable as long as a significant labor value gap exists: the productive value of labor is the net market value of the goods produced, and in order to buy the goods produced the market value of labor must equal its productive value, or nearly so (we may allow a small gap, representing capital accumulated for reinvestment, with labor accordingly diverted from producing goods for consumption to producing capital goods).

All of these panics, like the severe recession we are experiencing as of this writing (2010), were deflationary, that is, they drove prices down. As such, they reduced the productive value of labor, which is partly dependent on the prices of the goods produced. Unfortunately, at the same time they also reduced the demand for labor and so reduced the market value of labor as well, and this preserved the imbalance and prevented quick economic recovery.

After the end of the Second World War, the U.S. economy, and also those of capitalist Europe and Japan, entered a uniquely enlightened period. The labor value gap was lower during this period than before the Depression, and also lower than it is today. Just the same, the gap never completely disappeared, and in a capitalist economy my belief is that it can’t. A capitalist economy is defined as one that exists to pursue profit, and profit is found only through a labor value gap.

Just the same, the depression of the consumer market caused by the labor value gap represents a limit to how wide that gap can become. Along with the political restraints produced by rebellion, it tends over time to move a capitalist economy, in fits and starts, along the socialist road.

LOGICAL OUTCOME

I am unsure of the answer here. Much depends on whether the process of reform described above can reach a stage in which capital loses its excessive influence on the government (by any means other than violent revolution). If so, then a full transition to some sort of socialist economy will occur. If not, then we will reach an equilibrium in which we see-saw, as we have in the period since World War II, between wider and more narrow labor value gaps.

But such prognosis is beyond the scope of this article, as would be a prescription for what sort of socialist structure would best describe the post-capitalist economy, should attaining that prove possible.

The First Noble Falsehood

2010-05-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

All of the religions of the Classical Civilized Paradigm have in common a core belief about the relationship between the soul and physical existence. This belief is expressed in different ways in different faiths, but the most elegant expression in my opinion is the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, first of which is that all life contains the element of suffering, or, more simply and as believed in practice, that all life is suffering. For Buddhists, the joys and pleasures of life (while acknowledged to exist) are, in essence, the bait for a trap. They’re here to bind us to the world so we can suffer more. The point is to get out.

No other religion puts it quite that way (or, in my opinion, quite that well), but all of the Great Religions share that conclusion: the point is to get out. We don’t belong here. We belong somewhere else or in some other conditions: in Heaven, in Paradise, reunited with God from Whom we have become separated, or restored to the bliss of non-manifestation. The details vary widely, of course. Religions of the Hindu/Buddhist complex believe in reincarnation or soul transmigration, and so teach that we may go through many incarnations before finally being freed to go where we belong. Religions of the Abrahamic lineage (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) don’t have this belief, and so teach that there is a single lifetime after which comes God’s judgment and (hopefully) a passage to the place where we belong. But in none of these faiths is incarnate, manifest existence on the physical plane seen as anything but a mistake.

This idea – that we are here by mistake, and our focus should be to remove ourselves somewhere else – is what I call, in a play on the Buddha’s teaching which I’m sure he will have enough enlightenment to forgive, the First Noble Falsehood.

In fairness to the Buddha, we can’t be sure that this is what he actually taught. No writings by him have survived, and that’s rather a mystery. The Buddha, who was a prince, was certainly literate. Did he really not write down any of his teachings, or were his writings lost – or suppressed – after his death? We may wonder the same thing about Jesus and Mohammed, who were also literate and who have also left us no writings. Be that as it may, an inevitable disconnect occurs in communication between the teachings of an enlightened spiritual leader such as the Buddha or Jesus, and the form those teachings take when embodied in an organized religion, especially after the old boy isn’t around any longer to interfere with the process.

Part of that disconnect arises simply because of the difficulty of communicating the deep truths of the spirit in words. Language isn’t designed for that purpose. Its vocabulary communicates things from one person to another that both people are already familiar with. In giving you directions to the post office, I know that you know what a street is, what a post office is, what it means to turn left or turn right, and how to identify various landmarks that I may give you to show the way. If someone wants to communicate something that is a bit outside his listeners’ experience, then one starts with the things the listener knows and builds on that. But to communicate spiritual reality is very, very difficult, because it is outside of the experienced world of most people. It can usually only be done in metaphors and parables, and even then most people will attach meanings to the parables that aren’t correct. “He who has an ear, let him hear.”

But beyond this, further problems came in for all Classical Paradigm religions as they became established and involved in politics. Ideas and teachings that did not serve the political purposes of the faith were suppressed, and ideas that were necessary for that purpose were introduced. And it is at this juncture, I believe, that the First Noble Falsehood arose.

Politics is in large measure about privilege. It’s a battleground between those who enjoy an elite, entitled, privileged position, and those who would like to see them lose it. Sometimes those who would like to see them lose it simply want to replace them as the privileged elite. Sometimes the goal is to eliminate privilege altogether or at least reduce its prerogatives. In modern times that latter manifestation has become more acute, but in the ancient times when the Buddha lived, the elite (to which class he himself was born) had things pretty much any way they wanted. Politics – a game the Buddha’s social class played exclusively, commoners need not apply – was thus all about upholding and supporting their status and power, except of course when it involved infighting among them for a larger share of power than one’s fellows.

Religion was, under the Classical Paradigm, always a partner with the state. Often, it was an actual arm of the state. As such, it always served the purposes of the state, which included public order, but also included the upholding of privilege. Now privilege, to the enlightened eye, is unjustifiable. It is simply wrong, and needs to be abolished. And so, if religion is to serve the purposes of the state, a filter must exist to allow the passion which an enlightened teacher’s teachings inspire to be twisted into the service of privilege, something he would in all cases have abhorred. And the First Noble Falsehood serves that purpose admirably, by taking that passion and turning its focus away from this world altogether and towards another reality where there is no social privilege to be threatened.

The challenge to privilege and power represented by spirituality when focused on this world where we actually live can be seen in modern times. Look what Gandhi accomplished for Indian independence or Martin Luther King for racial equality in America. There is magic in genuine spirituality, a power of the heart that moves the hearts of others. To the holders of privilege, spirituality is dangerous, and must be channeled into non-threatening, or ideally even privilege-supporting paths.

Jesus was not put to death on a whim.

The story of Christianity’s co-option by the Roman state in the 4th century CE is a good illustration of how the process works, and where the First Noble Falsehood comes from. I said above that under the Classical Paradigm religion was always intertwined with the state, but actually early Christianity represents an exception. Under Roman law, Christianity was an illegal religion, but the laws were seldom enforced. Christians could be arrested any time, given a chance to recant their faith, and executed in brutal ways if they refused, but most of the time they weren’t. The net effect was that Christians were free to practice their religion (except when some Emperor or other got a bug up his sphincter and started a persecution), but was not involved with the state at all. It couldn’t be, because it was illegal. Nor could intra-faith politicians (you know the type, all religions have them) call on the state to enforce their authority. For that reason, during the time between the mission of Paul and the Council of Nicaea, Christianity was one of the freest and most diverse religions of all antiquity.

It was also frequently troublesome. Christians refused to pay token worship to the official state religion, and so in the view of the state endangered Roman society’s relationship with the Gods, on whose favor it depended. Christians were also frequently pacifists and anti-slavery advocates, thus endangering the Roman state’s ability to defend itself against foreign enemies and the foundation of the Roman society’s economy. Here was spirituality acting as a threat to privilege, which it so often does.

Three Emperors attempted to stamp out the religion through persecution. None succeeded. In the early 4th century, the emperor Constantine tried a different approach: co-option. By repealing the laws against Christianity, by calling a council of “Bishops” (note that this in itself favored the more authoritarian forms of Christianity over the less so, since only the authoritarian Christian sects recognized “Bishops” to start with) from all over the Empire to iron out exactly what the faith stood for and taught, and finally by making Christianity itself the state religion of the Roman Empire, Constantine and his successors transformed it from a rebellious and dangerous spirituality into a useful tool of politics. One of the primary levers of this transition was to bring to the fore, and interpret in certain pro-privilege ways, the otherworldliness that had always been an element in the religion. Rather than oppose war and slavery in this world, believers were taught to focus on the next, where there was no war and where everyone was free. By the time of the Roman Empire’s fall, Christianity had become wholly a tool of civic authority and the defense of privilege. The First Noble Falsehood was an important part of that transition.

The transition to that state for other religions is less visible, and in some cases I suppose it’s possible that the First Noble Falsehood was enshrined from the beginning so that no actual transition occurred. What is certain, however, is that so long as religion and the state remained partners in politics, any religion allowed to survive would of necessity transfer any passions for reform from this world to another.

With the separation of church and state which has become the modern norm, spirituality is now free to manifest itself in worldly ways and has begun to do so once more. It is, I think, time to abandon the First Noble Falsehood. We are not here, embodied in physical existence, as a mistake, and our goal is not to leave this life for another, but to make of it the best and holiest thing we can, in love of those around us and in homage to the principles we cherish.

Personal Power and Political Power

2010-05-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

“Money is power” is a cliché. That wealth leads to power, and vice-versa, is so well-known that an important underlying question is often missed. One finds arguments about which of the two is the more important for the commercial elite in our society – again missing that underlying question.

The important underlying question that’s often missed is this: what KIND of power? Are we discussing political power or personal power?

Political power is the ability to influence governing institutions. It’s held (obviously) by elected officials. Barack Obama, at present, has a great deal of political power. He can issue orders and have them carried out by the agencies of the U.S. government, by the United States military forces, and by the Democratic Party which he heads. He can use the persuasive power of his office to influence votes in Congress. To a lesser degree, all elected members of Congress also hold political power, as do Cabinet members and other important unelected government officials and those holding office in state and local governments, or in foreign governments throughout the world. Political power is also wielded by those who don’t hold government offices but who, through campaign contributions and lobbying, or through the ability to persuade a following among the citizens, can influence the actions of the government. Most of the time, when people speak of “power” being held or valued by the commercial elite, this is what they mean: the ability to influence government actions by means of persuasion and bribery.

If that sort of power, political power, is what we’re talking about, then I’d have to say on the whole – with a few exception – that money is more important to the commercial elite and power is only a means to the end of amassing more money. But there’s another sort of power that lies, I believe, at the heart of all desires to become mega-rich in the first place. Sometimes, for some people, it lies at the heart of a desire for political power as well. Both money and political power can be means to the end of amassing personal power: the ability to make other people, as individuals, into servants of one’s own will. Political power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified by the dictator. Personal power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified not by the dictator but by the slave owner.

Personal power is embodied in the powerful by a sense of superiority, and in the powerless by a sense of inferiority. Personal power lets a powerful person look at someone over whom he has power and say to himself – and, through various gestures and subtle means of communication, to his inferior as well – “I am better than you,” and makes the inferior say in the same ways, “You are better than I.” Unlike political power, it’s a very primal sort of power, with roots going back to the origins of our species. It pumps the body full of adrenaline and testosterone, or churns the guts with loathing, fear, and self-hatred.

Personal power is a man’s ability to seduce another man’s wife right in front of him, and have her be afraid to say no and him be afraid to do anything about it. Personal power allows a person to demand that others bow and scrape and show their submission. Personal power allows cruelty to others without penalty, and enables retaliation for even the most minimal slights. Personal power is what the power-hungry desire on a visceral level, and freedom from anyone having personal power over us is what we mean in our hearts by the word “liberty.”

Personal power is a face-to-face thing. Unlike political power, it isn’t impersonal power over the masses, but one-on-one power over an individual. It’s the ability of one individual to make another grovel, serve, and obey.

Government officials seldom hold personal power over ordinary citizens – we seldom interact with government officials in any direct way. They have personal power only over their employees, interns, and so on, and those who come within the purview of their immediate jurisdiction under the law.

Employers, on the other hand, always have personal power over their employees. We have laws protecting the rights of workers for that very reason, to limit the consequences of personal power. Landlords have personal power over renters, and we have laws protecting tenants’ rights for that reason. All such laws were fought tooth and nail by employers and landlords when they were proposed, partly because obeying them is often an expense, but in large part because it removes some of the payoff of personal power.

Every time an employee successfully starts a small business, or becomes self-employed, he gains freedom. The commercial elite may still have a lot more money than he does, but he is no longer dependent on any of them. No employer holds personal power over him. Every time a person buys his own home, he gains freedom. No landlord holds personal power over him.

That’s the underlying, unspoken reason why the pressure is on to keep wages suppressed in America. It’s not the only reason, of course; it’s reflexive for business owners for whom wages are a cost to be kept down, and who seldom consider the larger picture. But as long as wages are kept low, the number of people who will be able to escape from wage work and become free is limited, and so is the number of people who will be able to afford their own homes. With more and more money funneled to the very rich at the top of the ladder, they have more money to play with and gamble with, but at least as important is that the majority of the people are kept on the treadmill, where they can be controlled. Where they can be told what to do, and made to serve.

Personal power needs to be recognized and understood. We need to stop thinking “government” reflexively when we use the word “power.” Sure, government power is important and potentially dangerous. We need to make sure it is restrained by the three safety controls we put on it: separation of powers, public accountability, and explicit limits of government action such as the Bill of Rights. When these become frayed, as they have in recent years, we need to restore them.

But on a visceral level, the government is not what most people think of when they imagine freedom. They think of their boss, or their landlord, and being able to tell them to shove it. They think of being in a situation where no one can tell them what to do. The real enemy of freedom in a democracy is not the government, but rich and powerful individuals able to exercise personal power. To judge whether a government is a tyranny, a good rule of thumb is to ask to what extent it serves the interest of rich and powerful individuals – helping them to exercise personal power over others. To say that government secures and protects people’s rights is another way of saying that it protects the weak from the strong. A tyranny instead aids and abets the strong in dominating the weak.

Of course, the rich and powerful often try to confuse the issue by saying that a government interfering with their freedom to tyrannize others is a tyranny, and to them, it is – as it has to be; if it weren’t, it would be a tyranny to the rest of us. In just that way the slave owners of the antebellum South complained of the tyranny of Washington. We need have no more sympathy for our capitalist masters today than we do in hindsight for the plantation masters of yesterday.

Real Conservatism: Bring Back the Federalist Party!

2010-04-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

Conservative, adj.:

1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
3. traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.

None of those three definitions describe people who self-identify as "conservatives" in American politics today. And therein lies the problem.

A healthy political dialogue in a progressive society would occur between progressives on one side and conservatives on the other. Progressives would push for change, identifying problems that need fixing or opportunities to achieve something, to make society more egalitarian, wealthier, healthier, better-educated, more enlightened, more peaceful, fairer, more just, freer, etc., etc. Conservatives would object with "yes, but" arguments. But do we really need to make this change at this time? But look at the cost! But consider the unforeseen consequences. The subtext of all of which is: We agree with the overall goal. But let's not be hasty. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it, or the best time.

It's a useful -- in fact, necessary -- function in the dialogue, conservatism. It's necessary because (let's face it) progressives aren't always totally smart. On occasion, we can be profoundly stupid. Half-baked. Overly zealous. Insufficiently mindful of costs, social and political realities, and unintended consequences. So it pays to have a conservative side of the dispute, frustrating though we may sometimes find it, to insist that progressive ideas prove themselves in imagination and accounting before they're actually implemented.

But that function can only be served by real conservatives. Wingnuts need not apply. Those who reject, not only the half-baked hasty ideas sometimes generated by progressives, but the very idea of progress, are not conservatives, because one of the cardinal principles of conservatism is to support the traditional values of one's society, and the traditional values of the United States of America are progressive. You know, things like "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," or "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Conservatives -- real conservatives, that is -- hold to the same progressive values as progressives do, they're just more cautious about implementing them and less convinced at any point about the size of the step we're ready, as a society, to take.

The problem with conservatism in today's American politics is that the term has been hijacked. It no longer applies to real conservatives, it applies today to wingnuts who reject progressive ideals altogether. It applies to people who don't believe in the secular, Enlightenment-based democracy that America traditionally seeks to build, but would instead create a theocracy. It applies to people who don't recognize the value of a multiracial, tolerant society, but would have a white people's country. It applies to those who advocate, not a cautious approach to change, but a radical one -- in anti-progressive directions. To re-criminalize abortion is not conservative, it's a radical change. To abolish such long-standing government functions as Social Security, Medicare, aid for the poor, regulation of the economy, even public education, is radical. To end the separation of church and state and create a Christian government and legal base is radical. To bring effective democracy to an end and hand all political power over to a corporate plutocracy is radical. Conservatives do not advocate radical change. And so the people who advocate these radical changes are not conservatives.

Over the course of elections since 1980, I have watched the wingnuts take over more and more of the Republican Party from the true conservatives that used to dominate it. I kept hoping that the process would have a natural limit, that the GOP would come to its senses at some point and return to traditional American values and its own previously-solid conservative function in the dialogue. It's still conceivable that they may, but given the depths to which the party has sunk at this point, I think we need to entertain and plan for the contingent possibility that they also may not. What happens then?

There are still a few conservatives in the Republican Party, and also quite a considerable number of them in the Democratic Party, but Republican conservatives have become an endangered species. (Due to the wingnuts having hijacked the term "conservative," these Republican conservatives are nowadays known as "moderates." I refuse to cooperate with that theft of a perfectly good term by those to whom it does not properly belong, and so insist on calling these politicians conservatives, which they are.) We hear today that Florida Governor Crist, a conservative who will almost certainly lose the GOP Senate primary this year to a wingnut, will probably ditch the GOP and run as an independent. A few conservative Republicans have already left the party and either become independents or joined the Democrats. John McCain of Arizona is another conservative who faces a primary challenge from a wingnut, and although he has not indicated any inclination to jump party, none of us should rule out the possibility at this point. The surge of wingnut Republicans zealously trying to rid the party of conservatism has become endemic.

At the same time, as we progressives are painfully aware, the conservatives within the Democratic Party are making it harder for progressives to achieve what they should be doing. Well, of course that's what conservatives are supposed to do, but the problem is that the progressive-conservative dialogue, which has mostly become intra-Democratic, is in turn hampered by the howling wingnuts on the other side of the aisle. It's very difficult for Democrats to manifest both sides of a healthy political dialogue (progressive and conservative), and at the same time present a united front against wingnuttery. There's a strong tendency for people on our side of the discussion, that is to say, progressives, to turn upon conservative Democrats in wrath and insist that they be replaced by progressives, a desire that is amplified by fear and loathing of the wingnuts. Our political landscape is rapidly changing from one of progressives and conservatives to one of progressives and wingnuts, with conservatives squeezed out of the picture altogether.

Folks, that is not a good prognosis! We NEED conservatives, and we certainly do NOT need wingnuts! So I think it may be time to consider some practical contingency plans for bringing conservatives, real conservatives, non-crazy conservatives, conservatives-not-wingnuts, back into politics with a home of their own.

The simplest and best solution would of course be for the Grand Old Party to recover from its thirty-year binge and return to sobriety. Let the "big tent" goppers win the intra-party argument. Let the wingnuts be consigned to the wings and fringes where they belong. Let genuine conservatives again take their proper places as the loyal elected opposition. A nice dream. Maybe it will become real. But I'm no longer willing to hold my breath waiting.

Failing that, what we may need is a new political party. Governor Crist, rather than running as an independent, should found this party. I don't have any idea what to call it -- well, sure I do; it could be called the Conservative Party. But maybe that has too much potential confusion with the British party of the same name. The Party of Sanity is too flippant, as is the Party of Non-Wingnuts. Ah! I have it! We can bring back the oldest, most original name for an American party of conservatives there is, and call them the Federalist Party. Or maybe they can come up with a better name themselves, but I'll use that tag provisionally here.

The Federalist Party would include such Republicans as Crist, Olympia Snowe, Tom Campbell, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenneger, and similar targets of wingnut loathing. It would also find room within its ranks for Democrats (and ex-Dems) such as Blanche Lincoln, Joseph Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and so on. Since these people would no longer be competing in Republican (or Democratic) primaries, there would be no pressure on them to adopt wingnut positions and they could remain true to their conservative beliefs, and let those positions run honestly and fairly in general elections versus both progressives and wingnuts.

After all, there's really only one reason why the wingnuts are getting anywhere at all: they are big fish in an increasingly small pond, as the number of voters willing to call themselves Republicans declines, and the smaller and smaller numbers that remain are increasingly dominated by wingnuts. This means that on election day, it becomes increasingly likely that one of the candidates in every election will be a wingnut. So I say, let that process reach its logical conclusion, let the Republicans become purely a wingnut party, and let those Republican conservatives who remain have somewhere else to go besides the Democrats. Since under those conditions wingnuts would win very few elections indeed, the Republicans would, over a few election cycles, quickly go the way of the Whigs, and future elections would be mainly between the progressive Democrats and the conservative Federalists. (At least until we adopt proportional representation so that we can have more than two active serious political parties. But that's a change of subject.)

Would this be better or worse in terms of elections for progressives? I'm going to be have to be honest here: it would be worse. There's no question that, most of the time, a progressive can beat a wingnut in an election more easily than a sane conservative. So if all we care about is the short-term goal of electing progressives, a return of genuine conservatism isn't a good thing. But I don't think that is all we should care about. It also must be recognized that wingnuttery does not deserve to be represented in Congress, yet in many districts, replacing wingnuts with progressives is simply not feasible; the people might be uneasy with their wingnut reps but they don't want any dad-gum lib'ruls neither. So a real, true conservative Congresscritter would be the realistic alternative, better than a wingnut because, well, anything is, and better than a progressive because he or she would represent the people of the district, which a progressive (in all honesty) would not.

Let me repeat the first sentence above: A healthy political dialogue in a progressive society would occur between progressives on one side and conservatives on the other. That's something we don't have any more. It would be good if we did. We might not elect as many progressives that way as when the only alternative to progressives consist of clowns and zanies, but on the other hand we would elect no clowns and zanies. And that would be better for America.

There's Racism, And Then There's Racism

2010-04-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Is the Tea Party movement racist? Seems to me it is or it isn't depending on what kind of racism one means.

There's no question that opposition to President Obama from the right is vehement to a degree not really explained by his policies. This is not unlike the wild opposition to President Clinton, who was less progressive than Obama but also incurred loathing and fear on the right. Because Obama is black, the idea has arisen (and a certain amount of polling data in support of it has been presented) that this vitriol is based in racism. The fact that something similar was encountered by President Clinton, who is white, would seem at first glance to argue to the contrary. In fact, I contend that it supports the idea, if one examines the likely explanation for what DID generate that opposition.

Some racism is overt, crude, unsubtle, and blatant. Some racism is covert (or even unconscious), subtle, internalized, and unacknowledged even to oneself. Very little of the opposition to Obama is the result of overt racism. But a great deal of it is at least in part the result of covert racism.
An overtly racist objection to Obama would exist when a person feels, and admits to himself or herself (if not always to others), that a black person should not be president. Evidence of overt racism would be found when a person actually says something like this, or when a person is affiliated with a racist or white nationalist organization (e.g. when the person is a regular poster at Stormfront). Some of this does exist of course, but I am prepared to accept that the overwhelming majority of the Tea Party movement isn't part of it.

A covertly racist objection to Obama would exist when a person has no problem with a black person being president, but does have a problem with the idea that a black person could be elected president. That is to say, the person holding this attitude doesn't think black people are inferior to white people or inherently unqualified to be president, and may be willing to acknowledge that Barack Obama is a sharp guy who is just as capable at the job as a lot of white guys who have held it before him. It's not him. It's what his being elected says about what has happened to America.

I had a similar impression about the vitriolic opposition to Bill Clinton. Clinton's a white southern boy, of course, but he's also a notorious womanizer who evaded the Vietnam draft, smoked dope, grew his hair long, and married a tough feminist b**ch. For those who are inclined to freak out about the cultural changes that occurred over the 1960s and 1970s, he was a walking red flag, not because of his politics (which are pretty far right as Democrats go), but because of his cultural trappings and who he is as a person. In their America, the America they fondly remember from their childhood and would like to believe still exists -- in the REAL America, as they imagine to themselves -- someone like that would provoke revulsion and could NEVER win the nomination of a major party, let alone actually be elected. The vitriolic opposition wasn't really about him. It was about what his electability said about how America had changed and in what directions.

This impression was reinforced during the impeachment fiasco, which led Paul Weyrich to say, "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values. If there really were a moral majority, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago. It is not only the lack of political will on the part of Republicans, although that is part of the problem. More powerful is the fact that what Americans would have found absolutely intolerable only a few years ago, a majority now not only tolerates but celebrates."

In a similar way, Barack Obama's election says something about what America has become and is becoming that some people don't want to accept. And that change is not so much cultural as racial. Although there are cultural overtones, too.

White people are in the process of becoming a minority in this country. It hasn't happened yet, but it's in train. When it does happen, whites will be the largest minority, but still will represent less than 50% of the population. In the sepia-toned memory photographs of Obama's detractors, real America is a land predominantly of white people. Sure, it has nonwhites in it, and if you ask these guys they'd happily tell you that racial discrimination and Jim Crow and segregation and all that nasty stuff from our past had to go and they're glad it's gone. At least most of them will, and most will even mean it and believe it. But what they envision is an America of white people who are magnanimously, righteously non-racist and willing to generously tolerate and accept minorities in our midst on a (somewhat) equal basis, 'cause that's what great and wonderful people white Americans are. The idea of white people no longer being a majority, and thus no longer able to call the shots and be magnanimous and generous and so on, that doesn't sit well. But that's what the future holds.

As we approach that future, it becomes increasingly probable that someone non-white will gain the White House, and now it's happened. Obama was elected because America has a whole lot of black and hispanic citizens who voted for him in lopsided majorities. Obama was elected in addition because a whole lot of young people -- including young white people -- don't care that the country is heading for a white-minority future. Obama being elected president says that the uncomfortable future is closer than they thought, and his dusky face on the television above the presidential seal is a harsh reminder that the world of those sepia-toned memory photographs no longer exists. It makes them feel out of place in the world that surrounds them now.

And that feeling infects everything else, and magnifies small political objections into big ones, and causes irrational and unbelievable accusations to be believed without serious critique.
It isn't racist in the sense of being bigoted and thinking no black guy should be allowed to be president or can possibly have the smarts for it. But it is racist in the sense of being based in a lament for the fact that America is rapidly ceasing to be a white people's country.

Slavery, Serfdom and Wage Work: The Forms of Coercion

2010-04-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

I continue this week to encourage radical thinking, and to build on the post from last week. Last week, I explored the origins of capital property ownership, how it separates the right to own wealth from the work to create it, and the consequent nature of profit as a form of theft.

This week, I want to explore the lynchpin of all class privilege throughout the history of civilization: the ability to coerce the labor of others for the elite’s profit and the elite’s ends. Historically, there have been three broad methods by which the labor of the many has been channeled to the ends of the few, declining in brutality and increasing in subtlety from one to another, but all of them coercive in one way or another. These three methods are slavery, serfdom (and variants), and wage-work.

I don’t mean to suggest that there is perfect moral equivalence among the three. To be a wage worker is immeasurably better than to be a slave. The abandonment of slavery, and the near-abandonment of serfdom, really does represent progress in human rights and the human condition. But while working for wages is certainly not slavery, it is no more accurate to call it freedom. The only people who are free are those without masters, without bosses – those who work for themselves.

There was a time, early in the history of civilization, when that was pretty much the case for most people. The normal condition for a person in ancient times was not that of a hireling but that of a small farmer or craftsman, an owner of one’s own business. Working for someone else for pay was thought of as a transitional phase, something one did in order to learn a craft or to acquire the necessary capital to buy one’s own land. And of course, working for someone else was completely unknown in precivilized times. The transition to the current situation, in which the overwhelming majority of people work at jobs serving the profits of others, with no entitlement to the fruits of their own labor, did not develop overnight. The circumstances of servitude have grown less severe with the passage of time, but at the same time the condition of actual freedom has grown rarer and rarer.

One of the earliest forms of working for another, and the first to be employed on a large scale, was slavery. We may consider this the template. Initially, slavery probably arose as a consequence of war. When the victors in a war conquered an enemy, they gained more than the land that the enemy had occupied. They also gained the surviving enemy citizens as captives. Even when the conquest was less complete than that, captives were often taken in the course of the fighting and could be brought to the homeland and forced under threat of punishment to work for the victors. Of course, just as with the enemy’s land, the enemy people became disproportionately the property of the elite, who found themselves the owners of large tracts of land worked by slaves and generating a lot of money without the owner having to work on it at all. (Profit being theft, as noted last week.)

Over time, slaves became property to buy and sell just like land itself, and the pattern emerged of a class of warrior-aristocrats living off the labor of people who had no rights under the law (or few, depending on the society) and whose only purpose in life was to serve the interests of their masters. This became the template for all elite classes from that time forth. Like most prototypes, it was crude and unsubtle compared with the more sophisticated ways of compelling labor that followed. It suffered from numerous disadvantages, including slave revolts and a lack of motivation on the part of the workers. Nevertheless, it sufficed to keep the aristocratic class in wealth and power for thousands of years and in many different civilizations. Even more importantly, the underlying idea that the elite deserved to be served by a class of workers and to become rich from their labor became so entrenched that it survives to this day, many years after slavery itself has been outlawed.

One problem with slavery is that it was universally unappealing to the slave. (Or nearly so. There are instances in ancient times of highly skilled persons selling themselves into slavery, knowing that their skills would earn them favored treatment and a better circumstance than they could achieve in freedom. However, that’s the exception; very few slaves ever became slaves by choice.) People resisted becoming slaves and had to be forced into it when captured in battle or condemned for debt or for some other legal offense for which slavery was the penalty. There was really no way to reduce most of the people to a state of slavery, because the numbers of slaves would have proven impossible to control by the number of free people. In order to increase the number of people who could be reduced to servitude, it was necessary to make the conditions of servitude less drastic than was usually the case with slavery.

Some examples may be found prior to the industrial revolution of a form of coercion gentler than slavery, but still more direct and brutal than wage work. This consisted of a defined set of obligations on the part of a worker, who was forbidden under most conditions to leave his employment, but who also had more rights under the law than a slave. I’m going to call this sort of arrangement “serfdom,” but I should explain that I’m talking about a broader category of social arrangement than serfdom proper. The peasantry of medieval China or Japan, or the sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements in the post-emancipation American South, fit into this general category, as well as the condition of the medieval European serf. Because serfdom was less onerous than slavery, because it entailed some rights on the part of the serf and some obligations to the serf on the part of the master, it was possible to have a larger population of serfs than could be maintained as slaves. Even so, it turned out not to be as perfect a solution as wage work: the industrial-era answer that has turned nearly everyone into a tool of the elite.

Anyone can see how slavery and serfdom are coercive arrangements, because the victim is punished for refusing to work. But in the case of wage work, the coercive nature of the institution is less evident, because a wage worker is not directly punished for refusing to work. The only punishment is to withhold a reward: failure to work means the worker will not be paid. But it is still coercive, and the coercion still takes the form of punishment or threat of punishment. It’s just not applied by his immediate employer, nor directly for refusing to work. The coercion applied to a wage worker is applied before he ever accepts a job. It is built into the system of ownership that concentrates possession of capital property into a few privileged hands. It punishes the wage worker, not for refusing to work, but for attempting to work using capital property that belongs to the elite. Since he cannot obtain capital property of his own, he is unable to produce wealth on his own for his own use or for sale to others. As such, he has no independent way of supporting himself. He must work for the profit of another, in return for the means to support himself and his family. Rewards are sufficient motivators only to the extent that the person receiving the reward suffers from deprivation. If the wage worker can support himself through his own labor on his own behalf, rather than in service to another, then his desire for monetary reward is satiated, and he will have no reason to surrender his liberty. The rat will run the maze in return for food pellets, but only if it is kept hungry.

Because the ability of an employer to apply direct coercion is limited, and because the wage worker is allowed by law to voluntarily leave his employment, refusing to work but giving up his wages, it carries a greater semblance of freedom than either slavery or serfdom. It has been possible to argue that a wage worker “voluntarily” enters into an employment agreement, and so is actually free. The argument is specious, of course, because the only way the agreement could genuinely be voluntary is if the worker had the right and opportunity to support himself without a master. When the alternative is starvation, no real choice exists. It has also been possible to argue, with equal speciousness, that the worker rather than his master owns the fruits of his labors, by confusing the real fruits of his labors – the goods or services that his labor creates – with the reward his employer offers for surrendering them. Let there be no confusion on this point. A wage worker is not a slave, nor is he a serf. But he is most certainly not free.

In addition to keeping capital property concentrated in few hands – actually, in service to that necessity of universal coerced labor – it has also been desirable from the standpoint of the elite to keep the rewards paid for wage labor as low as practical. This was desired partly so as to maximize the share of wealth held by the elite, of course, but also to reduce the chance of a wage worker freeing himself by saving sufficient money to go into business or, through investments, to support himself without working. Even if a worker is unable to completely free himself from servitude, if he is well paid and lives within his means, his options become wider and he is much harder to manipulate. If asked to do something unacceptable, an employee who can survive without work for a year or more is much more likely to quit than one that lives paycheck to paycheck.

In the end, it’s all about power, even more than about money.

And that will be the subject of next week’s post.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357

Profit Is Theft

2010-04-04T18:11:00.000-07:00

One of my purposes in writing this blog is to encourage radical thinking. Not necessarily radical action (although radical thinking does radicalize action to a degree), but thinking that cuts through the false assumptions and intellectual ruts at the roots of a lot of habitual thought in politics, economics, religion, and art. If we can think radically, possibilities open to our consideration that we would never even imagine otherwise.

This week, I want to discuss two concepts that are crucial to any capitalist economy, and that are older than civilization, but much younger than the human race: the private ownership of capital property, and the related concept of profit. These were, for their times, radical ideas. Today, pointing out that they are not inevitable or natural ideas has itself become radical, and so doing that has become necessary.

Property ownership in some forms is as old as the human race, or somewhat older. But the property that our precivilized ancestors owned was all personal property, not capital property. Individuals owned things that they planned to use and enjoy themselves: clothing, tools, weapons, food stores, maybe a tent or a place in the communal dwelling. But no individual owned the land from which all these things came. An individual hunter could own the meat from his own kill, but not the hunting ground. The same hunter could own the spear he used to kill his prey, but not the flint quarry that its spearhead came from. Land was different from other types of property in that it was used to make wealth, rather than being wealth itself. In precivilzed society, it was the property of the band or the tribe, not of any individual. Any property that a person owned, he owned because his own work had made it, or because he had traded something produced by his own work for the product of someone else’s work.

Let’s look a bit more closely at that paradigm of property, because it contrasts greatly with what obtains today.

The source of wealth (the land) is owned communally.

The land is available to anyone in the band or tribe that is capable of making wealth from it.

If a person makes something, then (subject to tribal rules about sharing food and other necessities to make sure no one goes hungry or otherwise suffers unnecessarily) that person owns it. Labor defines ownership.

Private ownership of capital property was introduced with civilization. It created a very different paradigm of property ownership that worked like this.

The source of wealth (the land, and later on industrial plant and sometimes intellectual property) is owned by individuals.

The land and other capital property are only available to make wealth from with the permission of its owner.

If a person makes something, then (subject to laws which take a portion in taxes to cover public expense) it belongs to the owner of the capital property from which it is made. Labor does not define ownership. Ownership of capital property, and nothing else, defines ownership of the wealth produced from it.

Note the difference? When capital property was communally owned, it was labor that defined the ownership of wealth. Each person owned what he worked to produce. But since capital property has become privately owned, that ownership is now what defines ownership of the wealth produced from it. Today, no one owns what he works to produce, at least not because he works to produce it. Ownership is defined by ownership itself. To own capital property is to own what is produced from it, whether you do the work to produce it or someone else does. If you own capital property, that entitles you not only to the fruits of your own labor applied to that property, but also to the fruits of other people’s labor applied to the same. If you do not own capital property, then you are not entitled even to the fruits of your own labor.

This may be counter-intuitive, so let me go into a little more detail. Some may respond: aren’t people paid for their work? Don’t they own the fruits of their labor in the form of their wages or salaries?

No. They do own their wages or salaries of course, but that is NOT the product of their labor. That is the fee paid them for doing the work even though someone else owns the product of their labor. The product of a person’s labor is the goods or services produced by it, and that belongs not to the worker, but to the owner of the capital property the worker used to produce it. What’s more, it is always worth more in sale value than the wages paid those who produce it. As an employee, you are paid only a portion of the value of what your work produces – as small a portion as your employer can pay and still get you to do the job, and certainly never equal to the full value.

This brings us to the related concept of profit. What is profit? It’s defined as the revenues generated by a business minus its expenses. It may also be regarded as the net share of wealth going to the owner of capital property. Or, less even-handedly, it is that portion of the total wealth of an enterprise that the owner skims from the labor of others.

To make this clear, I’m going to exercise a bit of author privilege, or linguistic irresponsibility, and slightly redefine the word. (I have no shame. It’s true. Ask anyone.) For purposes of this writing, “profit” applies only to that portion of a business’ net revenue that is not produced with the owner’s own labor. This means that if you are the sole proprietor of a business with no employees, your business makes no “profits” in this sense, because your labor and no one else’s has generated the goods or services which have been sold to generate revenue. I’m doing this because I want to illustrate something about the great majority of business profits in our economy, which is however not true of situations such as I just described.

Profit, then, as I am using the word, is wealth amassed through other people’s work.

It is in this sense of the word “profit” – although I must emphasize that the vast majority of what accountants call “profit” does meet this definition – that profit is theft. It is the producing of wealth through the labor of other people, who are paid less than the value of the goods and services their labor produces. The owners of capital property – property which, in the natural state that our ancestors occupied for over a hundred thousand years, many times the duration of civilized life so far, was owned communally and not the property of any one individual – are taking wealth that other people have produced, and that in a natural society would belong to the people who produce it. And that is stealing.

But this act of theft is perpetrated by almost all owners of capital property without a shred of guilt, with even less shame than I feel in redefining a word here and there, because it has become endemic in our society and perceived as the natural order of things, no matter how unnatural it actually is. And it is completely unnatural, in two ways. Not only have we redistributed capital property, which in our original, natural societies was held in common, into private ownership, but we have also changed the rules about who owns what is produced from it, so that ownership rather than labor determines ownership. In natural, precivilized societies, capital property was owned by the society, but the society did not own the wealth that was produced from it. The individual that did the work owned the product of his work. (Subject, of course, to rules distributing food to the hungry and such, but that’s functionally equivalent to taxes today, and is a footnote to the process not the main description.) So not only have we gone from an arrangement in which capital property is publicly owned to one in which it’s privately owned, but at the same time we’ve gone from a system in which labor defines ownership to one in which ownership defines ownership. We have done this, obviously, to benefit the owners of capital property, who enjoy enormous privileges both economic and political in a modern society.

As noted above in the first paragraph, I’m not proposing any particular action here. We are long past the time when we could restore communal ownership of capital property, or at least I can’t think of any way to make that work in a modern industrial economy. Then again, perhaps there is a way and I simply haven’t thought of it. Certainly it’s a millennia-old Gordian knot of privilege and power, not easily undone. But the mind is as sharp an implement as Alexander’s sword, and merely to recognize the reality of what is and why serves by itself to put things into a new perspective. Also, there are some consequence of this recognition that all for-hire workers are being systematically plundered by a system designed to create and reward privilege which will be explored in future posts. At very least, this perspective will hopefully give many people the idea that things which have been taken for granted should be changed, which is a prerequisite to the consideration of exactly what they should be changed into.

Next week: slavery, serfdom, and wage work, or, the forms of coercion.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357

This Is No Time For Compromise

2010-03-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

Can we now dispense with the word “bipartisanship” now?

We are in a Crisis era, a Fourth Turning. Roughly once a lifetime, we go through a period of civic upheaval in which our national institutions (political and economic) have, for one reason or another, become dysfunctional. The last time this happened was in the 1930s-40s with the Great Depression followed by World War II. The time before that was in the 1860s-70s with secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The time before that was in the 1770s-80s with the American Revolutionary War and the framing of the Constitution. You can find out more about the concept at this web site: http://www.fourthturning.com/. But what I want to write about today is not the overall concept of the generational cycle and the Fourth Turning. I want to talk about a specific characteristic that all Fourth Turnings have, this one (so far) included. That characteristic is divisiveness. It’s something that is often decried, but it is in fact a good thing – indeed, an absolutely necessary thing.

A Crisis era (such as this one) is a decisive time. It’s a time when much-needed reforms are put in place, reforms that have been neglected for decades. It is not a time for compromise or soft talk or middle courses. It’s a time when consensus cannot be achieved, when conflict arises between those who see a need for the new and those who would preserve the old, however dysfunctional it may be. It is the nature of such a conflict that it cannot be resolved through agreement. There must be a victory, and there must be a defeat. Consider the three Crisis eras from our nation’s past, beginning with the American Revolution.

In 1773, tensions had been rising between England and the American colonies for decades. The expensive conclusion of the Seven Years War (or French and Indian War to Americans) moved the British government to try to get the colonies to contribute financially to their own defense. A reasonable request, of course, but it ran head-first into the colonists’ conviction that they had come to America in the first place in search of self-rule, and that Crown and Parliament had no proper sovereign authority over America. London’s position was diametrically opposed: the British government insisted on its right to govern all British territory, including the colonies in America.

This impasse had grown over time. Prior to the French and Indian War, the British government didn’t really make any attempt to govern the colonies. Britain used America as a convenient dumping ground for condemned criminals (as she would later use Australia), a source of raw materials, and a market for manufactured goods, but otherwise left the colonists to their own devices. Thought in Britain had always held that the Crown and Parliament held sovereignty and the right to govern, but why bother? As American society became more developed and sophisticated, though, as population grew, and as the war with France forced Great Britain to take an interest in (and spend more money on) America’s defense, the attitude of the British government and that of the Americans approached collision.

A number of taxes were imposed on the colonists in the years following the end of the war, provoking a storm of protest. The government backed down and repealed most of these taxes by the early 1770s, retaining only a token duty on imported tea.

Was the tea tax onerous, an unconscionable burden threatening to reduce Americans to abject poverty? Certainly not. It was barely a tax at all. It would fall short of paying for the French and Indian War by millions of pounds. Most Americans would likely shrug their shoulders, pay the duty, and hardly notice. But the Tea Act, if allowed to stand, set the precedent that Parliament had the authority to tax the colonists and to legislate in other ways. Rather than accept this, a radical group led by Samuel Adams engaged in a bit of guerrilla theater, nonviolent civil disobedience, and applied vandalism, and destroyed a cargo of tea in Boston harbor.

This was not a move intended or calculated to provoke compromise. In response, the British government didn’t compromise, either. It imposed a series of Punitive Acts (or “Intolerable Acts” as the Americans called them) which further roused the Americans’ ire. Americans began forming militias and stockpiling arms and ammunition. The Crown dispatched reinforcements to America and negotiated with the German principality of Hesse for mercenary troops. The Americans formed a provisional government and appointed George Washington commander of its newly created army, which set about besieging the British forces in Boston. Battles were fought. Washington’s forces outmaneuvered the British at Boston and forced them to withdraw. The British thereafter returned the favor at New York City and nearly (but not quite) destroyed the Continental Army. The Congress passed a motion to declare independence from Great Britain. From that point on, the lines were drawn and no compromise was possible. Either America would become fully independent of Great Britain, or the colonies would submit to British rule, but the prior condition of loyal but self-governing colonies would cease to exist, one way or another.

Does this begin to sound familiar in terms of our current situation?

We can also compare it to what happened in the 1860s. Tensions had been building over issues related to industrialization of the country, particularly slavery, for many years. The territories acquired during the U.S.-Mexican War were a focus for much of the argument, since they would eventually become states and their representatives in Congress would weigh in on one side of the divide or the other. The newly-formed Republican Party represented the interests of the northern capitalists and of the abolitionists (who were in agreement over the specific issue of slavery; both opposed it although for different reasons). A moderate Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was nominated for president in 1860. Lincoln was not proposing to outlaw slavery, but did propose to keep it out of the new states formed from the western territories. This would, over time, result in an anti-slavery majority in Congress, and the planter interests saw the writing on the wall.

A true compromise on the issue of slavery would have resulted in gradual emancipation with compensation paid to the slave owners for loss of their property, but the hard-liners were not interested in that on either side. Southern fire-eaters saw an opportunity to provoke secession from the U.S. by states that permitted slavery. The strategy for this was to ensure a hard-line pro-slavery Democratic candidate in the election. Moderate Democrats held their own convention, with the result that the party split and nominated two competing presidential tickets, both of which lost (predictably enough) and Lincoln won with a plurality of the popular vote, exactly as the fire-eaters had intended. Seven states promptly seceded. Lincoln initially attempted a compromise solution and peaceful rejoining of the Union. The seceding states were having none of it. They formed a new central government with a Constitution modeled on the one they had abrogated (with a few appropriate changes) and, in a dispute over a federal fort within the borders of one of the seceding states, went to war.

Once again, an irreconcilable conflict existed. The southern planters wanted to preserve an antique way of life based on wealth generated by growing cash crops with slave labor. The northern commercial and industrial interests wanted to pursue an increasingly mechanized and industrialized future in which slaves would be replaced by machines and finance capital would dominate the entire economy, and the emancipationists, their temporary and ad-hoc allies, wished to free the slaves for moral reasons. A solution might have been found short of war, but it would have required the planters to accept defeat and seek the best compromise deal they could get. They were unwilling to do that. And so the lines were drawn once again, and the conflict fought to the finish.

The Great Depression was less violent, but no less uncompromising. A breakdown of the capitalist economic system with its governing philosophy of laissez-faire left some 25% of the workforce unemployed. Neither the breakdown nor dispute over that philosophy was new; the industrial economy put in place after the Civil War suffered periodic financial panics and depressions roughly every 20 years. The philosophy itself was opposed by labor union activists, anarchists, socialists, and Communists. Class conflict had been intensifying for decades. The Depression brought it all to a head. Herbert Hoover, the president when the economy tanked, was no laissez-faire purist, or so one would judge from his past. But he moved in that direction in the face of disaster, perhaps out of genuine conviction or perhaps because the Republican Party demanded it of him. The conflict this time was political and electoral and did not involve guns (which we may take as a sign of progress), but it was no less decisive. Over the years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, laissez-faire was abandoned. The workplace was unionized, the government regulated the banks and other industries, and the first social welfare programs (Social Security and unemployment insurance) were put in place. By the time World War II was over, a new economy had been crafted, a mix of capitalist and socialist elements. This was not accomplished through bipartisan compromise any more than the changes of the American Revolution or the Civil War were. The divide was sharp and partisan, with the Democrats on one side of it and the Republicans on the other. The Democrats won, and the Republicans lost.

In the present time, we again face a situation similar to those three. The economy has again broken down, although not as severely as during the Great Depression. In addition, we face shortages of key raw materials and severe environmental dangers. The problems this time are global in scope. The global economy is beyond the power of any one national government to regulate – an international means of regulating it is required. One economic problem that was not present in the 1930s was a shortage of fuel; the U.S. was still a net exporter of oil then. Today, we are faced with the need to transform our energy economy away from its dependence on oil – no easy task. We cannot simply apply the same methods that worked in the Depression, despite a superficial similarity.

On all of these points, we do not find national unity. There are voices on the other side, claiming that the problems don’t exist, or that we can solve them without changing the way we do business. In many cases, these voices are cynical and insincere, acting not with genuine public concern but out of a desire to protect private profits. We saw how fiercely the lines were drawn over the health-care reform debate. This is the template for the next few elections. A compromise, “bipartisan” solution will, almost by definition, be an unworkable one. We must accept that the conflict exists. It’s too soon to broker a negotiated settlement. First, we must win. Then we can make peace.

I hope – and given the example of the Great Depression, I cautiously believe – that I speak of “winning” and of “peace” only in metaphor. Some violence, however, has already occurred. It remains to be seen whether those who are defeated at the polls (rather, some of their crazier supporters) will resort to the cartridge box instead of the ballot box. Let us pray not. Such efforts would of course be defeated, but in the course of it lives would be lost for the most futile of causes. In that sense, I hope that we have peace now, not after victory. But at the same time, we cannot let the danger of violence deter us from doing what must be done.

In any case, it’s time to jettison the search for “bipartisanship.” There will come a time later on, after the necessary reforms are in place and their opponents have accepted reality, when consensus may be sought once more. But that time is not now.

Interim Post

2010-03-27T11:03:00.001-07:00

I'll have a regular weekly post up here tomorrow, but at the moment I want to put up a few links where more of my writing on various things can be found.

My Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?ref=profile&id=100000709608530

In the Notes section, I include poetry and excerpts from my novel, The Stairway to Nowhere.

Which novel has an e-book page here:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357

You can read half of the book on-line for free, or download either a free sample or the whole book in various formats (.mobi for the Kindle, epub, LRF for the Sony Reader, PDF, or RTF).

See you tomorrow, and thanks for visiting.

The Advanced Civilized Paradigm III: Government

2010-03-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

This is the third entry in the Advanced Civilized Paradigm series, concerning government. As with the economy and religion, we can recognize two stable, long-lasting forms of government in our history and prehistory, before entering upon modern times and the whirlwind of change we’ve become accustomed to. When I say “long-lasting,” I mean over time measured in the thousands of years.

When the species Homo sapiens first appeared on the planet, the government structure of the Precivilized Paradigm already existed, as did its economic forms and, very likely, its basic religious ideas. The hominid species that preceded us, H. erectus, had already invented the fundamental technologies with which our ancestors faced the world: simple stone tools, the controlled use of fire, clothing, basket-weaving, primitive medicine. True humans quickly refined and improved all these technologies, but even so it was a long time before our ancestors resorted to the key technology which changed the paradigm of social life: agriculture. As long as humans lived by foraging and hunting instead of by planting and husbandry, certain forms of government, economy, and religion prevailed. It was a simpler, more egalitarian, less formalized way of life.

As with the economy and religion, we should ask ourselves a key question: what is government for? What purposes are served by having an empowered authority over society, whatever form it takes? As with economy and religion, the answer is a simple one, despite the amazing complexity and variety of tasks before modern governments. A government has two functions. First, it resolves disputes among citizens. Second, it decides, coordinates and implements collective action. Every operation of government – armies and navies, police and courts, bureaucracies and legislatures, aid to the poor and corporate subsidies, men on the moon and men in black – serves one or the other of these purposes. Humans are a social species not a solitary one, so both these function of government are always necessary regardless of the particulars of society. Wherever people interact, disputes arise, and if we are not to resolve all of them by individual violence, we must have some method in place for resolving them by recourse to decisive authority. Also, all societies of necessity do some things collectively rather than individually, and so a means of making collective decisions and effectively giving orders to participants is required. These needs are constants, but the way in which they are met has varied – yet not endlessly.

In precivilized times, people lived in small bands. Everyone in a band knew everyone else, and most of them were related to each other. Leaders of the band were chosen by informal consensus, and collective decision-making was by informal discussion. In short, there was no formal government, really, nor any need of one. Like the economics and religion of the Precivilized Paradigm, its governing structures were maintained universally wherever human beings lived for somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years. It’s difficult to imagine life going on without change in its patterns for such a long time as that.

In fact, though, it didn’t quite. Technological progress occurred in precivilized times at a glacial pace, but over 100,000 or 200,000 years, even glacial-pace technological progress adds up. Humans improved their techniques of toolmaking, going from the thrusting spear or swung axe to the thrown spear to the spear-thrower to the bow and arrow. They learned to use domesticated dogs as hunting companions. They developed new and better methods of food preservation, and applied borderline methods that skirted between gathering and agriculture. As food supplies increased, so did populations, until the pressure of numbers forced human societies to make use of agriculture proper. As soon as that step was taken, the nature of human society, including its governing institutions, began to change.

The change occurred over at least a thousand years, going through several transitional forms, including the chiefdom and the council of elders and the primitive republic, until tribal life evolved into the city-state. From that point on, government assumed the form of the Classical Civilized Paradigm, and retained that form, with occasional temporary exceptions, for about seven to eight thousand years. The elements of government under the Classical Paradigm in nearly every society that lived in cities, from the earliest known city-states in the Near East until things began to change in the sixteenth century in Europe, remained constant, and revolved around hereditary monarchy, with the royal power compromised by the influence of the hereditary landed warrior elite, of the priestly class, and (where a significant commercial element existed in the economy) of the merchant class. In a few exceptional cases, the elite classes governed without a monarch, sometimes with a pretense of democracy; this was the case in classical Athens and in the Roman Republic. Such societies always had a very strong commercial economic base, and were the exceptions to an overwhelming rule. Not only was the governing structure of the Classical Paradigm the norm in agrarian, pre-industrial societies of the western Old World that had contact with each other and might conceivably have influenced one another through imitation, but also in societies that evolved with relative independence, such as the monarchies of ancient India, China, and Japan, or even with total independence, such as the civilized monarchies of Mesoamerica. This form of governance was not, I would argue, something primarily learned by one society through contact with another, but rather something dictated by material circumstance. A warlike society with a primarily agricultural economy, in which land was the primary source of wealth and labor to work the land the primary necessity for its exploitation, readily available in the form of captives taken in war, naturally developed an elite class of warriors who were rewarded with land ownership and slaves to work their land. The king was in origin merely the most powerful and influential noble, but through the support of the priestly class and the machinery of formal government became something more than that, his power a check on that of ambitious aristocrats – not always successfully. Where the material circumstances shifted away from the norm for agrarian societies, most often when a society could achieve greater wealth through trade than through large-scale agriculture, a divergence was sometimes seen from the Classical Paradigm pattern.

The same array of technological changes that resulted in other divergence from the Classical Paradigm – the printing press, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, electronics, computers, the Internet and, in future, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence – have also resulted in a change of government form. I do not believe, however, that our society has finished changing in terms of government any more than in terms of economy or religion.

The changes to government in the centuries since the divergence began have all been in two directions. One direction has been that of equalizing influence on the state and elevating formerly powerless classes of people to greater power and greater protection against government abuses. Hereditary government positions have been replaced with elected ones, and the franchise extended to broader and broader percentages of the electorate, until today the vote is held by all people living in modern states except non-citizens, the very young, the severely mentally ill, and in some cases convicted felons; i.e., voting has become a right with relatively rare exceptions instead of a privilege held by few. Voting has probably been extended as far as it can be, but there remain two sources of privileged influence, one being wealth, and the other political office itself.

The other direction of change has been the expansion of the size and scope of government. As society has grown more complex, government has taken on more functions over time that were previously handled by private agencies, if at all. In addition, the size of territory administered by the “top layer” of government has grown, and the number and scope of intergovernmental bodies – government at a wider level than that of the nation-state – has increased.

So, where does each of these processes meet its natural end point, beyond which further technological advance will take it no further? We must, as always, speculate about the Advanced Civilized Paradigm, and none of this is certain. I play here with ideas. That said, here is what I think will ultimately happen.

The representative democracies we have today will in the end be replaced by direct democracy, facilitated by communications technology – the Internet or perhaps something more impressive, a linking of person to person that is always on. We will still elect representatives, but they will no longer make collective decisions for us. Instead, they will act as legal experts and consultants, presenting suggestions for the people’s consideration. The people themselves will be smarter on the average than they are now, thanks to genetic engineering and/or artificial enhancements, and biological humans will be joined by robotic intelligences in a dual citizenship.

One very desirable effect of this arrangement will be to undercut and neutralize the current contemptible influence of lobbyists and campaign contributions. Wealth will have much less effect on lawmaking because the people, not the people’s representatives, will be making the laws. The representatives may still be lobbied, but it will be increasingly impossible to keep any such efforts secret, and they will be easily countered by the instantaneous registering of public opinion.

The scope of government will be both broader and deeper, encompassing everything except personal and private life. Remember that under the Advanced Civilized Paradigm, there will be no such thing as a job. Everyone will be an owner and receive an income from that rather than from work, and so all business will become a public enterprise. This will vastly expand the role of government to encompass the entire economic private sector as it stands today – but since nobody will be employed any more, this will not amount to a significant degree of government leverage over people’s lives.

While deepening, government will also broaden, and many functions that are now handled at the nation-state level will move up to the level of global governance. Other national functions will devolve to a regional or local level of government, and national governments will wither away (at least in part), becoming much weaker than they are today. A single global government will handle all matters of trade regulation, peacekeeping, and resource husbandry, while local and regional governments handle criminal law, most civil law and the management of local business enterprise. There will be very little for national governments to do, especially since military forces as they currently exist will be abolished by the global government, and war as we have known it for thousands of years will disappear. There will probably still be a need for armed forces to contend with terrorist movements and civil disturbances, but these could be maintained at a tiny fraction of the resource and manpower cost of today’s armed forces, freeing up immense resources for the public good.

A remaining question is how government functions will be handled once mankind expands off planet Earth. Will the communication technology exist to make the global government a solar system or even interstellar government? Impossible to say – and this suggests there may, eventually, be a state of society beyond the Advanced Paradigm. But the visions presented here should be enough to occupy our progressive dreams for a good long while.

The Advanced Civilized Paradigm II: Religion

2010-03-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

This second entry in the Advanced Civilized Paradigm series concerns religion. I touched on this subject last January: http://thedragontalking.blogspot.com/2010/01/morphology-of-religion.html. Here, I want to go into a bit more detail about the nature of religion in the far future, in the end state of significant technological progress.

Religion changes over time. In particular, it changed dramatically at the same two junctures I cited in my last entry, the transition from the Precivilized Paradigm to the Classical Civilized Paradigm, and the transition in which we currently find ourselves, away from the Classical Paradigm and (perhaps) towards the Advanced Paradigm. Just as in government, in work, and in other areas, a pattern can be seen that remained constant within recognizable parameters across thousands of years of history and everywhere in the world.

It’s sometimes hard to recognize this, because all of the so-called “great” religions were developed under the Classical Paradigm. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all of these emerged during the millennia of agrarian economies and monarchical governments, and so they show the common characteristics of all such faiths, but because we are used to considering only these ancient religions, and the parameters of the possible are (incorrectly) imagined to be coextensive with their variations, the relatively insignificant differences among them stand out in stark relief and the essential similarity is all but invisible. It’s analogous to an all-male convention in which one observes that some of the attendees are tall, some short, some thin, some fat, some bearded and some not, some bald and some with hair, and fails to observe that none of them have breasts.

Religion, like government, follows the material needs of society, in this case the need for a statement and ritual reinforcement of collective morality and of the myths that describe man’s place in the cosmos. Like the governments of the Classical Paradigm, the religions of that era all had certain characteristics in common. They all stipulated that man was the master of nature, entitled to rule and dominate. They all elevated a principle separate from nature over and above man. (Usually, that principle was personified as one or more deities. Occasionally, as in Buddhism, it was not. But in all cases, the principle elevated to sacred status was separate from nature. It was either the creator of nature, or supra-powerful beings dominant over nature, or a principle of reality with nature seen as illusion. Nature itself was shorn of sacrality.) They all acknowledged the superiority of some men over others and of all men over women. All propounded a sexual morality that maximized birthrates by making women the sexual property of men, denying them control over their sexuality and their reproductive behavior, and placing upon them a moral obligation to have as many children as possible, while condemning both (female) extramarital sex and (for both sexes) homosexuality.

In matters of organization as well as doctrine, broad constants can be seen. All Classical Paradigm religions included a formal priesthood. All entered into partnership with the state, which gave privileged status to the official faith and, more often than not, suppressed all others. In all cases, the clergy represented an elite class alongside the warrior nobility, endowed with similar wealth and privileges, and often enjoying somewhat higher status than the nobility itself. In all cases, the formal priestly hierarchy had the authority to declare official doctrines and to declare deviance from those doctrines to be heretical; more often than not, the hierarchy also had the power to impose material penalties for heresy either directly or through the agency of the state.

These characteristics do not describe the religious beliefs, practices, and organizations of the Precivilized Paradigm, to the extent we know about those faiths. Admittedly that knowledge is less than perfect, but we can be certain about some things. For example, we can be sure that precivilized religion did not enjoy a special relationship with the state, because precivilized societies did not have states. What we can tell about our hunter-gatherer ancestors in terms of religion, assuming that the precivilized societies that have survived into historical times and had their beliefs recorded may be taken as typical, is that their myths and morality alike placed man as part of, subordinate to, and interwoven with nature, rather than above it. Women enjoyed a higher status in precivilized society than under the Classical Paradigm, and the religious beliefs of our distant ancestors reflect this. The stories and myths taught that people should treat nature, and the animals and plants that comprise nature, with the utmost respect. The religion of the Precivilized Paradigm was appropriate for the material circumstances in which people lived, and so was that of the Classical Paradigm.

Beginning in about the 15th or 16th century CE in Europe, our ancestors began to diverge from the Classical Civilized Paradigm. They did so in terms of religion just as they did in terms of economics and government. The Protestant Reformation was the first major upheaval in that transition. Most of the religious ideas of Protestants were as rooted in the Classical Paradigm as those of Catholics (after all, most them were the same ideas), but in two key respects the movement was revolutionary. One was the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers: that each person was his or her own authority on matters of doctrine, and required no sacerdotal intermediary. The other was the sheer existence of the movement and the challenge it posed to religious authority. By breaking the monolith of western Christianity, the Reformation weakened the religion’s power and paved the way for the related Enlightenment ideas of religious freedom and separation of church and state.

The second major change to impact religion was the scientific revolution. In creating the myths that explain man’s place in the universe, religious thinking during the Classical Paradigm had often employed statements about observable fact which, under scientific scrutiny, turned out not to be true. That in itself did not invalidate the myths, whose purpose was never scientific (that is, they were not intended to make factual claims about objective reality, but rather to use observable reality as a metaphor to make values statements), but it did undermine claims to infallibility, and thus further diminished religious authority.

A third major change has emerged over time from the industrial revolution, that awesome tidal wave of progress that has toppled kings and aristocracies, freed slaves, liberated women, and radically transformed societies from top to bottom. It has had its effect on religion as well. It has allowed population to grow to the point where we now need to restrain it rather than encourage it, and this has rendered inappropriate much of traditional sexual morality. Together with the elevation of brain over brawn, the same change has rendered pointless the subjugation of women. It has expanded human power over nature until today we must restrain ourselves in its use, so that myths which make man a divinely-authorized tyrant over the natural world have become inappropriate.

A fourth change impacting religion is the revolution in communications technology. From the printing press to the Internet, this has led to the exchange of religious ideas on a global basis, making it problematic for any faith to remain intellectually isolated and preserve its doctrinal purity or claims to exclusive possession of truth.

Most subtle of all, but perhaps most radical, is the observed reality of progress itself. All Classical Paradigm religions were built on a foundation of unchanging Truth known for all time and handed down by God or perceived in a state of enlightenment. (It’s true that there are Truths which are True for all time, but it’s also true that none of these Truths can be told in language, so religious doctrines, which of necessity are expressed in words, do not expound them.) Commandments written on stone tablets by the finger of God. God Himself inhabiting a human body and proclaiming infallible truth. The Prophet taking dictation from an angel. But these metaphors and mythic images, while appropriate and holding resonance within a society whose pace of change is so glacially slow that it is possible to believe it never does change, cannot work well in a society where change is rapid and constant. We cannot help but feel that they are relics of a bygone time – and indeed they are.

There is I believe one final change which has not emerged, but will. It will come from future developments in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. When we are able to remake the genetic structure of our own species, we will not use this technology merely to eliminate genetic diseases or augment average intelligence. There is more than one template of the ideal man or woman, and so the man or woman of the distant future will be a highly diverse creature, with genetic variation that is difficult to contemplate today. (The science fiction writer Greg Bear did a fair job of it, though. I recommend his Eon for a good mind boggle. To a lesser extent, also his Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children.) At the same time, developments in artificial intelligence may create minds, recognized as being minds, with a radically different basis of thought than our own. The myths expressing man’s place in the cosmos must take different forms when the nature of man itself has changed almost beyond recognition.

These six changes – religious liberty, scientific method, the need for environmental responsibility, global communication, the perceived reality of progress, and redefinition of what it means to be human – will define the religious thought of the Advanced Civilized Paradigm. Under the influence of these factors, we may get a somewhat hazy image of what will emerge, indeed what is already emerging.

First, contrary to what is supposed by some militant atheists, I am sure that religion will still exist. There is a need in the brain for mythos, for a narrative expounding the nature of man and our place in the universe, for ritual weaving us into that narrative, and for reinforcement of collective morality. Whether and to what extent the religion of the future incorporates crude “supernatural” ideas is another question, but a more subtle one than is usually recognized; the myths of the Gods, and perhaps even more so that of God, resonates with the mystery of consciousness and that of existence itself, which are inherently beyond the reach of science. Reason does well at contemplating the working of the parts, but is not designed to encompass the whole.

But if we need neither fear nor hope for the end of religion, the end of the religions of the present day in their Classical Paradigm forms is a certainty. The religion or religions of the Advanced Paradigm will have the following characteristics:

Fluidity. Religion in an advanced civilization will be an evolving thing, and it will be accepted and understood that its forms must adapt themselves to the concept of change itself. People will move easily from one religious idea to another, and the idea of fixed membership in a strictly-defined belief system will be abandoned.

Diversity. Religion will take many forms, mixing elements of many faiths and adding new metaphorical forms. The fact that all religious ideas are metaphors, and so multiple “truths” are possible – or rather, that multiple ways to express truth are equally valid – will be universally recognized.

Egalitarian, environmental morality. The Advanced Civilized Paradigm will include much greater recognition of the ideal of equality than the Classical Paradigm did, and it will, of necessity, be environmentalist to a degree most people do not comprehend at this point. Religion will reflect these values. All religion will promote equality of rights and economic equality, and all will promote good stewardship of the natural world. As a consequence, traditional sexual morality will be replaced by a morality of respect and trust in sexual matters. As part of this, traditional taboos against homosexuality will disappear.

As with all elements of the Advanced Paradigm, we should not expect its religious motifs to emerge without controversy. But emerge they will, because they must. In fact, the religious aspects of the Advanced Paradigm are closer to being with us already than any of its other aspects. That’s to be expected, because one must envision the future before one can build it.

The Advanced Civilized Paradigm I: Work

2010-03-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

I’m going to be writing a series of blog articles about far-future changes. This is the first one. In writing these articles, I’m not going to be addressing current events or immediate problems (which means I may interrupt the series from time to time with something that needs more urgent attention), but rather considering long-term implications of advancing technology and the changes that it brings. I’m calling this series “The Advanced Civilized Paradigm.”

Here’s the basic idea behind the Advanced Civilized Paradigm. If we look at the way our precivilized ancestors lived from the first emergence of the human species, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years in the past, until the development of agricultural communities around 10,000 years ago, we find a persistent pattern. People lived in small communities of mostly-related people. They had no formal government or organized religion. This pattern persisted all over the world wherever people lived by foraging and hunting, for tens of thousands of years. This kind of persistent pattern or template of society I’m calling a “paradigm,” and this original, very old one in particular I call the “Precivilized Paradigm.”

Over a few thousand years, the early agricultural communities developed into city-states, and as they did, another pattern emerged that was also found all over the world, and that lasted for a long time, although not nearly as long as the Precivilized Paradigm did. This pattern included hereditary monarchy, a hereditary warrior-aristocrat elite class, a class of slaves or serfs at the bottom of the heap who worked for the benefit of the elite under threat of force, formal state religion, subordination of women to men. This pattern can be seen all over the world wherever people lived in cities in agrarian communities, with only rare and partial exceptions. It lasted from the emergence of the first city-states in the fifth or sixth millennium BCE and endured until relatively modern times. I call this pattern the “Classical Civilized Paradigm.”

Starting in Europe in roughly the 16th century CE, this pattern began to morph into something different and we’re still in a transition stage. It’s not at all clear where we’re going, but we certainly haven’t achieved any stable form that is likely to endure for as long as the Classical Civilized Paradigm did, let alone the Precivilized Paradigm. Maybe there won’t be any. Maybe we’ll just continue in a progressive upheaval forever. Or maybe not; maybe there’s a practical limit on the advance of technology and the social changes that accompany it, beyond which we’ll continue to progress but more slowly, with refinements on what’s already been developed, but nothing revolutionary, the way the printing press was revolutionary, or the steam engine, or electricity, or radio, or the assembly line, or the robotic factory, or the Internet.

For purposes of this writing series, I’m going to assume the latter is the truth: that there’s a practical end to all this, however far we are from it at the moment. With that in mind, I’m going to explore some logical “end states” of visible developments.

What will the economy be like when there is no such thing as a job?

What will religion be like when there are no barriers of language or communication?

What will government be like when instantaneous voting becomes a reality?

What does human mean in a world of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence?

I will deal with the first of those today in this entry.

What An Economy Does

An economy is a social arrangement that produces and distributes wealth. By “wealth,” I mean goods and services. (Money is not wealth. Money is a medium of exchange whereby wealth is traded.) Note that this description has two functions: production and distribution. An economy produces goods and services and gets them to the people that need or want them. An economy that succeeds in doing this is successful. An economy that fails in either function breaks down and fails in both. You can’t distribute wealth that hasn’t been produced. If it has been produced and you fail to distribute it, the economy stops producing it, too.

There are of course many ways of producing and distributing wealth, of varying sophistication. But no matter how complex the economy, or how many layers of esoteric financial manipulation are constructed on top of it, in the end it comes down to those two things. Can the economy produce enough wealth for everyone? Can it spread that wealth around so everybody has enough? To the extent it answers both questions “yes,” it works.

Now let’s consider a specific economic transaction and how it serves both functions at once: wages for work. First, we have to understand that our society assigns “ownership” of the material resources necessary to produce wealth on the basis of history, going back to someone who, in the far past, was able to grab those resources and hold them by force. In America, that generally means a white person who seized them from Native Americans. In other parts of the world, it’s slightly different, but it always comes down to forcible seizure at some point along the way. (Of course, if you look at the Native American from whom the white person seized the resources in question, and trace ownership back from that point, you find that somewhere along the way a Native American seized the resources from another Native American by force, too. The point here is not that white people are more wicked than Native Americans, but that ownership ultimately derives from piracy.)

Since the initial seizure, the property may have been traded many times by more peaceful and voluntary means. The history of these transactions ascertains who owns the material resources that are necessary to produce wealth. By societal convention, all wealth produced is considered “owned” by the “owner” of the material resources necessary to produce it – that is, of the land, natural resources, factories and infrastructure by which wealth is produced – and not by the people who do the work to produce it. The people who do the work to produce it, since they don’t own the wealth being produced, and can’t be coerced into doing the work by main force, must be paid to do it. That’s how our society has set things up, and how wealth is both produced and shared. Wages motivate workers to work, thus facilitating the creation of wealth, and at the same time provide workers (which, please note, means most of the population – this is important) with money (tokens of exchange, remember) that they can exchange for wealth (goods and services). In that way, wages also facilitate the distribution of wealth. They are the mechanism by which the wealth our economy produces is put into the hands of most of the people who receive it.

With me so far? It’s easy to take all of this for granted and consider it an artifact of nature, but every bit of it is a societal convention. There’s no reason why we MUST assign ownership of material resources to individuals, or say that the wealth produced is owned by the people who own the resources used to make it, that’s just the way we’ve done things for a long, long time, and so we seldom question it. What we have is a system in which rich and privileged people buy the labor of almost everyone else and then sell them the goods and services that their labor produced, thus resulting in a distribution of wealth. In terms of economic function, that’s what’s going on. Money (tokens of exchange, remember, not wealth) goes in a circle. It goes from the rich and privileged to everyone else, then it goes back to the rich and privileged (allowing wealth to be shared out to most everyone in the process), and the whole cycle starts over. The flow of money is two-way and circular, but the flow of wealth is one-way and linear.

Let me note in passing (I’ll come back to it) that wages for work aren’t a terribly good or reliable way to distribute wealth. They’re better than nothing, but they tend to distribute wealth rather poorly, resulting in frequent breakdowns of the economy such as we are currently experiencing. Wages tend to drop below productivity, and have to be propped up with regulations and laws and unions and other measures that fight against this tendency, and that doesn’t always work, as in fact it’s not working now. Keep that in mind as I discuss a long-term trend and take it to its logical conclusion.

With any work that’s done for pay, it’s theoretically possible to replace human beings by machinery. As a practical matter, for the present it’s not possible to do this with all work, but it’s increasingly possible with more and more of it. A tiny fraction of people work in agriculture today as did 150 years ago. Manufacturing as well has been increasingly automated (except in some poor countries where labor is actually cheaper than machines). Some services have been automated, too. For example, if you call the customer service department of many a company, you will find yourself talking to a voice-recognizing computer program that fields your questions or complaints. Such programs cannot, at present, completely replace human beings in customer service, but they can do the simpler sorting tasks and answer the easy questions that used to be done by low-level CS operators, and pass the hard stuff to humans just as low-level clerks would once pass hard questions to their supervisors. In principle, there is no reason why a machine could not be made to do any and all service work whatsoever. Machines could, in principle, run businesses, conduct sales, do scientific research, give artistic performances, or even perform the services of the sex trade. Some of these things would require considerable advances in technology over what is available at this time, but none of them is demonstrably impossible.

Let’s take this to its logical conclusion. Imagine a world in which machines can do anything human beings can do as well as humans or better. Every company that needs labor for any purpose no longer hires people, it buys or leases machines. Not only does it not hire any workers for the factory floor or the secretarial pool, it doesn’t even hire executive officers. Forget today’s CEOs of mega-corporations getting multimillion dollar bonuses. They’re unemployed, too. In fact, everyone is unemployed, and the only people who can make any money are the stockholders of the corporations.

Only problem is, they can’t make any money, either. The goods and services the companies are producing can only be sold to people who are making money, and under that scenario that means only to the stockholders. And there aren’t enough big stockholders to buy enough to keep business profitable – so everyone goes broke, the economy fails, and everyone in the world starves to death, leaving a world populated by nothing but robots.

Well, of course it wouldn’t actually go that far, because as soon as things got bad enough to really tick people off, we’d have a revolution of some kind. As this system we have in which rich and privileged people buy the labor of everyone else and then sell them the goods and services their labor produced goes from sort-of-working to not-working-at-all, it will be replaced with something that works better. But what?

Remember the exception above to “nobody’s making any money”? Stockholders still have wealth to trade and can still buy stuff, at least until the whole economy collapses. So a system in which all the work is done by machines would work just fine as long as everyone is a significant stockholder. Or, to put it another way, in which everyone has an owner’s share of the wealth produced.

In the far future, I believe that’s what we will have. We’re still a long way from it, but it’s the way our descendants will live.

Utopian Templates, or, Why Progressivism Always Wins In The End

2010-02-27T20:43:00.001-08:00

What lies at the root of the differences between different political philosophies?

Exclude the obviously self-serving, such as the ideologies worn by many elected officials like makeup, or those employed by the voiceboxes of corporate power to justify rapaciousness and greed. Let’s confine ourselves to ideologies that people actually believe in sincerely.

Set aside also practical questions of methodology and political reality. These are important when facing real-world problems of implementation, but they are not what the disagreements are about. I am sure of this, because there is simply too little emotional energy invested in the hows, as distinct from the whats, to be worth fighting over. I mean, if you’re driving with a friend and you both want to go to the same restaurant, and you come to an intersection and you think you should turn left while he thinks you should turn right, that’s easily settled. You don’t fight about it. You just pull over and consult a map. Since you’re both trying to get to the same place, the one who’s wrong will shrug it off and say, “Glad you caught me on that one.”

No, the real disputes don’t come over disagreements on how to get there. The arguments happen when you want to go to the Chinese place and he wants barbecue. So it is, I would say, in politics. We don’t disagree about the way to get there. We disagree about where we want to go. If it were otherwise, we’d just pull over and consult the map, and come to an agreement.

If you care about politics at all, if it’s an emotional matter for you, if you pay attention to it and you think about it – if it’s not just another spectator sport for you (which it is to some) – then you are a visionary idealist. That is to say, you have a template in your mind, held there in various states of precision or vagueness, of the perfect society, and you chart your political roadmap based on what you think will take us there.

Now this template is usually not realistic. It can’t be achieved in any great hurry, if at all. If you’re wise, you realize this. But it colors all your political thinking just the same. It’s what guides you to sit up and say, “That’s wrong,” or “That’s right,” when faced with a policy choice. You have a sense that this policy choice will take society closer or further away from the template in your head of the ideal society, and you judge it (consciously or not) on that basis.

In America there are a number of competing utopian templates, which is why we get so much political drama from time to time. Once we even had a civil war and killed almost a million of each other because we couldn’t agree on the templates. Luckily the one that provoked the secession is (mostly) gone, but there are plenty of replacements. There’s the religious right template, which sees utopia in a Biblical theocracy where everybody lives according to the Word of God. The more thoughtful believers in that one will acknowledge that it’s unachievable until the Second Coming, but they still hold it as an ideal to be approximated. Then there’s the libertarian template, in which the perfect society is one with the least intrusive (or just plain least) government. The American patriot template sees paradise arriving in the slipstream of a U.S. Air Force jet fighter and American military dominance of the world. The mega-corporation template sees the ideal society as one that allows the rich to become richest. All of these templates compete for dominance in this country, but all of them are outliers and also-rans compared to another utopian template which has existed from the beginning of our nation and for several centuries before that. This template does not always govern the country, and has never done so without competition, but it is always a strong force and, over the years, has moved us increasingly towards its fulfillment while all of the other templates enjoy at most only temporary success. I refer to the progressive template.

The progressive template isn’t specifically American. It goes back at least to the Enlightenment in Europe, but its roots are older than that. It arose in embryonic form in response to a sequence of technological innovations. It started with the printing press, which boosted literacy rates by providing affordable reading material so that most people had a reason to learn to read. This in turn amplified independent thought and gave rise to a whole string of revolutionary developments, from the Protestant Reformation to the scientific revolution to the Enlightenment itself and the movement for democracy. Further technological developments followed at an accelerating pace, and along with them arose more and more questioning of the way society had been organized for thousands of years. Why should certain people have privileges granted them at birth? Shouldn’t government be by the consent of the governed? Why should anyone be enslaved? Don’t workers have rights that should be enforceable against their employers? Shouldn’t women have equal rights with men? Shouldn’t all races be treated equally?

Prior to about the 15th or maybe 16th century, the pace of political and social progress was glacial. The same basic paradigm of society held sway for thousands of years, composed of hereditary privilege, monarchy, male superiority, state religion, and a bottom caste of slaves or serfs bonded to toil for the benefit of the elite. The same held true with technology. It progressed over those millennia, but so slowly that one can see this progress only by looking back through history; it was invisible to the people living in it. Then, almost as if a switch had been thrown, the pace of both technological and social progress accelerated dramatically. Now, we see both happening in real time while we watch. This is not a coincidence. The one rises from the other, because as we see technology progressing during our lifetimes, we are conditioned to think of all problems as having solutions and of change as normal.

A fundamental congruence may be observed between two sorts of observations. On one end of the equation, we say things like this: “A thousand years ago, nobody could cross from Europe to America at all. Five hundred years ago, the journey took weeks. My grandparents could make the trip in a few days. Today, I can fly from here to Paris or London in a few hours.” On another, we can also say things like this: “When the Constitution was first implemented, most African-Americans were slaves, women couldn’t vote, and neither could most men who weren’t rich. Since then, we have freed the slaves, and we have made suffrage universal.” Moreover, it is only a short step from this sort of thinking to imagining both technical and social/political solutions to problems that haven’t been solved yet. This willingness to contemplate how things can get better, and better and better, without limit, is the essence of the progressive template. Unlike the others mentioned above, the progressive template isn’t any fixed model of utopia, but rather a vision of a society that continually improves, with better lives for more people as time goes by. Whether the problem is a need for cleaner energy or for cleaner politics, for safer transportation or for fairer distribution of wealth, the progressive position is that it can be solved. No matter what happens, no matter how much things change, that one fact remains constant: they can get better if we put our minds and hearts to it.

And that explains why progressivism (also known as “liberalism”) has always been a major contender for the dominant utopian template in American politics, and, I believe, always will be. Other templates come and go. The white supremacy template, for example, was strong through the 19th and about half of the 20th centuries but has now dwindled to being the preferred choice only of an impotent fringe. The religious-right template has just about peaked and we will see it similarly dwindle over future generations. The libertarian template waxes and wanes but never commands more than a small fraction of the popular allegiance. The mega-corporate template is under siege right now, but is never very popular except with the very rich anyway. So with any other conceivable template based on a fixed ideal society. But the progressive template, because it evolves over time, and is committed only to continuous progress, is always in contention, and so over time inevitably wins. It can lose temporarily, for an election cycle, for a decade or two. But in the end it always wins.

That’s why we no longer have slaves. That’s why we have guarantees of racial and gender equality. That’s why we have workers’ rights built into law. That’s why we have regulations on business to protect workers, consumers, and the environment. That’s why we have aid for the poor. That’s why we have a government retirement program. That’s why we have guaranteed civil rights for sexual minorities.

That’s why we WILL have universal health care. That’s why we WILL have same-sex marriage. That’s why we WILL have an end to poverty. That’s why we WILL have narrowed income gaps. That’s why we WILL have an ecologically sustainable society. And that’s why we will, in the future, have more and better developments that can’t even be foreseen from the present vantage point, but which future progressives will see and will enact.

It’s only a question of when.

The Deceptive Silence On The Left

2010-02-20T19:16:00.000-08:00

There are more of us than there are of them. We need to remember that.

The Tea Party movement is making a lot of noise these days. They’re scaring politicians in both parties to death, and the Republicans with cause. But they are not the ones the Democrats should fear. The Democrats ought to be afraid instead of the TP’s counterparts on the left, which I’ve unimaginatively called the Leftist Insurgency (LI). (Still would like a better name.) The Tea Party won’t determine whether Democratic Senators and Congressmen can be reelected. The LI will.

Look at it this way. Precious few of those participating in the right-wing insurgency today voted for Barack Obama in 2008, so their activism is not an indicator of any lost support, either for him or for other Democrats. Obama campaigned on a decidedly left-wing platform: health-care reform, ending the war in Iraq, stimulus for the economy, reducing corporate influence on government, green energy and ending oil dependence, “spreading the wealth around.” Never mind for the moment that he’s broken most of those promises or watered them down to the point of nullity. The fact remains that Obama the candidate was an unabashed progressive of the sort we haven’t seen among Democrats running for president in a long time. And he won. He won big, and he won with the votes and activism of the LI, thus proving that the LI exists, and that it is a lot stronger than mainstream media views of this country as “center-right” recognize.

Now we hear attempts to rewrite history, claims that Obama is losing support because of his overly left-wing agenda. The picture being painted is of someone who campaigned as a moderate and veered left once in office, losing support in the process.

And that’s bullshit. It’s total distortion, total disinformation. You know that, I know it, and everyone saying it probably knows it, too, which makes it not a mistake but a deliberate lie. Obama didn’t run as a moderate, and he didn’t tack left on taking office. He ran as a progressive, and he tacked right, and that’s why he’s lost support.

At this point in time, America is not center-right but center-left, and moving further left all the time. The election of 2008 proves that. If it were not true, Obama should never have been electable campaigning as he did. He was not some kind of stealth leftist. Anyone who voted for him thinking he was promising to govern as a moderate had his head in the sand and his ears plugged. What’s more, the fact that his support came disproportionately from young voters says a lot about where the country is moving, because of course young voters are the future. This division is generation-based, not age-based. Young Obama voters are not going to turn into conservatives as they age (except insofar as the issues of their youth win, and become part of the status quo). They will continue to vote for progressive candidates for the rest of their lives. In any election, the question is not who the people who gave Obama his victory will support, but whether or not they will vote at all. Any gains made by the Republicans in this year’s election will not be because the electorate has moved right. They will be made by default, because we see no reason to vote.

So: there are more of us insurgents on the left than there are of them on the right. The ones on the right are just noisier. Also, they get more media coverage in the old media. Why that is, I’m not sure. Viral memes? More outlandish costuming and absurd extremism, which boosts ratings? Conspiracy? Your guess is as good as mine.

Two weeks ago I posted “The Tea Party paradox” in which I introduced the idea of the LI. One of my readers pointed out that the LI was not very visible in the media. I agreed. But does it need to be? Here’s one interesting thing: Tea Party members are typically older people (as well as white and male). LI members, though, tend to be younger, more new-media-savvy types. While Boomers (born 1943-1960) are not a majority of the TP, they are disproportionately represented, while Millennials (born 1982-2005) are underrepresented although not completely absent. Now I know something about what Boomers are like because I am one. The Boomer style of political activism runs to guerrilla theater. That’s just as true of right-wing Boomer activists today as it was of left-wing Boomer activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Guerrilla theater is, when well done, lots of fun to watch. It’s just naturally going to boost ratings and therefore be something the old media will want to cover (which may suffice to explain the deceptive silence on the left by itself).

But if the LI is not as visible on television, it is no less active. It’s found in the blogosphere, in the social networks, and in action groups that, rather than putting on a demonstration for the media, instead put on an email campaign for members of Congress. The LI is pushing Congress to finish health care reform (pointing out that there’s really nothing to stop them, since a bill has already been passed by both houses of Congress and such differences as exist between them can be resolved through reconciliation, requiring only a simple majority). Congress, and now the president as well (http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/19/weekly-address-premiums-profits-and-need-health-reform), is responding. Similar efforts are under way to push for a jobs bill, for bank regulation, and for many other measures that have been stalled in Congress by Republican intransigence and Democratic ankle-grabbing. A new aggressiveness is starting to show up in Washington among Democrats that have up to now been about as effective as a tissue-paper tank. The LI is responsible for the change.

That’s typical Millennial stuff: not showy, but effective. Not guerrilla theater, but old-fashioned organization implemented with up-to-date technology. Not outlandish costumes and fringe ideas, but solid progressive politics and civic responsibility. The LI outnumbers the TP, and it’s better organized and a whole lot more practical. Its electoral impact cannot help but be much, much greater.

Does that mean the Democrats are, polls and pundits to the contrary notwithstanding, going to pull off a win this fall and actually increase their representation in Congress? It’s possible, but not likely, and that’s because the LI is no more an arm of the Democratic Party than the TP is of the Republican Party. If its collective mind chooses to support the Democrats enthusiastically this fall, then yes, that will happen. But it won’t – not every Democrat in Congress, it won’t, because some of them have not earned that support.

But while Democrats will probably lose ground this year, progressives will not. And that bodes well for the future.

Totem Spirits

2010-02-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

In the first entry of this blog, I mentioned that the dragon is “my personal totem in a deeply spiritual sense.” I think it’s time to discuss just what that means.

A totem is a source of magic and an image of the soul. The word and concept come from shamanism. Traditionally, a totem is the image of an animal, something that a person living in a primitive society might meet while wandering in the world near his village. Obviously that’s not quite the case with mine, though. No one is likely to meet a dragon in the flesh. Dragons are not part of our physical-plane existence, any more than unicorns, fairies, or honest politicians. But even in its aboriginal form, a shaman’s totem animal was never the same as the beast that bore its name and image. A shaman with a bear for a totem would not by virtue of that be able to turn to a bear in the forest for aid, and indeed might be mauled and killed by one like anyone else. In view of which, I’m just as happy that real, physical dragons don’t exist in our world.

But if my totem is not a physical dragon – and if the bear totem or wolf totem or eagle totem of someone else is not a physical bear, wolf, or eagle – what is it? Is it merely an imaginary creature?

No: because the imagination does not deserve to be called “mere.”

Unless you are currently out hiking in the wilderness and reading this on your smart phone or some such, most everything you see around you is a product of the imagination. Your home or office, the floor beneath your feet, the device you’re reading this on, the clothes you wear, in short everything man-made, existed first in someone’s imagination and could not have been manifest in physical reality if it had not first been imagined. Imagination links the world together and recombines its elements in new patterns. Imagination is crucial to all thought, all feeling, all social interaction, all life. Imagination is the essence of art, of science, of problem-solving. The reality we experience is composed of four elements, sensation, thought, emotion, and imagination, and imagination is as important as any of the others.

To make a contrast between the imaginary and the real is sloppy thinking. The imaginary IS real. It’s just a different type of reality than what comes in over the sensory lines. Imagination has power. Imagination remakes the world.

A totem, then, is a powerful creature of the imagination. Through the power of association, it links a person to some aspect of the universe which has particular significance for him. It expresses and strengthens certain qualities of a mage’s personality and character. It provides guidance, companionship, insight, and empowerment.

One interesting thing about a totem compared to other imaginary forms important in magic, such as deities from religions or mythos, the Sephiroth of the Tree of Life in the Kaballah, the Major Arcana of the Tarot, etc. is that a totem is very personal. The dragon isn’t everyone’s totem, it’s my totem, and my particular dragon is only my totem, shared with no other mage, not even those who also have dragon totems. It relates to aspects of my nature in its power of flight, its intelligence and cunning, its visionary depth, and its ruthlessness. It cautions me as well through its dark side, its potential for selfishness and greed, arrogance and autocracy. I know that all of these are qualities I share with it, even the power of flight or to breathe fire, though of course these are symbolic and not literal. Another person with a different totem will also find that its personal characteristics resonate with her own.

So how does one choose a totem? One does not. One feels the resonance, the attraction, to a particular image, a particular animal. It isn’t a rational decision any more than falling in love. Not much in the working of magic is rational; one can apply reason to understanding how it works, what it can do now and what it might be able to do in the future, and to the design of rituals, spells, and magical systems, but the actual doing comes from the shadow side of the mind, the moonlit night, the self of dreams. It comes from the heart and the soul more than from the mind. In a very real sense, the totem chooses the person.

Does all this mean I believe magic to be real, of the sort I write fiction about? I imagine some reading this may wonder at that. Yes and no. The sort of magic that Correl could do before he became a Star Mage, yes, that’s real. Deep-tier magic, manipulation of probability at the molecular or quantum level of events, is theoretically possible but I have seen no evidence that it can actually be done by any real person; it’s a fictional device, an element of fantasy and that’s all it is to the best of my knowledge – at least for the present. Thus I cannot, as my characters do, physically assume the form of my totem. It would be a splendid thing if I could. How delightful to soar on the wind above the ocean, my great wings spread until they blot out the stars. How satisfying to cast my shadow upon the makers of war, the greedy and tyrannical, the merely human monsters of our world, and send them fleeing and disrupt their wickedness. But it may be that Correl is right, and the universe does not trust human beings with power like that. Or at least, does not trust this particular human being. And I have enough self-knowledge, partly thanks to the dragon spirit itself, to recognize the possibility that the cosmos is wise in this restraint.

But if in reality and outside of fiction the power of a totem spirit (and of magic in general) is more subtle than that, it is still an intoxicating thing. Although I must leave my flesh behind to do it, I can indeed soar on dragon-wings against the starlit sky, and see the world through eyes not bound by the human spectrum, and contemplate the timeless mysteries with a dragon’s understanding. There is a deep knowledge and an instinctive wisdom buried at the roots of the brain. To connect with a totem spirit is one way to access that knowledge and wisdom.

Nothing comes free, and there are prices to be paid for this. To invite a totem spirit into one’s life is to invite painful transformation. It shouldn’t be done lightly, but then, that’s impossible anyway; a light call is not answered, only one made from deep in the heart. In any case, a totem’s gifts and the price for them are not separate things, but two sides of the same thing. It’s the paying that’s the gift, and it’s the gift that pays.

The Tea Party Paradox

2010-02-06T07:37:00.000-08:00

In The Stairway to Nowhere I have a Plot Device called the Crystal. It’s one of two powerful magic talismans, each of which has an order of magicians built around it. The magicians of the other talisman, the Star, are the Good Guys. The Crystal’s magicians are the Bad Guys. They’re nasty, ruthless, and mean. They cast spells on people and turn them into slaves. They torture people in creative ways just for the fun of it. They practice human sacrifice (the Aztec religion was their idea). In so many ways, these are Not Nice People. But they play a crucial role in the Star’s secret plan to turn human society into a utopia. It couldn’t be done without them. They provide the goad of pain to move humanity in a direction it would not go unless pushed. As the Star itself put it: “Each set of adepts has a role to play, and I appeal to each in the language they can understand. The Crystal’s selfish power drives the world forward, towards the supposedly ideal world the Star promises. The Crystal adepts are being used for a goal not their own. I give them what they desire, though. They are not deceived in that. It’s simply that there is a larger process of which their selfish ends are subroutines. The Star’s agenda is that larger process.”

Turns out the Star’s agenda itself is a subroutine of an even larger process, but that’s getting away from what I want to talk about this week, which is the Tea Party movement. If you want, you can read some more about the Star and the Crystal here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357. The coupon from last week’s entry is still good for a free copy.

Now, about the Tea Party movement. It’s not a perfect analogy. I’m not suggesting that our misnamed modern Samuel Adamses are nasty, ruthless, Not Nice People. But I do believe that they are, in the pursuit of what they desire, serving ends not their own, just like the Crystal’s adepts. Strange as this may seem, those ends may well be appealing to those of us on the left side of society’s political divide. (You thought I was going to say they were being used by the Corporate Interests, didn’t you? I believe just the opposite, in fact.)

The Tea Party movement, like its unfortunately less-visible and less-active left-wing counterpart, cuts across the lines formed by the political parties. (I can’t think of a cool and catchy name for the leftist insurgency, so I’m going to be unimaginative and call it the Leftist Insurgency, or LI. If you can think of a better name, post a comment.)

One can oppose the status quo from either the left or the right these days. That’s because the Democrats and Republicans today together form a deceptive system of control that was crafted during the 28 years from the administration of Ronald Reagan through that of George W. Bush. Although there are individuals in Congress who are not part of this system, enough are to make it work, and all of the presidents of those years (including the lone Democrat, Bill Clinton) played important parts in it as well. The system presents an illusion of political conflict and electoral choice, or rather it presents real choice but only on strictly limited issues. In any meaningful sense, the Democrats (most of them) aren’t liberal and the Republicans aren’t conservative. Both serve the Corporate Interests, because that’s who pays their campaign expenses for the most part, and without that money they wouldn’t have a job. At the height of this system’s power, which means during the Clinton years – it began to come apart under Bush 43 – the political discourse redefined “liberal” and “conservative” in terms of positions on abortion, gay rights, gun control, and a few quite trivial economic issues around the margins of the system. Politicians of both parties argued vehemently and demonized one another over this nonsense, while remaining silent (and silently agreeing) on questions of marginal tax rates that encouraged concentration of wealth into very few hands, trade policy that encouraged outsourcing of jobs and loss of industrial capacity, deregulation of banks and other industries, environmental shortsightedness, and a foreign policy designed to ensure a plentiful supply of raw materials, particularly oil, and of cheap labor. Anything the Corporate Interests cared about was a matter banned from discussion between the two parties, who were consigned to dispute only issues of no importance to those Interests one way or the other. The important thing to recognize here is that, while there were a few remaining politicians (most but not all of them Democrats) who still represented the public interest, the majority in both parties represented the Corporate Interest instead. And so the victory of one party over the other was really no more a victory in any meaningful sense than vice-versa.

The system began to break down under George W. Bush. That’s partly because Bush himself was so clumsy a politician and so inept an administrator, but partly because during his administration many of its inherent problems reached a boiling point. In other words, it wasn’t entirely his fault. A lot of it was just the luck of timing. At the beginning of his presidency, our ugly foreign policy provoked an even uglier terrorist attack, which in turn provoked two very ugly wars. In the middle of it, the government bungled response to a disastrous hurricane. At the end of it, imbalances in the economy finally led to a massive breakdown, the worst since the Great Depression. The public distaste with all this elected Barack Obama and a big Democratic majority in Congress, but this wasn’t really a solution (see above). Obama was elected because he talked as if he was going to clean up the system and restore government in the public interest, and the Democrats mostly because George W. Bush is a Republican.

The LI gave Obama his margin of victory. But after he took office, another insurgency arose on the right, greatly annoyed with, among other things, Obama. Now, that should be bad news for liberals, right? Wrong! Because although the Tea Party movement is in some ways “conservative,” it shares with the equally-distraught (but, alas, not equally visible) LI a state of being fed up with Government Of, By and For the Corporate Interests. Moreover, although the Tea Party’s Public Enemy No. 1 is the president, as a practical matter a lot of their main targets have an R after their names. After all, Obama’s not up for reelection this year. Where this movement has an impact in this year’s Congressional elections, it is likely to torpedo the campaigns of about as many Republicans as Democrats. And it is also likely that their victims will be exactly the right Republicans and Democrats.

The movement has helped secure an upset in two early elections last year and this year, and I contend that we may take these outcomes as templates for likely impacts in the general election this fall. The first was the 23rd Congressional district of New York. This election saw a third-party candidate backed by national populist conservatives against the Republican nominee, throwing the race to the Democrat in a district that had been staunchly Republican for decades. The second race was the Massachusetts special election for U.S. Senator to replace Ted Kennedy. Here, a populist, moderate Republican secured an upset victory against a machine Democrat. That race actually deserves a closer look.

Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, is not much of a prize, frankly. She has a record of support for heavy-handed police actions that are questionable in terms of civil liberties, such as the use of forensic chemical testing of alleged illegal drugs without any opportunity of the defendant or defendant’s counsel to cross-examine the expert witness, or the overreaction of Boston’s emergency services that mistook signs advertising a cartoon for bombs and disrupted traffic for hours. On the other hand, as state Attorney General she has been quite lenient towards Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, declining to investigate his office for alleged illegal destruction of public emails, and earlier as District Attorney of Middlesex County towards Somerville police officer Keith Winfield, declining to prosecute him for the sexual abuse of a girl under the age of 2, for which he was later prosecuted by Coakley’s successor, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Her career in public service has shown her to be deferential to those holding power, whether corporate or political, at the expense of ordinary people. Throw in her staunch defense of abortion rights (the faux-liberalism of the corporate-owned Democratic Party) and you have a very typical corporatist Democrat in the Clinton mold. By any reasonable appraisal, Mr. Brown is the better – and even the more liberal – choice, and only the arithmetic of Senate rules could suggest to the contrary.

Note that in NY23, the TP supported a right-wing wacko, while in Massachusetts, they supported a moderate Republican. The common feature of both these candidates was that they gave the impression of being outsiders, and of not being the paid-for property of the Corporate Interest. The wacko lost. The moderate won.

Taking these two races as templates for this fall, we can expect our right-wing populists to have an impact in various close races. But which races? What effect?

The LI is, alas, not as noisy or as visible as the Tea Party movement, but it’s almost certainly bigger. It was that insurgency, which unlike the TP is concentrated in younger people (the TP is largely a movement of the middle aged and elderly), that put Obama in the White House. It can put genuine progressives into control of Congress, if there are enough of them running, and if it votes, and the second follows from the first. That is, if a genuine progressive is running for office in any given district, the leftist insurgency will come out to vote for him. They may also hold their noses and vote for a corporatist Democrat if the alternative is a thorough right-wing wacko (as happened in New York). In a race between a corporatist Democrat and a corporatist but non-crazy Republican, or even more so between a corporatist Democrat and an apparently non-corporate-owned Republican, the leftist insurgents will mostly stay home, as they did in Massachusetts.

Which brings me to an analysis of likely Tea Party effects on the coming election based on hypothetical consideration of who’s running. Bear in mind the TP is unlikely to do much to influence Democratic primaries; they will be targeting Republican primary races for the most part, or general election campaigns.

If a genuine progressive, anti-corporatist Democrat is in the race, he’s invulnerable. The LI will come out and vote for him, and he will win, and the TP won’t make any difference. (The exception would be if he’s running in a seriously Red district, but progressives don’t run in those districts anyway, so that’s not a real exception.) The only races the TP can influence are ones without a progressive, and as I see it there are only two possible outcomes.

One, the TP may support a right-wing wacko challenger in the GOP primary. The wacko may win, in which case the Democrat will be much more likely to win the general election. Or the wacko may lose, in which case the outcome will be unaffected or affected in unpredictable ways. Net effect: increased probability of a Democratic victory.

Two, the TP may support a non-wacko challenger such as Brown in the GOP primary. The challenger may win, in which case the Democrat will be much more likely to lose the general election. Or the challenger may lose, see above. Net effect: increased probability of an anti-corporatist Republican victory.

The net effect will almost surely be a weakening of the corporatist majority in Congress. There may also be a weakening of the official Democratic majority (that’s the norm in midterm elections with a D in the WH), but so what? If the debacle of the health-care reform initiative has taught us anything, it’s that the terms “Democratic majority” and “progressive majority” are not synonymous. The weakening of the health-care bill, the removal of any provisions in it threatening to the health-insurance industry, and the transformation of it into something corporate-friendly – these were not accomplished by Republicans.

So in short, the TP is not something to be feared by the left. Like the Crystal Mages, in pursuing their own agenda, they’re helping ours.

Of course, ours would be helped even more, if the LI were to take a leaf from the TP’s playbook and become more visible, noisy, and active themselves. But that’s another subject for another day.

The Golden Game

2010-01-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

This entry is going to be about several topics, but before I get into them, I want to make an offer. I want to give a copy of my novel away free to everyone who reads this blog. You can read part of it free anyway at the web site below, but for a while, you can download the whole thing gratis.

Here’s how to get your copy if you want it.

Go to http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357

In the column beside any of the available formats, click “Buy.” This will take you to a checkout screen.

In the “coupon” box, type KD26A. That cuts the price to zero.

Once it’s “bought,” you can download it in any or all of the formats provided. This will let you read it on the Kindle, a Sony e-reader, a Nook, an iPhone, or a computer screen. All for free!

The coupon is good through March 12, 2010. After that I’m going to get greedy and start charging again.

Ok, that done, let’s see what there is to talk about.

Well, to begin with, there’s the president’s interesting Congressional Republican town meeting yesterday. I have to say I’ve been less than thrilled with Mr. Obama in recent months, given some of his appointments and his less than stellar performance as a leader since he took office. He needed to do what he’s doing now, which is to channel, while toning down and mixing with political realism, the anger on the left. He needed to do that, but month after month he didn’t. That is to say, he did tone it down, but rather too much, so that the anger, and the hope, the reason he was elected in the first place, were lost somewhere along the way. But this recent change in his behavior has somewhat restored my faith in his ability to maybe pull it off. Maybe. If he does it perfectly, he may even be able to coopt some of the anger on the right, too, because in some respects that and the anger on the left are coming from the same place. Both the disgruntled and disappointed young liberals who voted him into office, and the Tea Party folks who mostly voted against him, are disgusted with the degree to which corporate influence corrupts the government. Up to now, Obama’s actions have had the simultaneous effect of disgusting his supporters and energizing the Tea Partiers, which is something he just can’t afford. By coming out more strongly against the corporate interests and at least sounding like he stands for the people, he can conceivably reverse that. The Tea Party folks mostly won’t agree with him enough to vote for him, or for Democrats generally, but they may quiet down and do their damage to the Republicans instead (whom they by and large consider traitors to the cause). Meanwhile, if he manages to mollify his supporters, they may actually vote this fall, and the Democrats in Congress badly need them to.

One question is whether he sincerely means any of it. I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that question. But as long as the pressure can be kept up, it may not matter. There’s a pattern to what’s going on here. These difficult times are in many respects a lot like certain former difficult times, such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. (You can find out more about this idea at this web site: http://www.fourthturning.com/.) At all those times (we can particularly consider the latter two in view of the fact that both occurred after the Constitution had been ratified, so that presidents existed), there were serious problems, and people were ready to vote for, work for, and even fight for (literally in the 1860s) dramatic changes in the way the government operates. But the president of the time (Lincoln, FDR), although nominally on the side of reform, was inclined to be more cautious and conservative than either the situation warranted or the people wanted.

Mr. Lincoln, although personally opposed to slavery and in practice opposed to its expansion, was unwilling to come out in favor of abolishing the institution. He wanted to focus on restoring the Union instead, and felt that if he got too pushy about slavery, the effort to restore the Union would suffer. He was particularly worried about losing the support of the Union states that permitted slavery. So he soft-pedaled the whole business. His supporters, especially the ones known as the “radical Republicans” (no, at that time that wasn’t an oxymoron – the party has changed a bit, unfortunately) were disgusted. Meanwhile, the British and the French, sensing a divide-and-rule opportunity, were toying with the idea of recognizing the Confederacy and pressuring the U.S. to accept the seceding states’ independence. Combine that with Union military failures in the early Civil War, and Lincoln’s presidency looked like a disaster. But under this pressure, he moved decisively. He passed the Emancipation Proclamation and took other actions that turned the war from a simple question of union or secession into a war over slavery itself. This removed any danger of foreign intervention in the war, because, however much Britain and France might have preferred to see a divided America to a united one, they were certainly not going to come in on the wrong side of a war over slavery. The new cause was controversial to be sure, but it helped solidify Lincoln’s political support in his own party and gave the troops and the nation a powerfully moving cause to fight for. Because of this, the nation was dramatically changed in a few short years. Today, Lincoln is a revered national hero, and most Americans are unaware of the fact that the abolitionist Wendell Phillips once called him, with considerable cause, “a huckster in politics, a first-rate second-rate man.”

Mr. Roosevelt, like Mr. Obama, consistently fell short of his own rhetoric in his actions. He spoke in his campaign of intending to govern for the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” and to cast the “money-changers” from the temple of government. In practice, though, particularly in his first term, he was the champion of the moneyed interests, if a bit more practical than they often were themselves, and not blind to the fact that some degree of reform was necessary. Yet his early reforms were paternalistic in nature and took the form of a partnership between government and business, with labor’s aspirations largely suppressed. Things were somewhat ameliorated as a result of Roosevelt’s initiatives, more his relief measures than the economic reforms of the First New Deal. But the Depression dragged on. The economy began to grow again, but not enough to return to the prior prosperity. Meanwhile, progressives expressed their dissatisfaction and began supporting radical measures like those of Huey Long or the Townsend plan, or third-party candidates such as Socialist Norman Thomas. There was a serious threat that such political insurgency could drain enough of Roosevelt’s support in the 1936 election to throw the race to his Republican opponent. (The GOP were smooth enough to run a moderate that year, so it wasn’t going to be an automatic walkover. We’ll see if our own Republicans have the same savvy in 2012.) Under this pressure, Roosevelt rolled to the left in his rhetoric, and passed the first measures of what became the Second New Deal, including Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and other measures which created the ground rules of the historic prosperity of the postwar years. Today he, like Lincoln, is a hero to progressives, and with equal irony.

Also ironic is the fact that both these men provoked absolute, and absolutely unwarranted, fury on the right. As moderate and (to the progressives of their time) frankly inadequate as they were, their ideological opponents thought them dangerous radicals. Conservative capitalists and Republican ideologues regarded FDR as a socialist, which he most certainly wasn’t (any real socialist would guffaw at the suggestion) and as a traitor to his class, which he also wasn’t. As for Lincoln, his opponents in the south thought his election so dire and dangerous that they seceded from the country and provoked the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil. We see the same irony in the way that the right regards Barack Obama: the radical leftist who wasn’t.

And this brings me around to the other subject, and also back to the universe of my novel. This irrational opposition and polarization in our politics, which has recurred in all eras of crisis such as the present, or the time of Roosevelt or of Lincoln, does not arise from anything sensible. It occurs to me that it might be something instinctive, archetypal, atavistic, a boiling in the blood to the confounding of the brain. Something the soul needs, though the mind should scorn it. Or perhaps we are all moving to the steps of a collective dance, something no one person fully wraps his brain around. Perhaps it’s as Karla said to the Star:

“I think there’s something more. I think that if we imagine utopia as an ending, we deceive ourselves. I think that it’s in our nature to strive, and when we have world peace and the end of hunger, when there is no more tyranny anywhere and the weak are protected from the strong, we’ll still be striving. But for what? I can’t imagine.”

Neither can I. But perhaps that's asking the wrong question. Perhaps it doesn't matter for what we strive. Perhaps the striving is the whole story, and the reason for it all, and the goals of our politics or our morality or our religion or anything else are just lures to keep the Golden Game in play. And so at times when passions burn hottest and the need for change is greatest, that is when the players of the Game become the most intense in their conflict. We may hope, I think, to avoid civil war this time around. But to avoid the kind of partisanship that Mr. Obama deplored in his talk with the opposition party yesterday is, at such a time as this, perhaps too much to hope for.

The Decline and Fall of the Gatekeepers

2010-01-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

In my first entry to this blog, I talked about the decline and fall of publishing houses. As I see it, that’s not an isolated process, but part of a much larger trend in communication and thought: the fall of the gatekeepers.

Who are the gatekeepers? Anyone in any part of the communication world that has the authority to say what gets heard and what doesn’t. In literature, it’s the publishing company. In the music industry, it’s the record companies. In the movies, it’s the big studios and film distributors. When you write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, the editor gets to decide whether or not it sees print: he’s acting as a gatekeeper. Anyone who can look over your creative work of communication – your book, your screenplay, your music album, your article or column – and decide whether or not anyone else will have a chance to read it, see it, or hear it, is a gatekeeper.

What lets gatekeepers do this? Because free speech was (and remains) a legal reality, the only thing empowering gatekeepers has been the fact that communicating costs money. A gatekeeper had control of the money needed to communicate, and could thus decide what to spend that money on. It was always possible to bypass the gatekeepers if you had enough money and were willing to spend it for that purpose, but few people do have that kind of money lying around, so most people had to please the gatekeepers before they could communicate.

What I see happening today is the end of that relationship, as the cost of communicating declines towards zero. It’s not happening in all forms of communication at the same pace, though. In book publishing it’s already here, although a lot of publishers haven’t figured out that they’re dead yet. The same is pretty much true for political commentary; a huge amount of that today is done on blogs without any gatekeeper oversight. Most likely the music industry will be next: it’s already possible to issue an album or a single song electronically and avoid all the costs, and digital music distributors publishing new work, analogous to e-book distributors, have already begun business. For the film industry, the transformation is probably a ways off yet. It’s already being done with shorter productions through such outlets as YouTube, but it still costs a lot of money to produce a major full-length movie for the big screen. It may be that a diminished big-screen movie industry will continue into the foreseeable future, but a proliferation of gatekeeper-free shorter films and independent film making has already commenced. Certainly even in the movie industry the power of the gatekeepers will decline, even if it doesn’t disappear altogether.

My assumption is that this trend – the decline and fall of the gatekeepers – is ongoing and will not be reversed. In every area of communication, it will become increasingly true that the artist or thinker himself decides whether his work goes before the public, without having to convince a gatekeeper. What I want to speculate on is what this means, for art, for thought, and for politics, because it will certainly impact all three of those.

What I see happening all centers around two developments: 1) A lot more stuff is out there; and 2) It’s increasingly interconnected.

A lot more stuff

A lot more books. A lot more music. A lot more films. A lot more commentary. A lot more political opinions. A lot more everything.

It (mostly) costs less than it used to. A hardbound book costs $20.00 or more, but e-books almost always sell for less than $10, often for less than $5, and a good percentage of them for nothing. A movie ticket runs a shade over $10, but movies can be downloaded for pocket change. An album on a CD runs $10-$20, an album’s worth of downloaded songs about $5. A news magazine costs four or five dollars at a newsstand, but news stories can be browsed on line for free, as can most political commentary.

The quality has become more variable, in both directions. Gatekeepers have kept a lot of creations from seeing daylight in the past, and in terms of quality that’s both good and bad (although in other respects, like intellectual freedom, it’s just bad, period). There are independent works of art out there today that are too creative, too avant-garde, too imaginative to pass the gatekeepers. If the gatekeepers were still effective, you’d never see them, and that would be a shame. So at the cutting edge, what’s out there is better for not having to satisfy them. At the same time, there’s a lot of stuff available today that would never get past the gatekeepers because it is, frankly, crap: poorly-written, poorly-composed, poorly-edited drivel, hashed-together films, works of art with the maturity of a disturbed teen and rough-draft finish or worse. And one must admit that there’s much more art that’s too bad to have passed muster in the old days than art that’s too good.

The same is true of thought and discussion. There are ideas in circulation on the Internet that would never have been published in the old days, and some of those are wonderful: new political philosophies, new religious concepts, new technologies. We are enriched by the availability of all this. But at the same time, the Internet is also home to nonsense, from racist and white supremacy discussion to the persistent idea that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen to the equally-persistent silliness that 9/11 was a government put-up job. The gatekeepers used to block the truth far too often. But they also would block the most egregious of lies.

Between the sheer volume of thought on the Net and its dropping price, the competition has now become one for people’s time and attention more than for their money. It’s quite possible for the average person to buy more than he will ever be able to read, view, or hear without straining the budget. No one person can possibly keep up with it all. This creates a tendency to atomization, to people walling off little corners of the intellectual sea and shutting out the rest of it. But there is, I believe, a counter-tendency in the other change mentioned above, that will prevent this from happening.

It’s all more interconnected

Let’s consider for a moment what things used to be like before there was such a thing as the Internet.

Communication happened in one of the following forms: live/in person, writing or print or recording or visual art in physical media, or broadcast. In any of these forms, a particular piece of communication was comparatively isolated from all other pieces of communication except those in the immediate vicinity.

For example, consider a book. To browse or buy a book, you went to a bookstore. To learn about it beforehand, though, you would not go to the same bookstore. You would go to a magazine and look up the book reviews. If the book you were thinking about wasn’t reviewed in that magazine, you would have to look through another, and so on. Or you could ask a friend who had read it. Maybe, in reading the book, you were reminded of something you had read in another book. To check that out, you would need to put the book down (marking your place), and go hunt through the other books in your library to find what you were remembering, and that’s only if you could remember what book you had seen it in. Or maybe it suggested an idea that you didn’t have anything on at the moment. For example, say it said something about the Alger Hiss trial of 1948. (I just looked up that date on line, by the way – something that in my example could not have been done.) In order to find out more about Alger Hiss and his trial for espionage and perjury, you would perhaps go to the public library, or place a phone call to a history professor at the local college. All of which would take time.

Today, if you run across a term or an idea or a reference that is unfamiliar, it’s a matter of seconds to search for it, and that’s if a link to a source isn’t embedded in what you are reading so all you have to do is click. The tendency arising from this is for broadening, not narrowing of scope – for people to acquire at least a passing acquaintance with the unfamiliar, to a greater degree than ever before. I mentioned white supremacy above. That’s a completely foreign ideology for me, as for most of us, but on a couple of occasions when I had nothing better to do, I satisfied my morbid curiosity by searching for it on line and browsing through web sites such as stormfront.org. Would I have researched white nationalism prior to the Internet? Probably not, and even if I did I would certainly not have encountered discussions with people who actually believe such tripe.

On the other hand, people who do actually believe such tripe will find it equally easy to expose themselves to its counterargument. And that brings me to an out-on-a-limb prediction.
The fall of the gatekeepers means an increase in intellectual freedom, and one consequence of that is an amplification of idiocy. White nationalism is a good illustration of this, because budding racists can find each other even though there are fewer and fewer of them to be found. There might not be another nascent neo-Nazi for a hundred miles, but our young thug can find quite a few other people equally deluded on line with a few seconds of searching. BUT – what I also believe is that while idiocy is amplified, its life expectancy is reduced. A movement such as the “birthers” (those who believe that Obama is not a U.S. citizen) can coalesce very rapidly and reach a certain size, but it can’t easily be maintained, because it is too easy for people who consider this idea to be confronted with the evidence and counterarguments to it. And so fairly quickly, it dies out except among a die-hard few.

Test this. Do a Google search for “Obama birth certificate.” You’ll get lots of hits, but hardly any more recent than about August 2009. Only a very few holdouts such as World Net Daily still post much about the birther conspiracy theories, indicating that only a very few people are still interested enough to make this newsworthy. Since the conspiracy theory first became prominent in July-August 2008, after Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, this suggests a “main sequence” life-expectancy (as it were) for such absurdity of about a year. That’s pretty good intellectual damage control, I’d say.

The political implications are legion for party loyalty, the ability of lobbyists to influence events (Supreme Court decision or no Supreme Court decision), and the ability of politicians to make deals in smoke-filled rooms. But this is getting long, so I’ll leave more on this subject for another day.

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/BrianRush

The Morphology of Religion

2010-01-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

What is religion good for? I don't mean that as a rhetorical question. Religion is good for some things, or it wouldn't be such a persistent feature in all cultures.

In asking that non-rhetorical question, I would like to avoid simplistic, pat answers such as "it reassures people and calms their fear of death," or "it explains things that primitive people found beyond comprehension." Not all religions even include a concept of the afterlife, and some that do have afterlives far scarier than death, such as the Christian Hell. Actually, death isn't all that scary. Dying is, because it usually hurts, but death itself is no more frightening than sleep - unless one imposes upon the imagination horrors such as Hell. Death is something to be regretted if it comes too soon, not for its own sake, but because of lost opportunities, but it is not something to be feared, and many religious beliefs tend to generate, rather than calm, fears of death.

As for primitive explanations for natural phenomena, we should understand why people want to explain things in the first place. It's not just for mental comfort, but also for practical reasons. "Why didn't my wheat grow?" is best answered by "because the rains didn't come" or "because the crows ate it," as these admit of practical solutions: irrigate from the river; plant the seed deeper; make a scarecrow. A religious answer to questions like these might prompt the working of magic (such as prayers or sacrifices), which could do some good, but is no substitute for practical solutions in the material world, although it may enhance those solutions' effectiveness. Religious explanations for things completely outside human control may offer some mental comfort, but no practical utility, and this quite minimal benefit cannot explain the persistence of faith.

So what does religion give people? I'd say that there are two main benefits, one individual and personal and the other collective and social. I'm more concerned here with the collective and social benefit, but to get the other out of the way, I'll simply say that spiritual experience is real. Individual identity is in the end an illusion, and masks our true position as one with everything else in existence. However dimly, most people occasionally have perceptions of this, and it is a very moving and powerful experience that is extremely difficult to articulate or to understand rationally. Religious teachings give it a framework by speaking of consciousness and intelligence beyond human limitations, in one form or another, embracing and supporting the human soul. All such teachings are metaphors, none are literally true, but they have the virtue of saying to a person who has undergone a spiritual experience: yes, you have touched upon something real. You are not mad. So long as religion does this, and so long as nothing else does, religion will exist.

The other benefit of religion is the articulation and reinforcement of common values. And this brings me to the title of this writing: the morphology of religion. Because common values are not a constant. They change, and so religion also changes. We have seen this in relatively modern times, as Christianity has morphed from a religion that accepted (for example) the existence of slavery into one that condemns the practice, or as Islam, in being transmitted from the Middle East to western nations, sometimes loses its most misogynistic elements. But a much larger change occurred in the distant past, long before either Christianity or Islam existed, as our ancestors settled into farming communities and began building cities. In doing this, they entered a material reality requiring radically changed common values.

All of the so-called "great" religions, including without limitation Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, and Shinto -- I'm sure I've left some out, so if you're a follower of one of those I did, please accept my apology -- emerged during the time of agrarian civilization, after the founding of the first cities but before the industrial and scientific revolutions. So did many other religions that have not survived, such as the polytheistic faiths of the Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Gauls, and Germans of antiquity. Certain features were common to all agrarian civilizations, mandated by the material circumstances that defined them. These included a universal elevation of a hereditary warrior-landholder elite (and normally but not quite universally a monarch above them all); a base class or caste of forced laborers, most commonly slaves but sometimes serfs or peasants; drastically low status for women, who normally subsisted as the subordinate property of men, their only real purpose in life to bear children.

Most basic of all, so universal that it is seldom noticed, was a belief that man is superior to and dominant over nature. This belief was not held in precivilized forager-hunter societies, but it's necessary if humans are to cut the earth with plows, kill the plants that nature has bid to grow in certain ground, and replace them with other plants of the farmer's choosing. It's equally necessary if humans are to enslave animals for meat, hides, milk, eggs, wool, and labor, rather than taking wild, free prey like other predators. Many of the other institutions of agrarian civilization follow from this basic change, either logically or by association. As man is dominant over nature, so some men are dominant over others, and men over women, and the Gods over men. As for the status of women, that follows pragmatically from the increased food production available with agriculture as compared to foraging and hunting. An increased food supply means that it is possible to have a larger population, and since it is possible, by competitive necessity it becomes mandatory. As we know in modern times from studies of how to reduce population growth, women who control their own reproduction tend to have smaller families. Conversely, women who don't control their own reproduction - women who are the brood-slaves of men - tend to have larger families, and so when large families and high birth rates are what is desired and needed, the status of women necessarily falls.

All of the so-called "great" religions, as well as others from the same period that have not survived, have teachings that reinforce these values. The institution or sacrament of marriage is one of these. Marriage in origin was a most unequal relationship, a transfer of female human property from a father to a husband. That our thinking about it has changed is a good example of religious morphology. But it was always an institution that encouraged high birthrates. By making a woman the property of a man with sexual rights to her person, and insisting that her purpose in life, the only reason she exists at all, is to bear children, this institution made sure that many children would be born, and born into a situation in which they could most effectively be raised. The sexual morality common to the "great" religions also reinforces this breed-to-the-max desideratum, channeling all sex into heterosexual relationships that are best for raising children, and often condemning sex for its own sake, as well as homosexuality and other non-procreative sexual acts.

We are again in a period of transition, as our ancestors were when they let the plow replace the foraging basket. Today, we must be concerned with human mismanagement of nature and damage to the natural world, and so "man as overlord" is not a very useful mythos. We are also past the time when maximizing birthrates is a good idea. Exactly the opposite is true today. And so, to one degree or another, the so-called "great" religions are all changing, and new religions are arising to express spirituality and common values in less anachronistic fashion.

But in addition to this, another change is happening through the process of intellectual globalization. We now have what amounts to a global conversation taking place, and the subject of religion naturally arises as part of it. It's no longer feasible for a religious belief to isolate itself from the impact of ideas from outside itself. And so we see such things as Christian churches adopting meditative practices from Hindu and Buddhist sources and labyrinths and other symbols from Neopagan ones. We see people who consider themselves spiritual and religious not confining themselves to a single faith, but picking and choosing elements from among various offerings to, in effect, craft their own approach. In such a climate, an exclusivist, "We have the only true way" approach to faith becomes increasingly untenable.

None of these changes are comfortable ones for traditionalists and purists. And that, I believe, is why we see phenomena such as radical fundamentalist movements in Islam or Christianity. These people see their faiths threatened by the changes of modernity, and they are right to do so. But theirs is in the end a lost cause, because there is no way to turn back the clock on the material changes that are driving the process. And since one of the two purposes of religion is to articulate and reinforce common values, and common values must and do change to be relevant to material circumstances, so religion must and does change as well.

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/BrianRush

Pretentious, no?

2010-01-10T15:45:00.000-08:00

I just created this blog today, and had to think of a name for it. Well, the dragon is my personal totem in a deeply spiritual sense, so I decided to work that into it. I tried "Dragonsmoke" - taken. I switched to "The Dragon Belches," which is perhaps more honest and certainly more amusing in a silly way. Then again, I don't imagine I'll actually be doing any belching here, or if I do it's not something that will find its way into print, and you will never know unless you're watching me type.

But I will certainly be doing a fair amount of talking. I do that a lot, and in fact there are those who say that the hard thing is to shut me up. So although pretentious, "The Dragon Speaks" may be the most straightforwardly honest title after all.

I'll hold forth on just about anything: politics, religion, the occult, and creative writing and publishing being my most common topics. Whatever strikes my fancy will go here, although your comments (whoever you are) may inspire me or move me in directions I hadn't considered before. I'm no expert on anything and will deny being one on principle even if I am; all ideas must stand on their own two feet, without artifical propping-up by people's opinions about their sources, and if I were God writing with a finger of fire on stone tablets, the words that appeared would be "Think For Yourself." Still, it's possible that what I have to say may provoke some thought. If so, I'll have done a good job.

I suppose it's traditional to introduce oneself in the first post of a blog. Very well. My name is Brian. I am old enough to know better. I live in California, but that's only in the flesh; my mind lives everywhere. I am an aspiring novelist; links to my book (or in future my books) appear here (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357) and you may browse the early chapters for free as if perusing a volume off a bookstore shelf. I should say rather that I am a novelist, and what I aspire to is to be able to make a living off it. These days there's no need to wait for a publishing-company's seal of approval, and if it's finished it can be published; then the reading public gets to decide whether publishing it was a good idea or not, and after all that makes a lot more sense than having some self-important gatekeeper making the decision before anyone has a chance to read a word.

And that brings me to the first topic: publishing, and what's happening to it.

There’s been a certain amount of talk floating around about the “end of the book” as a result of the rise of the e-book. That may ultimately happen, and from a reader’s perspective it makes a difference, but from a writer’s standpoint it’s not really the most important thing happening. Far more significant than whether we will in the future be publishing in print or digitally is the end of three institutions that have dominated writers’ professional lives for a long time: the publishing company, the literary agent, and the bookstore. All three of these are in decline, and there is no reason to believe that the decline will not continue into nonexistence.

Bookstores are an old story and I’ll not retell it. Suffice to say that for purchases of new books, on-line bookstores make so much more sense than brick and mortar that the writing is on the wall. There remains a niche for the used book store, but that doesn’t matter much to writers, except insofar as writers are also readers.

Since the literary agent is a function of the publishing company – an agent’s job is to negotiate with publishing companies on a writer’s behalf – agents will stand or fall by publishers. So from the writer’s perspective it all comes down to the publishing house.

There are three technologies impacting the relationship between writers and publishers. These are e-publishing, print-on-demand, and on-line marketing. The combination of these three technologies makes it feasible for any author to self-publish. Not to succeed necessarily – you have to write well (usually) and appeal to the fickle and unpredictable reading public (always) to do that – but any writer can today put his work before the public absolutely free and without having to meet the approval of a publishing house. It’s wrong to focus the question on the e-book in my opinion, and I say that in spite of the fact that I firmly believe that e-books are the wave of the future in literature. But it doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong about that, because what is true about e-books in terms of impact on the writer-publisher relationship is also true about POD, provided that either of them is matched with free on-line marketing, which of course they are.

What services do publishers provide to writers? There are three of them, traditionally: editing, printing/binding, and promotion/distribution. But with respect to any of them, the question arises of whether the author employs a publisher for these services because it’s actually desirable to do so, or because he has no choice. And I would answer that for all of them, a traditional publisher was always employed only because the author had no choice about it. Printing, binding, promotion, and distribution were expensive in the old model, and required a large outlay of capital with no certain return. A writer who did not have a lot of money to spend had no choice but to submit his work to a publishing house, and let the publisher decide whether it would be published or not.

POD, internet marketing, and of course the e-book have changed that equation. The cost per volume using POD is the same as with traditional printing, but since it’s now possible to print only when an order is received, there is no up-front capital expenditure. Of course, e-books have virtually no cost of production at all. And with distribution happening primarily through on-line stores, there is no real need for a traditional publisher’s distribution network, either.
That leaves editing, and this is a genuinely valuable service. I see plenty of e-books on the market that could have used a good editor, not to mention a good proofreader. But does this service need to come from a publishing house? Does the writer need to pay for it by handing over control of whether he will be published or not, and the lion’s share of the proceeds if he is? Not at all. A pay-for-services model of editing (available through most self-publishing outlets) makes much more sense from the writer’s perspective. Or, if the writer doesn’t have the funds for that, he can find another writer on-line and exchange editing services, because all an editor really is, is another literate person seeing things from a different perspective that the author perhaps missed.

Given all of this, plus the decline of traditional publishing and consequent caution of publishing houses, why on earth would any aspiring author ever submit his work to a publisher? The way things are now, with fewer and fewer titles being published each year, the odds against one’s work being accepted are simply monstrous. And if one beats the odds and one’s work is accepted for publication, one still signs a contract giving an enormous percentage of the proceeds to the publishing company. And even then, most books don’t succeed, because publishers aren’t really all that good at predicting the reading public’s tastes and desires. Aside from editing, about the only advantage of traditional publishing is that the publisher pays the author an advance. So you get your up-front money and you roll the dice, and if your book doesn’t sell enough to pay back that advance you won’t publish another. You’ve inadvertently (and legally) swindled the publishing company of funds, at the cost of your writing career.

Does that make sense to you? It sure doesn’t to me.

On the other hand, with self-publishing nobody pays anything up front, except the self-publishing outlet’s overhead costs. The writer gets no advance, but by the same token modest success is not, in that model, the same as failure. Royalties are higher, typically about $4 per volume with print-on-demand, or some 70% or more of the total sale price for e-books. If you publish a traditional book through a publishing company and sell 200,000 copies, you might get $400,000 in total royalties depending on the book's retail price. Do the same with a POD volume (and that’s no more or less likely than doing it through a publishing house, except that you’re guaranteed to have the chance to try), your royalties will be about double that. Publish a traditional book, sell only 1,000 copies, and you’ve flopped; the publisher has lost money on you and will not want to publish anything else you write (however, since the publisher probably paid an advance of at least $5,000, you’ve made that much). Sell 1,000 copies POD, and you’ve made $4,000 and are free to keep writing and publishing. Your return on that one book is less, but it’s made honestly, not by taking unearned payment from the publisher, and your career is not over.
Why, then, would any author ever choose to publish his work through a publishing company? Honestly, I can’t see any reason at all, except that some haven’t figured it out yet, or think that self-publishing is an admission of defeat. It's not. It's a perfectly rational decision. It's the thing to do even if you can get published traditionally.

If you’re a new author, self-publishing is the way to go because (let’s face it) 1,000 sales represents a more realistic projection than 200,000 for a first book, and you don’t want to kill your career. On the other hand, if you’re already successful, and publishers are drooling over the chance to publish your books which are always best sellers – then self-publishing is still the way to go, because of the higher royalties and greater control over the process.

It’s only a matter of time before all authors figure this out and publishing houses can no longer get any business because nobody will submit to them. We will have self-publishing outlets in the future, and we will have professional editors, because that’s a genuine service that’s needed. But the publishing house is going to disappear altogether. And that means the literary agent will go, too.

More next week, on who knows what? Fly free.