Mercy

"Instead of humanity rationally governing the world and itself, we are at the mercy of monsters that we have created."

Dale Jamieson
Reason in a Dark Time

Dark Age Ahead: Choosing Ignorance

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) is rightly remembered for changing how influential people thought about and designed cities, particularly in North America, because of her original and persuasive writings and activism.

But in this culture people get a single label, which is probably one reason that her last book, Dark Age Ahead was praised and ignored when it was published in 2004.

Another reason is that such a subject (a coming Dark Age in America) is hard to think about: difficult because it is complicated, difficult because it requires shedding habitual categories and ways of thinking, and difficult because it is emotionally huge, and invites displacement and denial.  The mind just can't get itself around it, while the emotions blur the brain and suggest sweets instead.

But at this cultural moment, as we really need to be clear on what's going on and what it may portend, this relatively short book may help focus observations and analysis, getting us beyond the usual paths that so many are now taken in trying to explain what's happened, and more importantly, what to do about it.

There is some agreement that this is part of a trend--not the only one, but a powerful one--that has been building and consolidating over years and likely decades.

There is perhaps less agreement that, as I believe, this is not a mere political problem, let alone an accidental outcome.  Though electoral margins were slim and there's the counter-evidence of the popular vote--and clearly the culture is divided-- the failure of the political system (including media) was so total that it more than suggests a larger cause.

In retrospect, for example, we can see the political and economic causes for Hitler's rise in the 1930s.  Something like it was in the cards at the close of World War I and the harshness of the Versailles treaty.

But that doesn't really explain Hitler.  C.G. Jung, who was in neighboring (German-speaking) Switzerland throughout this period--from before World War I until well after World War II--felt strongly that there was a mass psychological component that transcended politics and economics.  It continued to obsess him for years after.  Judging from the monstrousness of what occurred, I am persuaded he's right.

Jacobs doesn't get into the psychological realm, which I believe is part of the story today, and I believe it is directly related to the prospect of the climate crisis.

But Jane Jacobs also looks beyond ordinary politics and economics, though she includes them in her synthesis.  I approach her book now, determined to go through it carefully.

I begin reading with one of my questions in mind: has any civilization, prosperous and powerful and with domestic tranquility relative to many times and places in the past, actually chosen ignorance and thereby self-destruction?

In the early pages of the book, Jacobs cites two strong cultures that did themselves in: Mesopotamia (much of what we call the Middle East) before the Christian era, and late medieval China.

"The difference between these failures and those of conquered aboriginal cultures is that the death or the stagnated moribundity of formerly unassailable and vigorous cultures is caused not by assault from outside but by assault from within, that is by internal rot in the form of fatal cultural turnings, not recognized as wrongful turnings while they occur or soon enough afterward to be correctable. Time during which corrections can be made runs out because of mass forgetfulness.”

The initial cause of decline in Mesopotamia was environmental degradation: they cut down their forests.  In China it was the result of a bad decision made by the head of an all-powerful--totalitarian-- central government, that turned the nation inward.

But at some point they made everything worse by choosing ignorance. “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to society’s decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality," Jacobs wrote.

The fortress mentality conjures up the inevitable image of walls.

Jacobs quotes historian of religion Karen Armstrong analyzing the Mesopotamian decline as continuing because of a shift "from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit" to a "conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview."

At its height, medieval China had huge fleets of ships capable of exploring the world.  The decision to destroy the fleets eventually led to government officials destroying all the records, designs, navigational charts, maps and findings associated with the fleet and these voyages.  Centuries of knowledge were lost.  Ignorance was chosen.

Jacobs quotes a vice president of the War Ministry for China of the period as denying the fleet was ever large and impressive, or that the voyages brought back anything of value.

This reminded me of a talk I watched on YouTube by science fiction author and thinker Neal Stephenson who suggested that today's minority views could become predominate, so that in a matter of decades in America it would be generally believed that the Apollo moon landings never really happened.

(By the way, what might have happened had China continued to explore is explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate history novel Days of Rice and Salt.) 

Jacobs adds another interesting comment:

“A fortress or fundamentalist mentality not only shuts itself off from dynamic influences originating outside, but also, as a side effect, ceases influencing the outside world.”

Reading about what could be causing the onset of a Dark Age is not the most pleasant--it can't be called diverting.  So I'm enforcing my reading by committing to writing about Jacobs' book in this space for the next few weeks.

The Donald Chronicles: Are We Too Stupid To Live?

As we slouch towards September, there's still almost a month before the first debate and early voting in some states.  So the media is all about speculation--is Trump done?  Or is there time? Is Hillary overconfident? Are the polls tightening, or is Trump's base eroding?

And now all this speculation on what Trump is going to say about his immigration policy.  At least some of  the media believes a slight change in Trump's doubletalk bullshit is going to convince some people that he should be President after all.

Trump has garnered a plethora of appropriate descriptions, "psychopath" being the latest.  But what does his nomination as the candidate of one of only two major parties say about the rest of us?

Let's separate the underlying factors that leads some people to a desperation that expresses itself as anarchism.  In more general terms, is Trump more disconcerting evidence that we're culturally decadent?  That in a moment of existential crisis--perhaps the greatest crisis of human global civilization--humanity is too stupid to live?

If the evidence is the television we avidly watch and the popular culture it expresses, TV expert Michael Rosenblum says oh yeah.  Unfortunately he did so at the excerable Huffington Post, which blocks the copy feature, and what he said isn't so profound that I'm going to type it all out.  Basically his evidence is  the devolution of TV--notably the cable stations like Bravo!, A&E and the History Channel that once actually did programming that expressed the purpose inherent in their name but now traffic in the same reality show sewerage as the networks.  This is Trump's America, and why he will win, Rosenblum says.

A transatlantic view in UK's Telegraph focuses on credulity there and in the US:

American and British politicians at the highest level appear to be engaged in a competition to see who can utter the most defiantly ill-informed, aggressively ignorant statements about precisely the issues that governments have traditionally regarded as life-and-death matters. Somehow, this brazen guilelessness – the shameless display of the failure to understand even the basic meanings of significant words – seems to be offered as a bond with the common man, as if not understanding complicated things was a measure of authenticity."

There's a chicken or egg problem here--is the electorate getting really stupid (clueless about even recent history, heedless of real world consequences) or are our political leaders?  I think the second proposition is easier to prove.  Donald Trump is the most ignorant human ever to be a major party nominee for US President in at least my lifetime, which is something I could have said (and probably did say) just 12 years ago when G.W. Bush ran.  Yet Bush's knowledge could run rings around Trump.

That perhaps the most ignorant available candidate (and remember, Rick Perry was among them) got the nomination throws suspicion on the electorate, at least in Republican primaries, but also on the cynicism of party leadership.

It seems the cynical ignorance is broader and deeper--and perhaps institutionalized.  The cynicism and lack of responsibility to the country permeates the Republican political leadership.  Arthur Vandenberg in the 1940s, Everett Dirksen in the 1960s, for example, were Republican leaders, partisans and conservatives, but they had major moments of statesmanship that helped their country through great crises and improved the lives of Americans and others.

It's worth noting now, so near the March on Washington anniversary, that Dirksen's greatest moment as Senate Republican leader was supporting Civil Rights legislation.  He did so using a quote that has since become famous--I remember when he said it (I was in high school), and it's the reason I know the quote at all:

 "Victor Hugo wrote in his diary substantially this sentiment: 'Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.' The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing of government, in education, and in employment. It must not be stayed or denied."

Can anyone seriously hear Mitch McConnell saying something like that?  McConnell, currently the Senate majority leader, is 100% cynical partisan.  The name "statesman" can't conceivably be applied to him in any circumstance.  McConnell also appears to be a dim bulb, though with a tunnel vision cunning.  Lots of those in politics, but he's the Majority Leader.

Democrats lack personality in their leaders, and there's nobody I know of who is at Obama's level of combining personal force and vision with knowledge both broad and deep.  But statesmanship is not yet dead in the Democratic party at least.

Both parties suffer from a political system in which members of Congress and other officeholders spend much if not most of their time raising money for their next election, and can't bother to even read (let alone write) the bills they occasionally vote on.

Still, voters gave us Trump, just as they gave the UK the catastrophe of Brexit.  Not comforting.

Otherwise: the New York Times suggests that particular Donaldalian vulnerabilities encourage Dems to pursue a House majority, and publishes a feature that's really worth looking at--a timeline of Trump's Greatest Homegrown Hitler Hits together with the dates on which Republican leaders announced they were abandoning him.

Polls: A new Monmouth U. national poll of likely voters has Hillary up 7, though their previous had her up 13.  Emerson has a confusing bunch of state polls, which show Hillary up 10 pts. in Ohio (more than others) but only up 3 in PA (less than others.)  Josh Marshall suggests Emerson's methodology isn't reliable. Polls by other outfits show tie games in Arizona and...yes, South Carolina.

It's Getting There

It was one small step for political hacks, one giant leap backwards towards the new Dark Age.

The Republican Congress has passed a budget which slashes funding for NASA's earth sciences research.  There are many other preposterous cuts in their budget so when it comes time to compromise with the White House on a final budget, this funding may be sacrificed.

The cuts are obviously aimed at NASA's climate research, which includes weather forecasting.  Republicans and their fossil fuel masters are at war with reality, but everyone else is going to pay the price.

Jane Jacobs wrote a book, her last, called Dark Age Ahead, published in 2004.  Jacobs, along with Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Frances Perkins, Halle Flanagan, Eleanor Roosevelt and others, was one of the great women of the 20th century.  She was famous for The Death and Life of American Cities and other books on cities, and she changed what cities look like and what they are today.  But this last book was ignored.  It's time for it to be revived.

She writes that a Dark Age is not just some primitive state.  It is a time when what was once known is culturally forgotten.  It is when knowledge is at first denied and ignored, and then it disappears.  Once started, it can become very extreme.  In the last Dark Age, people lost the skills required to measure time, and so in a sense in daily life, time itself was forgotten.

"Cultural xenophobia", a "fortress or fundamentalist mentality" are the signs that the fall into an age of darkness has begun.

In the New Yorker article I linked above, Elizabeth Kolbert uses a term I've used here before: willed ignorance.  That's what is happening among our "leaders."  That's why, if it's not dark yet, it's getting there pretty fast, and this latest effort--especially if it succeeds--is a notable step towards that darkness.  With chaos ahead.

The cost of willed ignorance is increasingly steep, as is the lack of societal will to do the difficult things necessary to stop our self-destruction.

So the news is always the same, and yet significantly worse.  Species disappearing from the planet,including large herbivores like elephants and rhinos and species of primates, with consequences of the crash of natural systems we can't predict.  And of course, the continuing acceleration of pouring carbon pollution into the atmosphere, condemning our progeny to a hotter, more violent and in many ways, a poorer world.  This week it reached a long-feared record.

Meanwhile the rabid right grows ever more extreme and perverse, with the latest feverish delusion of an ordinary military training exercise really being an Obama-led military takeover, because (as columnist Gene Lyons wrote) "where else would you start a military takeover but the strategic hamlet of Bastrop, Texas, commanding the crucial highway junction between Elgin and LaGrange?"

 And when it doesn't happen, rabid rightists and their pandering politicians will brag that their vigilance stopped it.  It would be nothing but funny if it weren't another de-legitimizing tactic that has consequences for the planet and the future well beyond the petty careers in the tiny lifetimes of power-hungry hollow men.

Whose Bus Are You On?

Earlier this year, President Obama had this moment alone, sitting in the very seat on the very bus where Rosa Park's act of quiet defiance became an iconic moment in the struggle for racial equality in law and in practice.  Looking at this photo we may reflect on how far we've come, but sitting on that bus might prompt someone to realize how the fight is never over, and even some of the same ground must be defended and won again and again. 

In agitating for the practical, equal right to vote, African Americans in the 60s were not only claiming their own rights but affirming and reviving constitutional and societal rights for everyone.  By adding their free participation in the political process, and the economy, they added value to society, and made it easier for others to use their rights. 

A mirror of their fight for voting rights in this generation is resistance to the attempts by GOPer governors and legislators throughout the country to erode and even take away voting rights.  In Florida, the governor has essentially declared war on the federal government, specifically the Justice Department, in announcing his defiance of their order to stop the cynical attempts to deny citizens their right to vote.  Using the plainly cynical excuse of addressing a voting fraud that does not exist, he seeks to seize political power by preventing people who might vote against the GOP from being permitted to cast their votes.

There are principled people in Florida stopping this particular effort, but it is only one among many in that state, and in many other states.  Just as in the Civil Rights era, such efforts are conducted by cynical politicians who feed (and feed on) the ignorance and bigotry of the people who support them. 

Controlling who is eligible to vote is an age-old strategy for the undemocratic seizing and holding of power.  So is demagoguery, which in its way is also an assault on the integrity of elections, especially when it involves pernicious lies.  In this election, involving media paid for by huge amounts of money, those lies will be persistently repeated--and the Romney campaign is extraordinary in the number and size of its lies.

They are not differing approaches to policy, or arguable interpretations of meaning.  They are lies about quantifiable facts.  Romney's campaign is based on insisting that President Obama has vastly increased federal spending, added greatly to the federal deficit, and greatly increased federal government regulation.  None of this is true.  Yet Romney has the money behind him to repeat these lies endlessly, in media packages designed for those who believe television dramas and reality shows are true.  Update: the pattern in Mittdacity.

This attacks the legitimacy of government at its core.  For if there is no incentive in doing something difficult since your opponents will simply lie about it, or in attempting to address real problems because there is no political benefit to doing so, it's not only democracy but government and the functioning of society that is in danger.

Romney's lying is becoming his defining characteristic.  One writer noted, "There no longer exists any doubt that Mitt Romney intends to win the White House by conducting the most dishonest, unscrupulous and reprehensible campaign ever devised."  If he is successful, elections become a sham, as real as reality TV.  The fight for effective rights, for a real representative democracy, and against ignorance and bigotry, is as real and necessary now as it was when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus.  We must recognize how our different situations today nevertheless constitute the same fight.

 One difference is that on the surface at least the Civil Rights movement was an insurgency that rattled the established practices of a settled society.  Today the fight is to keep rights from being taken away by those who feel the tide of history against them.  But society is also in more peril, more danger from a return to rule by the cynically selfish and the ignorant.  It's this generation's fight.  They are getting on the bus.  What will they do?           

Update 6/12: The lawsuits are flying.  Florida has sued the federal government over its attempts to stop the voter purges, while local election officials condemn the Governor's suit and say they won't resume the purges anyway.  The Justice Department has sued Florida to stop the voter purge.  Meanwhile a Tea Party front group has sued several states to force them to enact similar voting purges.  So whose bus are you on?

Liar in Waiting

Politicians stretch the truth.  They omit inconvenient truths.  They imply something they know is not true in the hopes that people will believe it while they can deny they actually said it.  They inflate the importance of something (knowing it is not that important) or minimize the importance of something they know is really serious.

None of this is admirable.  All of it interferes with the public's ability to justly judge the meaning of positions, decisions and actions.  Some of it is more forgiven when done in an election campaign, rather than by an officeholder in the performance of duties.  But out and out lying is still a little scandalous--so scandalous that mainstream media is very trepidatious about calling a lie a lie.  It was this tendency that allowed the "swiftboating" of John Kerry to proceed, when it was all based on vicious lies. 

Now Rachel Maddow has exposed Mitt Romney as a serial and unapologetic liar.  She did one segment on Wednesday, illustrating the proposition "that a man who may well take the oath of office in 10 months is choosing to get to that podium on a foundation of utterly unashamed, unprecedented deceit."

This segment started with the Etch-A-Sketch scandal (responding to a question of whether Romney could move towards the center in the general election campaign after taking such hard right positions in the primary, a Romney strategist said sure, moving from primaries to the general is like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch, you just start over) but moved quickly beyond flip-flopping and pandering to a pattern of outright lying. This ignited something of a media kerfluffle, but she made more of a case of Romney the liar on Thursday.  (Both video segments are here.) 

I've been calling Romney a liar for awhile, so I can add only this further observation to what Rachel and her staff have documented.  Beginning perhaps with the de facto lies promulgated by Lee Atwater for Bush I, but in any case for most of a generation now, using lies has been a growing part of the GOPer political playbook.  As one kind of de facto lying gets by and then becomes standard, a more baldfaced sort of lying becomes possible, and then used, and then accepted.  This has been going on for so long that a generation of GOPers--as old now as their 30s and maybe even 40s--has grown up with lying as a standard political technique. 

They may have to make some false equivalences with what Democrats do to help them justify it, but basically they see it as standard.  The Romney brand of lying is a direct product of the Karl Rove school of politics.  It also happens to have become standard during the rise of the Christian right in the Republican party.  I can't pretend to explain or understand how systematic lying comports with fundamentalist Christianity.  There's some ends versus the means going on that contradicts the Christianity I was indoctrinated with in my youth.  But I do see the effectiveness of putting the two things together, so that people can lie while sounding righteous.  (That's one of Romney's problems--he lies so blandly.)   

We aren't talking about different interpretations.  We're talking about lies, about statements of facts which Romney knows are not true.  About telling lies to audiences and reporters, which Romney routinely does.  We're talking about editing the statements of political opponents in ads or in statements by Romney's campaign or supporters that make President Obama or President Clinton say pretty much the opposite of what they in fact said.  These kinds of lies strike at the foundation of democratic government.  They make authentic dialogue about important issues impossible.  And that's probably the point.  They create a culture of ignorance, and feed it with lies.        

The Week in Blogview

Here are a few off-headline stories that caught my eye this week:

A couple of interesting court cases: Zombies won the right to demonstrate against consumerism--well, activists dressed as shopping zombies. They won a settlement against restraint by police, whose excuse was terrorism, what else.

At least here in CA, Sarah Palin's big payday for a speech at a state university got some attention (not much.) Now a court has decided the terms of her payment must be disclosed. Update: and here's the contract.
$75,000, pre-screened questions and a bendable straw.

The state government of CA is busily self-destructing and taking the state down with it, but there are occasional glimmers of life--like getting it together to be the first state to organize its health-insurance market under the new healthcare law. It'll all happen too late to help me--I'll have Medicare by then--but implementation of reforms is going to be as difficult as passing them. So the biggest state economy in the country going first is a big deal.

And here's a mere detail of news you probably missed, since it wasn't exactly headlined: the much-maligned Recovery Act resulted in millions of jobs in the second quarter of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As bad as things are, they would have been greatly worse without it. Update: a great story in Time Magazine on how the Recovery Act will transform the future.

Sanity made a brief appearance on the rec list at Daily Kos this week. But I wouldn't count on a recurrence.

Finally, the NY Times has been doing a series on "Your Brain on Computers," a series of research-derived cautionary tales, which might also be classified under my "all your eggs in one basket" refrain. For this article warns that among the effects of being constantly plugged in is the lack of downtime for information to establish itself in memory. It's just a constant stream of triviality. Which I guess returns to the previous theme--the Institution of Ignorance.

The Institution of Ignorance

I've referred to the evolution of ignorance, and the ecology of ignorance. It has now become the institution of ignorance---ignorance as the official ideology of a major political party, and the media which controls it.

Timothy Egan's column lays out the basics and the consequences:

"It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present? "
"Climate-change denial is a special category all its own," Egan writes. "Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox."

But it isn't just them. It's the American media in general. Kristina Hill, chair of the University of Virginia Landscape Architecture program who is looking ahead at designing for the Climate Crisis near future, said this:

Here, in the U.S., we live in what I call the American Media Bubble – where the media aren’t using climate change to sell papers, unlike their Canadian and European counterparts. Since they don’t see the headlines the rest of the world is reading, the average American doesn’t know what’s at stake. And as a result, their elected officials are discouraged from taking action. But the rest of the world is starting to prepare. Our economic future, and the health, safety and welfare of many of our citizens, depends on learning from the best practices that are out there."

The institution of ignorance is now the greatest threat to the immediate and long-term future. Even over the next few years, it will be difficult to dislodge misinformation and lies, and get this society moving to deal its real and present dangers, instead of its absurd and loathesome fantasies. But even that could be made immeasurably more difficult if Republicans use this perfect storm of economic discontent to actually put these willed ideological idiots in office. E.J. Dionne has written again on the necessity of Democrats generating a backlash against this extremism in the defense of ignorance. We'll see, but so far the signs aren't good.

Update: Well, maybe this is a beginning--a Democratic National Committee YouTube video. But viral videos won't be enough. Words from the top eventually will be necessary, I believe.

The Evolution of Ignorance: Television

"Even though the mass extinction of species and the wholesale decline of ecosystems have yet to trump contemporary fixations on the economy, politics, peak oil, terrorism, and entertainment, biodepletion will undoubtedly be judged, in retrospect and not soon enough, as the most momentous, far-reaching event of our time."--Eileen Crist & H. Bruce Rinker, "One Grand Organic Whole" in Gaia in Turmoil (MIT Press.)

You would reasonably expect that if there is substantial evidence that an intelligent species is systematically destroying what supports its existence, that species would focus on the issues involved. You might even consider such a focus to be a reasonable definition of an intelligent species.

You might reasonably expect that such a danger would be the main topic of inquiry and debate. Our species has in place the communications media to involve pretty much the entire planet in such an urgent and thorough discussion of the mortal danger to the biosphere, including the ominous threat of the Climate Crisis. But we're not using it for any such intelligent purpose.

We don't even use it for serious exploration of issues of the economy, terrorism and the rest of that list. We do use it to display some of our species other great qualities--wit, imagination, music, physical achievement in sports. But then there's the degradation on parade called reality TV. And the money-making games called politics.

What we don't have--or have enough of-- is what got us here. We developed as an intelligent species by looking ahead, at future dangers and opportunities. But our greatest means of communicating fails entirely to focus on the greatest dangers we have ever faced.

The pioneers of television stressed its vast potential for education. Even as commercial interests took it in other directions, the educational mission held on, undernourished until it starved to death.

What did it in was a numbness to consciousness, to the ability of the medium to involve and expand consciousness. That hasn't died completely--you see it in programs that still inspire awe, both fact-based and imaginative. But it's been largely numbed, and overwhelmed by the purposeful evolution of ignorance.

In 1957 Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders. It exposed techniques being used and developed for advertising, especially television commercials. Shocking in its time, it's a modest description of normal television today. But among the essential elements of these persuaders is that they remain hidden. They operate by direct appeal to the unconscious.

Today's commercials are layered with irony, yet the same appeals are made in basically the same ways. American men will do anything for beer. Etc. While we may laugh at the stereotypes, we basically identify with them, and assume everyone else basically does, too, because that's what we're supposed to be, and what we're supposed to care about.

The commercials define us. They define what we are and what we aren't, and what we expect. The programs permitted on television are those that support the appeals and the stereotypes created in the commercials.

Crucial to their successful operation in getting us to buy their crap is that they keep us ignorant, and happy to be ignorant. And so we are. And it is the very crap we buy that largely is destroying our future. As a society we have not yet been overwhelmed by a new Dark Ages. But television pretty much has. It is a mirror held up to our decadence and willful ignorance. But we've been persuaded that it's all ok.

The Evolution of Ignorance: Getting Started

You might think that ignorance doesn't have to evolve: it's the default setting. In a way, that's true. To produce knowledge and increase intelligence, there's a lot of inertia to overcome, it seems: old ways, some animal instincts, status nervousness, etc. Except that the evolution of knowledge and intelligence are much more natural for animals as well as humans, since they enhance survival and generally enhance the quality of life. Probably the best survival mechanism ever to exist is curiosity. That's not as obvious as, say, wings, or opposable thumbs. But it probably precedes a lot of physical changes.

Anyway, human social systems encourage intelligence and knowledge, a little bit more than they discourage them. Some human social systems encourage them more than others. Those closest to nature--and closest to the edge of survival--may well encourage them more than societies that are pleased with themselves and how things are. Or those that are afraid of the changes around them, and those they see coming.

I don't mean entire societies as such. It's a matter of emphasis, but it can be pervasive in terms of what people feel they can do or be. The character of a society can be dominated by powerful groups. The rich in positions of power are the most obvious. Those who control the dominant dialogue through whatever communications media exist: the pulpit, newspapers, television.

Oppressed groups know that the powerful maintain control by keeping them ignorant. That's one reason that literacy was so important to African American slaves, and to be educated and well-spoken was to be admired. But that cultural value seems weaker now in all groups, in the society as a whole.

Our society has been systematically evolving ignorance more than it has been encouraging intelligence. While not always deliberate, it is often intentional--though often it's a step towards another ultimate purpose.

In this post, I'm just going to suggest some ways this is done. I hope to flesh them out later.

Societies, cultures, and their social systems can encourage or discourage behaviors based on what they value, reward and honor, and what they don't value but dismiss, ignore, discourage and penalize. Our society has a love/fear relationship with science and scientists, and to other kinds of knowledge, as well as the intelligence of art. That's a dynamic, and the love or the fear gets emphasized in different circumstances, different cases, at different times.

But the balance gets thrown off in various ways. We're seeing it happen now in the political dialogue, where ignorance in the form of no respect for truthfulness or knowledge is common. We're seeing it happen in education, with schools starved for support, cutting back on content and rigor. We're seeing it in the global culture, which is most influenced by American commercial culture.

Here's one example that may seem trivial, but I believe it has been powerful, especially in combination with other cultural and political forces. Our society is saturated with advertising. Billboards, store window displays, newspaper ads and giveaways go back a couple of centuries. But with radio and television--with hundreds of channels of television--advertising became pervasive. Advertising information--words, images, texts and especially subtexts--comprise a major proportion of the information we take in every day.

In the past generation or two, the coordinated advertising campaign--often led by TV commercials but including other forms using the same theme and key images--has used various psychological devices to entice buying, and above all to define the public to itself. Thousands of hours of beer commercials for example have defined men as fundamentally stupid, interested only in drinking beer, and proud of it. In fact, that's become the definition of masculinity.

Commercials in general portray both males and females as dull-minded, incurious, stupid people interested only in fashionable products and images. I believe this came about partly because advertisers realized that only idiots could believe their claims, so why not make idiocy the cultural ideal? Advertising only works on people who can be easily swayed, by personal and fashion anxiety, and identification with those happy sappy idiots they see in the commercials. For what advertising is about is mostly getting people to switch from one brand to another.

A super-heated consumer society needs to define itself through what it buys, not what it knows. People are smart enough to know this is pretty stupid, but commercials make them feel really comfortable with being stupid.

The most interesting example I've seen lately is the evolving campaign for SuddenLink, the cable TV company that operates mostly in smaller markets across the country. Depending on where you are, you may or may not have seen these commercials. We started getting them here when SuddenLink bought our cable franchise.

The first set of commercials we saw featured a young man, late twenties perhaps. Verging on overweight, he had a friendly smile and a vapid face. He didn't look very smart, and he didn't act it. But he was seen to convince friends and relatives that cable (rather than satellite) was better, even as he did dumb things, like playing touch football in his mother's living room.

The next set of SuddenLink commercials contrasted things that are hard ("Indoor cattle herding is hard") and things that are easy when you have cable (telephone ID shown on your TV screen.) These were also humorous ads, and made the conceptual jump to say that simple (like their simple-minded former spokesman) is actually smarter. The latest group of ads has pushed this into more dangerous territory, showing these "smarter" jocks bullying a nerdish satellite dish installer. It's the cable jock as Tea Party bully.

To make the point that cable is simple (and not complicated scary technology) and that choosing something simple that works is smarter, these commercials use the imagery that suggests the longstanding tradition of making fun of smart people. But the real power of it is in the saturation of this cultural ideal: the happily ignorant.

I've seen this evolve in my lifetime, but it became a more obvious change across the culture in the Reagan 80s. That realization is in books written in the decade, like Martin Amis' The Moronic Inferno, and in songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, Jackson Browne as "The Pretender":

"I'll be a happy idiot
and struggle for the legal tender..."

This is the Social Darwinism imposed by the commercial culture, resulting in the continuing evolution of ignorance.

The Truth Is Out There

So: a one day Climate Summit at the UN on Tuesday. New hope or more of the same?

In the UK, where the Climate Crisis is covered more consistently and prominently, the BBC led its story: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says a one-day climate change summit in New York has given fresh impetus to efforts to tackle global warming. He says the momentum has shifted in favour of reaching a deal at December's crucial climate meeting in Copenhagen."

Also in the UK, the Guardian led on a positive note with China: The world inched closer to an elusive deal to combat climate change yesterday, when China, the world's biggest polluter, made its most substantial commitment yet to curb its carbon emissions and invest in clean energy."

But in the US, the New York Times (which also published a CC denial piece filled with bad science, according to Climate Progress) had a much more dour approach: World leaders gathered here for a global summit meeting on climate change made modest proposals on Tuesday for combating the problem, underscoring the way domestic political battles still trump what United Nations officials had hoped would be a sense of global urgency."

When you get right down to the nitty gritty, the reports in the Guardian and the NY Times aren't that far apart, but the difference in tone says volumes. Even though what China has actually proposed falls short of what climate experts say is needed at minimum, there is good news in that China (and India) are officially recognizing the problem and the urgency. That alone makes it a bit easier for the US and Europe to move forward, since one common objection has been that their efforts would be useless without China and India. But the US in particular should be squirming as well, because if China actually commits to greenhouse gas reduction and especially clean energy, then the economic as well as environmental leadership of the 21st century goes to them.

President Obama is trying to keep the US in the game. "The threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. Our generation's response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it - boldly, swiftly, and together - we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe," he said. After acknowledging that the US has been lax until now, he added: "But this is a new day. It is a new era. And I am proud to say that the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history."

That's certainly true, but we're far from critical mass--it's still an uphill climb to get the US to really commit to clean energy and addressing the Climate Crisis. The first critical test are Copenhagen and the climate bill now in Congress.

Anyone who cares about the survival of our planet should start praying that Barack Obama gets his way on reforming US healthcare, writes Jonathan Freedland in Worldchanging. The reason is political: this insane health care debate, that (as President Obama said on Letterman Monday night) other advanced nations can barely comprehend since they all have universal healthcare, is taking all the time, energy and attention, while the climate legislation languishes. Moreover, if Obama can't win on healthcare, he is unlikely to prevail on climate. And that's the key to Copenhagen. Freeland continues:

The science is now clear that if we do not manage to keep the increase in the earth's temperature below 2C, we risk facing the effects of catastrophic climate change – with all the flooding, drought, mass migration and human suffering that it would entail. The experts tell us that the only way to stay below that 2C limit is for global emissions to peak in 2015 – and then start falling. In other words, we have set ourselves up at a nice corner table in the last chance saloon. Copenhagen is that last chance. "

While no one really can foretell when the "last chance" will be--or if it has already gone by--it's certainly close to that. And here's another possible last chance: Not for the first time, the fate of the world rests in the hands of US domestic politics, Freedland writes. But if the US doesn't take leadership and China is prepared to do so, it could be the last time. It will be a long time before the US is irrelevant, but it is in danger of moving in that direction.

Failing to truly solve the multiple problems of health care more than signals a steep decline, which probably has already begin. The incredible ignorance demonstrated by the visible opposition (as opposed to the insurance companies who are orchestrating both the public and behind the scenes machinations) is just one clear manifestation. Here's another, according to former President Bill Clinton: "In the last eight years, we went from first to tenth in terms of the percentage of 25 to 34 year olds holding a bachelor's degree. That's the most important unknown statistic out there... We are headed into long-term economic decline if we don't do something about it."

Though once again big money from vested interests is fueling and inciting opposition to not only measures to address the Climate Crisis, but to acknowledging that the crisis exists, that opposition is characterized not by clever and deceptive arguments, but once again by lies and loudly proclaimed ignorance.

And while we roil in this poisonous nonsense, the facts and scientific studies delineate a Climate Crisis that is worse than previously believed. New research indicates that the world will warm 150% faster in just the next five years than the UN climate panel last predicted. Yet another Pentagon report warns that the Climate Crisis will pose significant strategic challenges, including the possibility of resource wars.

One of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was 10 years ago. But a lot of attention is being drawn to the Arctic. New research there strongly suggests that greenhouse gas pollution from the start of the Industrial Age reversed a cooling trend and started the Arctic warming. Arctic ice continues to thin, melting both from above and below. The effects of global heating, felt most strongly so far in the Arctic Circle, are already being widely felt, disrupting animal and plant life for thousands of miles. This isn't speculation. It's observation.

Once again the fires in California and the obvious drought conditions in Texas and the Southwest are not only accumulating problems, but supporting predictions of what the Climate Crisis would look like. New CC models see drought impact eventually hitting the American Midwest the hardest.

The truth is out there, and so are the blind and the ignorant. The willfully ignorant, blinded by ideology, prejudice and fear.

President Obama did announce some concrete steps on Tuesday, as reported in American Progress: a first ever program to track the amount of greenhouse gas pollution emitted throughout the country and the United States will propose a phase out of fossil fuel subsidies at the G-20 meeting later this week in Pittsburgh, PA. But these, along with green energy initiatives, will probably stall unless the Congress passes some minimal Climate Crisis bill that at least doesn't do the wrong things and does do some things right, and unless the US can help forge a global agreement in Copenhagen.

Patriot Games

Barack Obama spoke today about patriotism, mostly his. He's defending himself against the charges of being unpatriotic.

It's times like this that I truly despair of Americans ever growing up. What does patriotism mean to the people who make this absurd charge? Conformity to some stereotype? Acting white? What threatens them? We all know it's some bizarre emanation from the unconscious, a code concept for fears of difference, subversion, whatever. But that doesn't excuse it. Non-idiot adults should be able to figure that out and get serious.

We have this complex of problems that truly do threaten survival. That millions of Americans are left helpless without adequate health insurance, and increasingly aren't seeing doctors when they are ill, to the tune of nearly 60 million Americans, is not an abstraction to me. My next serious illness or injury will likely be my last. Period. We're supposed to put off a decent health care system again because of the exploitation of national idiocy?

Talk about clinging to guns. After more than two hundred years the Supreme Court decides the right to own guns is guaranteed by the Constitution when guns are among the biggest delusions and the most dangerous. Guns keep you safe? Are you kidding me? You need them for hunting? Killing animals for sport is barbaric. Meanwhile children are gunned down in petty disputes that a fistfight used to settle. And what are guns best at doing? Making sure your suicidal impulse successfully kills you. Half of all gun deaths are suicides.

We have serious problems, and we need serious people to solve them, and serious voters to make sure they do. We can't afford another election based on delusion, lies, corruption and idiocy. Or it may be the last one that will ever really matter.

I used to get those pitying looks when my interest in Star Trek was revealed, but Star Trek fascinates me precisely because, behind all the space opera and bumpy-forehead aliens, there's the premise that humanity is finally growing up. Finally entering adulthood. And not a moment too soon.

These days to call humanity an adolescent race may be a social promotion. Patriot games are for children, and it's not very healthy for them either.

Guernica is not past

The painting by Picasso. The quote by Faulkner:
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

J'Accuse!

This month (last Saturday to be exact) marks the 71st anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica, which essentially inaugurated the mass terror bombing of World War II. Five bombing raids with incendiary bombs dropped from primitive aircraft resulted in some 1650 deaths in this small market town in Spain. By the end of World War II, bombers and missiles killed thousands in London in the Blitz, and massive numbers of sophisticated aircraft and powerful bombs killed 100,000 mostly civilians in Dresden and 130,00 in Tokyo, before the atomic bombs killed at least 280,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Two generations later, much of the world has internalized the horror of that war, as well as the different but in some ways worse horrors of World War I. But America has not, argues Tony Judt in an indispensable article in the New York Review of Books. Some of our political thinkers even argue that such history--any history--is irrelevant as a guide to our present and future, because the bad old past is over, and things are different now.

So Judt asks the question in the title of his piece: "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" What's clear to him--and to me--is what we haven't learned: "In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war." One of the main reasons is that in the 20th century, we were lucky. War hardly touched us--not the World Wars, not even the waves of terrorism that Europe experienced, let alone other parts of the world. But even though the lessons of those wars are available to us in accounts, in eloquent writings and filmmaking, we haven't learned them. Instead, we are going through what we should have learned to avoid. For example:

"World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life—regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges—disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances—theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering—became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.

War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. "

Americans fought and died in the two world wars--but Over There. Americans could observe what happened in those societies, but the lessons didn't take. We didn't experience what they experienced, starting with the extent of death and destruction.

"In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940...

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead. "

So what does this mean?

"As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."

Judt writes in detail about how this also leads us to misjudge our enemies, particularly in the so-called war on terror. Another consequence is this administration's attitude to torture, which used to be the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships. " Torture really is no good, especially for republics. And as Aron noted many decades ago, "torture—and lies—[are] the accompaniment of war.... What needed to be done was end the war."
We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them"—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there? "

I would add something else to Judt's point: it's not only that Americans didn't experience war the way others did, it's also that America--with all these years of prosperity, access to education and information--is still so fond of being ignorant. We don't learn from history because we don't respect the ability to learn from history. We demand our leaders bowl well and be the kind of guy or gal you can have a shot and a beer with. Not that they know anything, or can bring any insight and intelligence to the problems that are killing us, and laying waste the world. Just so they talk tough. We'll keep at if it takes a hundred years! We'll totally obliterate them!

It's not like the lessons of war and the 20th century are unavailable. On TV the other night I happened to see some of Abel Gance's great 1919 film, J'Accuse. There are scenes of men killed in war rising up and returning to accuse those who profited by the war and their deaths (scenes that Gance used again in his 1937 remake.) Some of the men in those scenes were actual soldiers, who shortly afterwards were killed in battle. We are seeing the dead returning, literally. Asked the meaning of his film's title, Gance said: "I am accusing war. I am accusing man. I am accusing universal stupidity."

That was almost 90 years ago. And yet, this past week a story broke about retired military officers trotted out as experts by television news networks to explain the Iraq war and the war on terror, who were not only political instruments of the Cheney administration, but paid by companies profiting from the war. Said the New York Times: " The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air." J'Accuse!

But these days the news media can't even be bothered to justify the war--they ignore it. They ignore that April has been the deadliest month in Iraq since last September. J'Accuse! Meanwhile, contractors who have made billions to reconstruct Iraq have cheated, lied, done shoddy work or didn't finish the job, and still got rich. J'Accuse! For all the good it will do.

Judt's article concludes:

" Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?"

That last sentiment in fact was a slogan in the 60s (though not a bumper sticker--no one would dare put it on the back of a car, if you wanted an intact windshield.) Our hope ultimately is today's young, like the black junior high age boy I saw the other day, wearing a t-shirt with the script familiar from the Star Wars movies, only the words said: "Stop Wars." But way before he is an adult, Americans have to come to grip with this failure to learn. Or it could be too late.

Dr. Hu

Emperor Hu of China had a great time in the U.S. Oh, there was that nasty woman who shouted at him during a White House press conference, which was loud enough to upset Smirk but apparently not enough to wake up the napping Cheney. But according to a PBS News Hour report, nobody in China heard about the shouting (she was upset about persecution of religion in China) or, for that matter, the napping---they just got great pictures of the 21 gun salute.

Hu got to be photographed at the White House and he met Bill Gates of Microsoft, and officially the U.S. got nothing--none of the agreements they wanted. But maybe they got some advice. So far (according to the PBS report) China has been pretty successful at free enterprise, including a free press---as long as they stick to celebrities, crime and local stories, that is. The Chinese strictly control political information on all media, including the Internet.

Though Bill Gates and other computer mavens are likely to deplore this publicly, they are all pretty much cooperating, and probably helping China devise more efficient means to police the Net. (Maybe there's a TV series in it? Drag/Net 2006?) Nobody has the guts to ignore the China market.

And maybe the Bushites got something out of Hu's visit after all. Thanks to the control of a few greedy and ideologically rightwing corporations, as well as timid and overpaid celebrity media "reporters" working for Cro-Magnon management too stupid to see that their efforts to appease the right are coming several years too late, when the tide is turning, Bush has had a pretty easy ride media-wise. The press has been in his corner and under his thumb for most of his tenure.

Though these days, not so much. So maybe Hu was able to give Bushites some tips on how China does it. Whatever ails Bush's control of the media, Dr. Hu can fix it.

He could also pass along data on how well the Internet controls are working. A free Internet, even as free as it is now, is not likely to last. Between greedy corporations and Bushite totalitarians, the whole blog thing could disappear overnight. Or just be gradually transformed into pay-per-view, open only to the same megacorporations that control just about every other source of information and "free speech."

The Daily Babble

Hu's on First?

No, this isn't going to be a diatribe about how the Bushites and their corporate cronies are so eager to sell out to China, providing them with all the military technology, manufacturing jobs and debts they need to bury us, Khrushchev style. Although I could write that.

It's about humor. Did you get the joke in the headline? What do you have to know to know it's humor (whether you think it's funny or not is another matter)? You have to know something about today's news, that the Emperor Hu from China is in the U.S. meeting with Smirk. Okay, so he's not the emperor, officially. (Probably you have to know something about the old Flash Gordon serials to know why calling him the Emperor Hu is possibly a little funny, but that's another joke.) And you have to know the Abbott and Costello routine. If you don't know the one I mean, why should I even tell you?

What percentage of America do you think would get this joke? That's what I thought, too. Pretty depressing, isn't it?

This line of thinking came to me as I perused the back page of the Wednesday San Francisco Chronicle. It had the Asmussen panel I've stolen for the occasion. To find it funny you have to know at least the headlines about "missing links" recently discovered, or maybe there was just one missing link (and lots of headlines): the fish with legs, sort of. And you'd have to know about John McCain's recent forays into Pat Robersonland looking to be the Bushite candidate for 2008, a strange but somewhat delightful strategy, since it seems self-destructive, and there's nothing like self-destructive Republicans who aren't destroying other countries and many other people in the process, to brighten up the day.

But that wasn't what got me started. It was one panel cartoon on the same page, a Bizarro by Piraro. I will try to steal that one, too but I'm not sure I can. So I'll describe it---specifically my experience of it. I saw a cartoon of a police officer cuffing a young man, saying (via the balloon above his head) "Anything you say can & will be used against you in a future life..." The legend at the bottom of the picture says, KARMA MIRANDA ACT.

Not only did I get it and laughed, but I really admired its elegance. And when you find something funny and really admire its elegance you want to immediately tell somebody about it, share it. And then the thought came to me: like, with who? Who can I be absolutely sure will understand this? And the answer was...almost nobody.

I knew some people who would get the Karma part. And some people who would know what the Miranda Act warning is (if only from a billion TV cop shows.) And some people might know who Carmen Miranda was, especially if they noticed the fruit on top of the cop's head, which I didn't catch until I looked at the cartoon again. But the joke doesn't work unless you get all of the references. And I can't quite be positive. That anyone would.

I'm tired of explaining references all the time, even though I don't do it all the time, because I try not to make them, so I don't have to explain them. It's partly an age thing, of course. Carmen Miranda did not discover radium or was she even under-secretary of state. The same kind of people who know who all the Simpsons are would know who Carmen Miranda is, if it happened to be the 1940s or 50s. I first learned of her from cartoon parodies made in the early 50s or earlier, that ran very early Saturday mornings on TV when I was in grade school. Later I probably saw her on variety shows, though my only clear memory of her is in a movie with Groucho Marx. But for someone in my generation, you just knew who Carmen Miranda was. An odd looking Latin dancer who wore hats with piles of fruit on them.

But you have to know at least the name Carmen Miranda to get the pun. Karma, Carmen, get it? I really didn't want to have to explain that. So is this what old age is going to be, especially in an era of galloping ignorance...me chuckling to myself, and being ashamed of getting an elegant joke?

You can really cheer me up by commenting in outrage about how you feel personally insulted because I didn't know you would get this joke immediately.

The Evolution of Ignorance: The Next Step

One of the great triumphs of the Rabid Right has been the dumbing down of the news media. In the guise of rooting out liberal bias, this well-timed campaign converged with other changes in broadcast and print media---mostly to do with consolidation and greed--to intimidate cowering executives into stripping news of actual objectivity, and opinion of any ideas either slightly left of center, or more complex than a slogan.

That the news media has become more stupid and superficial, at the same time as it has become more right wing, is not a coincidence. Does this mean the aggregate Rabid Right is stupid and superficial? Yes, it does. As a generalization (for which you can name your favorite particulars)they are also clever and violent, with a true belief (or a perfect cynicism) that enables them to automatically demonize anyone they don't like. They are incapable of distinctions. In argument, they are generally incapable of proportionality. To say they jump to conclusions is kind: it's more like quantum leaps. Every divergence from dogma is an insult and an attack on their entire system of belief, evidence in itself of persecution and bigotry against them, not to mention the basest infamy, therefore justifying a global nuclear response.

They have turned projection into a fascist art form and a mighty political tool in the age of ignorance. They are the toadies of the very wealthy, whose temporary interests they serve. Media owners are their phantom masters and greatest beneficiaries.

Having pretty much conquered television and radio and a good bit of print journalism, they turn their attention now to schools. The same charges are being met with the same confused, defensive responses from people who are used to rational argument and civilized discussion in which distinctions are made and differences recognized without every statement turning into an occasion for deliberate misunderstanding and total war.

This story in the Guardian is an excellent summary of what's going on directly in attacks on teachers in universities and even high schools by the new McCarthyites, with a hurried overview of alarming goings-on in legislatures. It begins with a suggestion of how these attacks succeed, through the tacit cooperation of people who may not believe in the charges but don't want to be associated with anyone who is accused of anything by anyone. As well as the indifference of associates who don't understand how important it is to support each other, quickly and firmly, in any such attack. I've seen it, and to some extent have felt it before.

As to the accuracy of the charges, is that ever really the point? Any thinking person will concede that there are idiotic and intolerant leftists among teachers, just as there are idiotic and intolerant rightists, and just as there are incompetent teachers with no discernable political point of view at all. But as the author of this article points out about concerning the attacks on specific academics by David Horowitz, the chief instigator, as well as others:

"Evidence to back up his central argument - that these political leanings are at all related to a teacher's ability to be fair, balanced or competent in class - are non-existent. Most of the criticisms of lecturers on both the Dirty 30 list and in Horowitz's book are levelled at comments professors have made outside the classroom and rarely do they provide any evidence of the accused actually criticising or ridiculing students with rightwing ideas. "

But evidence is beside the point for these people. Academics who use evidence and argument, because that's the basis for what and how they teach, as well as for their whole world, are going to be helplessly spinning their wheels. Several lifetimes of commercialized ignorance combined with the fear of losing the privileges of affluence, grafted onto an increasingly desperate and shrill form of pseudo-Christianity, is encouraging the application of viciousness and violence to another former field of knowledge creation and dissemination.

What they truly can't face is that actual objectivity faced with the weight of evidence, along with the moral and operational development of most academic fields---especially the ones having to do with people--themselves lead intelligent people to the conclusion that the Rabid Right is rabidly wrong. They can cry all they want about the dearth of intolerant true believer fundamentalist Rabid Right "conservatives" in academia, but then there aren't many thumb tacks piloting space shuttles.

Will they succeed as easily in the academy as they have in the media? Not all the same economic forces are at work there, but other favorable factors exist. Thanks to the deification of corporate business, the administrative talent left for education is weak. Schools used to be staffed by people who cared first and foremost about education, rather than the bureaucrats who weren't up to corporate competition, and there is still a residual cadre in the mix, though the tendency appears to be towards the clueless and spineless, and therefore easy marks for aggression from the loudest and richest.

Schools also seem to be more dependent on corporate money, as public funds dry up, and so even universities are becoming prey to the same lobbyist forces as dominate the government that no longer is willing to support disinterested education at any level.

Then there is the easy prey of students basically uninterested in learning anything, cynical in the exchange of going into horrendous debt to get the job qualification of a diploma, who turn their anger on their own education. Denouncing professors can be much more fun than studying, and may help the grade point if they suspect they aren't getting an automatic A. In this unnurturing cultural context, there are a surprising number of students who do deeply care about learning, the search for knowledge, the paths of inquiry and the environment of discourse, and who will sacrifice for principle. So far their immediate responses has been the chief defense in many cases, as bewildered adults chase their tails. Of course, these adults may also know how easy it is to be forced into homelessness and illness without a shred of medical care in a more vulnerable zone of the lifecycle, in this great nation of ours.

So in the face of serious problems and alarming prospects, America apparently chooses to go mad. Well, how many times did the world shatter itself in the twentieth century? Why should the twenty-first be any different? It sure can't be because we're smarter, or braver. Let's hope enough of us rise to meet the challenge. There is so much potential here.

Captain Future's Log

Ranting Back at the Engineers of Interconnected Ignorance


Charlie Rose just had one of those fascinating and infuriating group interview shows on what’s next in technology and society, global economics and the U.S.

These people---like the head cheese of Cisco systems, president of Stanford U., John Doerr and Ether Dyson who have so many titles for so many entities (virtual or not) that they should have extra names---are undoubtedly smart, and they make a lot of sense on a number of issues. Doerr has a list for immediate needs, like a commitment to 100,000 new engineers from U.S. schools (and the end of idiotic Homeland Security laws that chase away foreign students) in four years, U.S. energy independence in five years, commitment to dealing with pandemics, plus real broadband, real health care, actual education in schools, etc. These priorities (many being widely shared among technology celebrities and ceos) are inarguable.

How far the U.S. has fallen behind in Internet related technology, in producing scientists and engineers, as well as in supporting a decent society with good public health, health insurance, education and respect for learning---it's all an immense and depressing scandal.

But some of the rah rah for innovations that technology will and should create, especially via the Internet, are a lot more troublesome. Some are the product of the limitations of scientific and engineering thinking. Some are just dumb.

For example, the idea that all information will be and should be digital, because it makes it accessible to more people. This is part of the Internet=Everything approach, so typical of a new technology yet in this case particularly dangerous because it’s possible.

In ten years, says Ether Dyson, the Internet will be like electricity---you won’t even think about it, you’ll just think about what you can do with it. It’s got a McLuhanesque prophetic non sequiter ring to it, and it’s also functionally insane. Because a great many of our real problems today are due to the fact that we don’t think about electricity, the infrastructure that delivers it, the costs to individuals and the planet of how we deliver it and especially the energy used.

On a practical level, it’s very easy for me to focus on this because I’ve just gone for 36 hours without electricity---and people I know who live within a couple of miles went 3 or 4 days, and within15 or 20 miles went 6 days without it. But 36 hours was enough to teach the lessons that we are more and more dependent on electricity---even for (as I mentioned in previous posts) things that didn’t used to be, like gas heating and cooking. So there are a lot of people around here talking about getting blowers for woodstoves that are powered by the heat of the stove itself, or kicking themselves for throwing out their manual typewriters.

The lesson may be forgotten, but fried systems and downed lines due to storms (which are likely to increase in many places in the next decade) or supply and demand problems and other infrastructure difficulties are both real and indicative. The same fossil fuel energy that is fueling those storms through global heating, is the energy that is running out. Local disruptions are likely to increase as the problems of supply and infrastructure grow.

And though technologists don’t like to point it out, the tremendous growth of the Internet has accounted for a large percentage of the growth in energy use. One normally tech-friendly futurist predicts that Internet use will soon consume as much power as the entire U.S. economy did way back in 2001. A single server farm uses as much energy as the city of Honolulu. Not to mention the tremendous energy used to build computers and especially make all the materials used (and wasted) in their construction. And so on. Not thinking about it is ignoring the cost, in pollution and the sicknesses created, in our current unthinking global suicide. (I'm not saying that Dyson would necessarily disagree, just that it's the kind of glib statement she made that gets repeated as the whole answer.)

And don’t tell me wireless is the solution—microwave technologies are quite vulnerable, and also depend on the physical world of structures with transmitters, as well as energy sources.

I ask you, who in their right mind would discard multiple ways of storing and presenting “information” in favor of a single highly vulnerable system? Scientists and engineers and people who would make a lot of money creating such a system, apparently.

Unless and until highly portable, decentralized, highly efficient, sustainable and renewable energy systems are widely and cheaply available as part of every electronic device, linked to a digital distribution infrastructure that is impervious to physical or software sabotage or disruption, this Internet as Everything within ten years is a moronic fantasy.

And if you haven’t accomplished this and a lot more in ten or maybe twenty years, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to have this fantasy ever again, at least in this millennium.

The urge to digitize entire libraries is supposed to supplant the need for those libraries, which the president of Stanford characterized as imprisoning information within walls. That’s very attractive to schools like Humboldt State, strapped for cash, which has already gone two years without buying a single new book for its library, apparently with little complaint.

I don’t see libraries as imprisoning information; I see libraries as protecting information. Make it accessible, of course. But don’t destroy it. (I can hear them objecting now—of course, we didn’t mean burn the books. Well, wake up, dreamers. They’ve already burned the card catalogues. Now in a brownout nobody can find anything. Of course, you burn the books. The San Francisco Library did when it went digital. I suspect the practice is widespread, even before digitizing those destroyed books was affordable. Who can afford to store them? And pretty soon, who can afford to print more? Sure, this is a broad question with many individual solutions, but the prediction was also broad.)

Then there’s the knotty problem of who is going to pay “content providers” in this new digital world. There are real problems involved, but the solutions I heard proposed show the fundamental idiocy embedded in the very vocabulary used to discuss these matters.

We have to find a way to “pay content providers” so they will have “incentive to create content,” as Charlie explained on the behalf of panelists. The Cisco Kid said that the wave of the future would be to pay not for information or access but for interaction. His two examples were: you don’t pay the doctor to take your blood pressure. You take it online yourself. You pay the doctor to interpret it, along with other medical information; you can instantly get three or four opinions on the same information. Second, you don’t pay somebody to write something, you pay them to answer questions about it.

The practicality of getting four competent doctors to comment on the same trivial case aside, the writer example gave me chills, perhaps because it revived every fear sweated into me by some of my English lit professors who took the Leavis side over C.P. Snow in the perennial Two Cultures debate, particularly on the cultural cluelessness of engineers.

I presume some of these “content providers” are artists, musicians and literary writers. First of all, they don’t need to be paid as “incentive.” They need to be paid so they can a) live and b) write, not necessarily in that order. Incentive is not the problem.

Secondly, this seems to propose that you don’t pay Doris Lessing or Gabriel Garcia Marquez for writing their books. You pay them for answering questions about them.

In some ways, this is only an extension of what’s been happening for the past two decades, which is writers like Doris Lessing are forced to go on book tours and promote their books in order to get paid. Now writers must do Internet chats, etc. or their publishers may very well refuse to publish them. Agents are more interested in your marketing plan than your words. (Whereas nobody seems to care about the expertise at writing of a marketing expert.) This is due to the marriage of technology and business. And this might be a real rather than prophetic example of the Cisco Kid’s belief that “technology will dictate business strategy.”

But promotion makes celebrities, not writers. And only someone who doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what a literary work is, who possibly has never read a literary novel or even a short poem of Rumi, could possibly suggest that the proper job of literary writers is explaining what they write.

By all means give us 100,000 new engineers, and teach them Chinese while you’re at it. But you’d better pay some attention to developing 100,000 new literature majors if you want a society in which humans can be human. And make a few new portable typewriters while you’re at it.