The U.S. Is Not a Democracy But an Assembly of Political Machines

Why do so many commentators speak of American crusades to spread democracy? It doesn’t matter whether they’re hardheaded commentators casting doubts upon such an unrealistic and jingoistic scheme or whether they’re commentators praising such bloody-minded silliness. They speak nonsense themselves.

Americans haven’t engaged in crusades to spread democracy around the world. We don’t have a democracy in the United States but rather a system of political machines which generate dependent clients. American style political machines, and their allied institutions or servants such as private corporations or public schools, are in the business of perpetuating themselves by shaping those under their influence into clients.

It’s that system of perpetual dependency which we seek to impose upon the rest of the world though we call it democracy.

Stem-cell Research: Some Good News But I’m Still a Skeptic

First, the good news. From this article, Stem cells created from ALS patient and used to make neurons, we learn:

It’s a good time to be a stem cell researcher. Legal and political wrangling aside, the discoveries are starting to come thick and fast now and new breakthroughs seem constantly around the corner. Last November, I was writing about two groups of scientists who had managed to turn adult human cells into embryonic stem cells for the first time. Now, after less than a year, John Dimos and Kit Rodolfa from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have given us two more surpassed milestones for the price of one.

As before, they have transformed adult skin cells have been (sic) into embryonic stem cells but this time, there are two important differences. Firstly, the cells that came not from a young, healthy individual, but from an 82-year old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the same condition that has paralysed Stephen Hawking. Even after a lifetime of chronic disease, the adult cells could still be reverted to a stem-like state.

I remain skeptical about the uses modern societies will make of this technology. For various reasons which have taken books to explore on even a tentative basis, the modern West no longer has the moral and social structures which once forced even scoundrels to discipline at least their public behavior to some reasonably demanding standards. This was part of the reason for the ‘spontaneous’ formation of morally well-ordered marketplaces which so impressed Adam Smith: he was observing societies where scoundrels were forced to behave in their public activities, including commerce, or they would have been ostracized. You could label this as the ‘good’ hypocrisy that pays tribute to morality. But mostly, those Scottish and English marketplaces self-organized into morally well-structured forms because the vast majority of citizens of those countries were Christians at least in their moral beliefs and behavior. In this context, I’ll make no arguments that Christianity is morally superior to other human sets of beliefs, only that such a homogeneous society allowed free human beings to organize their activities from the bottom-up because they shared their basic beliefs and behaviors and those basic beliefs allowed only limited forms of selfishness.

In any case, our modern societies have unleashed their morally challenged members to the greater task of enriching themselves even at the expense of others. For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that the current researchers and administrators and investors in the stem-cell industry are all morally well-formed men and women. If true, it won’t be true for long just because of the vast potential of this industry, potential for profitable good or evil. Those seeking wealth and power will soon be flowing towards this industry, as scientists or administrators, as fund-raisers and bankers. The potential for abuse and exploitation of vulnerable human beings is perhaps beyond any horrors yet seen in the brutal history of our race. Even in the United States, the most middle-class of any major country in history, there is a growing separation between rich and poor and the middle-class is pushed downwards. This is but a hint of what we might see if we build an industry capable of turning some human beings into walking spare-parts bins, in general — capable of turning some human beings into the means for reaching the ends of others. More so than in any period of that brutal history of our race.

I remain skeptical that we can control the potential evil of various forms of biotechnology. Our societies have not the moral structures adequate to control such dangerous technologies. After all, we managed to destroy our farming communities and many other human communities by the way in which we deployed our modern skills in agriculture. This is not because our technology was a little inadequate and needs refining. It’s because we all allowed ourselves to seek our selfish and shortsighted interests and those who are best at this sort of seeking have risen to the top. Kind of like pond scum.

Corporate Laws: Not in Our Genes and Not in the Bible

There is no verse in the Bible that says:

Thou shalt extend human political and economic rights to corporate entities with abstract ownership that freedom and prosperity might spread through the land.

Nor do we have any reasons from genetics or evolutionary biology to believe that human beings function well as cogs in large corporate entities, either private or public. The nice middle-class Germans who actually did the work for the Nazis (building railroads and running military manufacturing and logistics and so forth) were not forthrightly evil as were Hitler and Himmler, but they ignored the larger effects of their work and kept busy in pursuing their modest career goals that they might be respectable citizens paying their taxes and adding to their children’s college funds. (See Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil for an accessible analysis of the situation in light of Eichmann’s trial and Professor Arendt’s efforts to deal with the ‘niceness’ of the man who was horrified by the Nazi programs but did his job of managing the logistics of the death-camps.)

For every exploiter who made his billions by selling American productive assets and jobs overseas, for every exploitive employer pushing the ‘liberal’ cause of open immigration programs which has been justly labeled as ‘quasi-slavery’ by some commentators, there were not only armies of naive and well-intentioned activists for the global economy but also armies of well-behaved widgets who handled the details of those programs even to the point, in many cases, of selling their own jobs overseas or training their own cheaply-paid immigrant replacements.

The marketplaces of the modern world are morally unstructured because those vast places can only be inhabited by mobs of human beings, not human beings organized into local communities that reflect, poorly or badly, the needs of very concrete family- and community-centered creatures. A mob of human beings moves as such. Not generally rebellious, these marketplaces mobs are docile, moving to build the railway lines to carry their Jewish neighbors towards the east, staffing the planning and operations departments of corporations which provide huge bonuses for executives and bloated dividends for retirement funds by selling American productive assets and jobs overseas. But what are those people to do?

Capitalism can take many forms, including forms which allow families and local communities a large role, but as for corporate capitalism…

Can no one see that huge, centralized structures don’t meet the moral needs nor the moral capabilities of those very specific creatures — human beings? The economic man assumed by the theoreticians and practitioners of corporate capitalism doesn’t exist and never did exist. He bears no resemblance to the concrete man described by evolutionary science, genetics, psychology, and the better-quality novels. Try to justify our current economic system on the basis of any of the writings of Jane Austen or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Hermann Melville or Henry James or V. S. Naipaul. It would be the same problem as trying to justify our current economic system on the results of sociobiology or neurobiology, both of which paint images of man not so different than those painted by our better novelists as well as the Bible. And this is an image of man not suited for life in the modern marketplaces, not capable of living a morally well-structured life in these marketplaces.

Destroying Minds One Show at a Time

There is still another research effort that points to the dangers that television presents to developing minds, even when it’s only on in the background. In Parents should limit young children’s exposure to background TV, we read:

Despite the fact that pediatricians recommend no screen media exposure for children under age 2, three-quarters of very young children in America live in homes where the television is on most of the time, according to research. A new study has found that leaving your TV set on disrupts young children while they are playing, even if the channel is tuned to adult shows. This means that simply having the TV on, even in the background, may be detrimental to children’s development.

What is it about television that’s so attractive that parents will watch it despite dangers to the minds of their children? It’s bad enough that those parents are willing to destroy their own minds, but their children’s minds?

Where Are Our Moral Leaders?

We’re headed for some hard times. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are in the saddle. The Antichrist, war, famine, and death are mounted and preparing to ride amongst us to kill by sword, famine, plague, and the wild beasts of the earth.

Something like that, though it’s likely we can contain the damage an awful lot if we act quickly and intelligently, if we’re willing to start making sacrifices of comfort and luxuries now to avoid the large-scale death of the vulnerable, children and elderly and the sick, as it becomes more difficult to heat houses and public buildings. What if there are major disruptions in the transportation systems of countries so advanced that they have only a three or four day supply of food in their local grocers and their warehouses?

We have a moral crisis before we have an oil crisis or a financial crisis or an immigration crisis or any other sort of crisis.

We in the modern world have lost our way and have no coherent understanding of who we are as a concrete people, that is, as inhabitants of particular regions and specific communities. We have accepted a change in our lives, in the very locations where we spend out times. Rather than inhabiting homes and neighborhoods and communities of worship, we live in the marketplaces of the modern world.

Where are our moral leaders? Where are the town fathers, the priests and minsters and rabbis, the leaders of ethnic associations? Human societies are about to be reshaped and those who claim to be our leaders are nowhere to be found, though they’re ready to identify themselves when it comes to spending some of our money or claiming the seats of honor at banquets. Are they going to stand in the shadows as the wolves once more come down upon the scattered flocks? Are the shepherds counting the money they get from the wolves to better care for those sheep who will be next year’s meals? Are they perhaps themselves well-intentioned but weak, gathering in those shadows with the well-intentioned but weak members of their flocks?

Teaching Intelligent Design

Here’s a story about a new attempt to allow teaching of Intelligent Design and some other controversial hypotheses in public schools in Louisiana: New legal threat to school science in the US.

So far as I can tell, many of those trying to push Creationism or Intelligent Design into the schools are driven to do something irrational by legitimate fears for their children. From the 1960s on, many parents have seen that rapid societal and cultural changes had made it more difficult to raise children to be morally mature adults and to nurture some sort of faith in them. Many of those parents, and their friends at church and elsewhere, have felt their own beliefs under assault. Many scientists who don’t seem to be particularly harsh individuals, many other intellectuals of the sort which once appreciated at least in theory the problems of modern ‘alienation’, seem to have no sympathy for those who belong to particular cultures in a rapidly changing world, one where most changes work to increase activity of all sorts in the modern marketplaces and often by destroying that which is local and particular.

I advocate and will always advocate the idea that this world is part of God’s Creation and we honor our Creator by studying His world and trying to understand it in empirical terms. This includes what we we now call ‘science’ but also nearly all forms of organized knowledge gathering and analysis. But I sympathize with those who have good reason to fear some aspects of a world in which technical expertise is in far greater supply than wisdom, in which profits trump respect for the teachings of Grandpa and Grandma.

See Proving the Existence of Zeus for my position on Intelligent Design Theory.

See Debating Popular Intelligence Design for a good discussion of one of the major intellectual confusions behind those who accept the Creationist or Intelligent Design arguments.

What Do We Truly Value?

This, Child Rape and the Modern State, is an interesting commentary upon the Supreme Court decision that execution is not constitutional for cases of child rape. It notes that it is allowable to use execution for treason and other crimes against the state.

You can be for or against capital punishment, for or against frequent use of it, and still see some sort of a problem here. Apparently, we citizens, including children, exist for the sake of the state and her officials.

A Moral Animal Rather than a Selfish Animal?

I find this story, Virginity Pledges May Help Postpone Intercourse Among Youth to be somewhat interesting given the evidence that human beings don’t always change their current or their future behavior in response to horror stories of lung cancer told to smokers or lingering death by AIDS told to many American youth, even when relatively few are at high risk of ‘risky’ behavior. Apparently, some youth will be more likely to avoid premarital sex if they simply give their word to do so.

A creature that values its word more than the avoidance of future suffering may be different from the creature assumed in most of our teaching institutions, inside churches as well as inside the secular schools. Such a creature might even carry the possibilities of nobility, of willingness to sacrifice for future generations rather than maximizing their consumption of present pleasures. If only we were wise enough to nurture these better possibilities in our own selves and in our children.

Maybe We’re Worrying Too Late About the Moral Problems of College Students

I confess: I drank too often and too much in college. I went to college unprepared for the effort of serious learning and was shocked at the discovery. Lacking something in my moral character, I fell into evil ways. Yes, evil. And those were evil ways which can flourish in a society in which young men and young women are raised to be good, pliable targets for the exploiters of the marketplaces of the modern world. Once trained to long for the latest toy or the latest breakfast cereal, should we be surprised that they have little self-control when faced with the temptations of life on their own?

In a word, we don’t raise our children to be morally well-formed creatures possessing not only a knowledge of moral principles but also good habits. And then, having failed in our responsibilities, we send them off into the world, to college or into the corporate world. Even those who live near a good extended family might well play softball with guys who head right off to a bar after each game, not for a beer and some good debates about the pennant race but rather for six or seven beers and some increasingly irrational arguments.

You shouldn’t even have to think about saying, “No,” to a party you know is going to be a falling-down drunk-fest when you’re in college to learn, supposedly something of a moral adult and ready to be turned into a cultured and perhaps productive moral adult. Well, a frighteningly high percentage of college students drink heavily and always will when they’re not properly formed in their moral characters. See Not All University Students Will ‘Mature Out’ Of Heavy Drinking Habits for a study showing that some of them keep those heavy drinking habits when they leave college. Maybe we should be putting in the hours and efforts to develop moral character — habits first and then powers of reasoning — in our children? Maybe we should be more careful about the television shows and movies they see. Maybe we should be careful they admire their hardworking, if somewhat boring, grandparents instead of drug-using athletes or drunken singers.

One decidedly useful advice which can be derived from this study is: be especially careful how you raise your children if you’re an alcoholic or if you have three alcoholic siblings or maybe an alcoholic parent.

Math is Hard and Math is Lonely

The American public school system is oriented towards the socialization of students into a homogeneous body of mainstream Americans. Education beyond what’s necessary to read public newspapers is quite beside the point. This socialization, brainwashing if you will, takes place in private conversations involving only students as much as in the sheer deadness of mind imposed by drill-techniques and by the use of textbooks deliberately aimed to be in the comfort zone of the typical student. Any student who might actually learn something is going to mostly learn to hate learning, at least formal learning, in such an environment.

I can remember being lulled into a laziness — I expected to go to college and do well while continuing to not study and to sleep through classes. I can also remember being trained to be a television watcher by peer-pressure. It was difficult to participate in most conversations unless you followed pro sports, rock-and-roll, and the hit television shows. So I cut back on my reading and watched the Monkees. And I continued to sleep through classes that were little more than efforts to keep the attention of students not interested at all in reading or arithmetic and to help the students of some middling talent. I learned to drop my effort level and to coast in my intellectual efforts while enjoying the fruits of American mass culture.

So I learned to mimic the the more socially inclined students. I can remember that the movement from classroom to classroom in sixth grade was upsetting because my ability to concentrate was still strong enough that sometimes, in mostly seventh grade, the teacher had to yell at me to bring me out of my efforts to concentrate on something I had learned the night before in my free readings or maybe something I’d found interesting in a later section of a textbook, a section we wouldn’t reach in class. That truly was one the aspects of the socializing process of the American public school system. The teaching methods and the logistical problems of processing so many young cattle on the hoof leads to the destruction of concentration and intensity in any students who are unwilling to be at war with the system. This is where it helps to be gifted in the way of Einstein who was sure enough of himself that he was non-cooperative with the coercive German school system to the point of obnoxiousness.

I’ll put the problem bluntly: students who are paying attention to teacher or fellow-students aren’t necessarily learning. Math is not only hard, it’s also lonely for the most part. So is real history which require immense hours of simply reading good history books and even primary sources such as the autobiography of a great man — I remember reading sections of the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and enjoying it when I was young. Math, history, or any other meaningful field of study require long hours of practice at problem-solving or writing and maybe long hours of contemplation to be able to re-orient one’s thoughts in a proper disciplined direction.

Now, scientists have verified part of this problem for school systems that want pliable students attentive to their teacher and fellow-students rather than students capable of learning difficult material. It seems that serious thought, serious digestion of difficult material reaquires concentration of the sort that forces the student into a temporary non-social state — see Knowing Looks: Using Gaze Aversion To Tell When Children Are Learning. Truly talented students, the ones who might actually be able to find solutions for some of the difficult problems on our growing list of technological and cultural disasters might well go into strange, inward-looking states for hours at a time — if they were allowed to develop their minds and their souls.

I don’t wish to cast aspersions upon public-school teachers as a group because many of them are dedicated and hardworking souls who care about their students — though I think we should be more concerned to have at least some teachers who care a little about the subjects they teach. Imagine a dedicated, hardworking teacher in front of 35 students, some of them not having even basic habits of self-control and others (especially boys in younger grades) not having proper hand-control for writing legibly even if they can read, some not having much in the way of intellectual talent and others having too much energy to sit still long enough even if they come from good homes. Is it possible that teacher won’t notice that little Albert with the downcast eyes is daydreaming about deeper meanings and further possible uses of the very material being taught? Is it possible that this little Albert, unlike the more famous bad student, doesn’t have an engineer uncle to help develop his mind by teaching him Euclidean geometry at a young age? Is it possible that the schools will be damaging the talents of this little Albert as they force him on a schedule convenient for a bureaucracy processing human children as if raw materiel? Is it the schools, as much as television and the general rush-rush of modern life, which is destroying the concentration that would allow him to handle difficult and important problems?