Dear Conservative

Dear Conservative,

I'm a liberal, a progressive, some would even call me a socialist.  And I don't stay awake at night thinking of ways to take your freedom.

I don't stay awake planning a war on Christmas. Or Easter, either.

I don't stay awake thinking of ways to give your money to lazy people.

I don't stay awake plotting how to ruin families.

I don't stay awake thinking of how to drive the country into bankruptcy.

I don't stay awake scheming how to corrupt the morality of college students.

I don't stay awake plotting to be a traitor.

I don't stay awake thinking about how to kill babies. 

I don't stay awake planning to ban your religion.

I don't stay awake conspiring with terrorists and foreigners. 

We Have Met the Barbarians, and They Is Us

Our dominant cultural image of barbarians is of filthy, illiterate, bloodthirsty brutes: imagine a fur-clad, lice-infested savage ferociously raiding a village, axe in one hand and torch in the other, who then heartily celebrates with a flagon of ale and a giant roasted leg of some animal or another.  Barbarians are noted for their contempt for and domination of the weak, yet barbarians are also admired for their brawn and tenacity: think of Conan the Barbarian and other pop-culture images of warrior-heros who spurn the refinements and discourse of civilized culture and deal with problems through the sword and conquest.

Historically, the term "barbarian" came from the ancient Greeks, who heard the unfamiliar languages of other peoples as the nonsense syllables “bar, bar,” akin to our word “blah” (if we were to invent the term today we would call him Conan the Blahblahian!).  Of course, not all peoples who were foreign  to the Greeks were uncivilized or primitive.  Nor were the Vikings or Mongols or other groups upon whom Western cultural images of barbarians are based, who had developed sophisticated ways of dealing with their problems, and who were in many ways were more sophisticated than the medieval Europeans who judged them barbarous -- especially in the case of Arabs.  Indeed, Middle Age Europeans were themselves rude, filthy, illiterate, and belligerent brutes, and the Romans who had preceded them had been cruel and oppressive, and only differed from “barbarians” in that they had learned how to effectively organize large armies and large cities, and to engineer and build massive structures with marble and concrete.

Barbarism still exists today, despite all the advances of modernity and science; but the real barbarians are not to be found among the Earth's few remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, but among the most modern and technologically advanced societies.  Modern barbarians are barbarians with toys, possessors of all the sophisticated technological devices and organizational structures created by science and other forms of modern knowledge.  Advances in technology and technique have been harnessed not to create a paradise on Earth in which all human beings can flourish, but to serve primitive, impulsive drives, and to perpetuate them.

Preface to a Handbook For Democracy

I’ve had an idea kicking around my head for a needful project: a collection of political theory essays and entries that describes the multitude of ways that elites and oligarchs use power to undermine democracy.  The idea is to lay out threats to democracy in clear language to help people be more aware of them, and to suggest solutions to combat them.

The word democracy is an ancient Greek word, of course, and combines two terms: demos meaning “the common people” and -kratos meaning “to rule.”  Democracy thus means a government in which regular people wield power and rule over the upper classes, rather than be ruled, and usually tyrannized, by them.  A related idea from the later school of political thought known as classical republicanism (as in the Roman or Florentine republic, not the U.S. political party) is that public affairs are to be run for the good of all and not for the benefit of a single corrupt class.  This entails that the common people, who make up the most numerous class, must have the ability to protect themselves from the rich and powerful, and indeed should have predominant say in setting the direction of government policy (even if they do not always directly run the day-to-day affairs of the government).*  In the modern world popular control is supposed to be exercised through representation, in which political leaders are held accountable to the common people through free, fair, and competitive elections.  Elections are supposed to be a way for citizens to ensure that public institutions are run for the good of all, rather than for a narrow section of elites who already possess power, wealth, and/or privilege.  

The dynamics of power are such that the demos always has to work diligently against the corruption and undermining of democratic/republican government by elites.  The ability of regular people to hold elites to account, however, has been eroding for some time, in the United States and globally.  A reassertion of democratic control will be needed for the world to solve its many problems, and the Handbook For Democracy is meant to assist that. 

The idea is drawn from a genre of political theory texts written in antiquity and the Middle Ages called mirrors for princes.  Mirrors for princes were handbooks that offered advice to leaders (especially young princes under training at court) about how to rule justly and effectively.  From the fall of the Roman republic until the emergence of modern representative democracy, educated and experienced political thinkers were deprived of channels to directly contribute to politics, so they had to exert influence by acting as advisors to emperors and kings, and one way they did so was to pen mirrors for princes.  These books were usually intended to improve the moral character of leaders, and often did so by presenting mythological or historical examples of just and good rulers to follow, shining examples held up for the prince to compare himself to, a sort of looking-glass to induce princes to examine and improve their own behavior.  These handbooks were written by Cicero, Seneca, John of Salisbury, Christine de Pizan, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, and many others.  When it was Machiavelli's turn, however, he introduced a twist: in his book The Prince, rather than advising how a leader should be good, he advised how a leader in an insecure political position could effectively wield power to establish stability.  One could argue that another of his political works, The Discourses, was also a mirror, but this time not for princes but for the citizens of a republic, where he describes how they could effectively maintain their liberties and ward off tyranny.

The Handbook For Democracy is intended to be a mirror for the demos, a companion guidebook to help people govern themselves effectively in the face of the constant pressures of power in the modern world that tend to undermine popular government and aggrandize oligarchy, police states, military dictatorship, or totalitarian fascism.  Our demos needs to better understand how power is used against them -- not just direct political power, but economic power, the power of the media, and the power of cultural control.  There are a host of techniques that political and economic elites use to exert social control and to keep the demos in line.  The Handbook is intended to schematically describe many of these different ways in which power is used against the demos, and it will also give recommendations for how to defeat, deflect, defuse, or otherwise deal with those techniques.  

I’m going to periodically use my blog to write up some of the essays and entries that I’ll eventually compile for the book.  Here are some (but hardly all) of the control techniques I hope to deal with, from time-to-time, over the next couple years:

• Political
• Armed suppression of dissent, when deemed necessary by the elite
• War in foreign places as a domestic control device
• Divide-and-conquer the working class using racism, sexism, homophobia
• Control of policy-making through the lobbying process
• Privatization of public functions, reducing the range of policy under public control
• Limitation of political participation 
• Control over election processes 
• Small numbers of “mainstream” political parties to reduce the range of political debate to what is acceptable 
• Economic
• Concentration of wealth
• Inequality is itself a control device
• Controlling nearly all of society’s capital investment allocation
• Ability to hire and fire workers, and to control promotions and demotions, pay and benefit raises and cuts, working conditions, etc.
• Marginalization of worker unions
• Control of the lobbying process through money
• Maintenance of poverty levels as a method of keeping people passive.
• Consumerism combined with mass entertainment as the modern bread-and-circuses
• Ideological
• Predominant control over the mass media
• Increased private funding of education at the primary, secondary, and university levels
• False consciousness: convincing many in the demos to identify with the wealthy
• Mass spectacles, celebrity worship, and other entertainments as distraction from the political
• Stupefaction of media programming to reduce intelligence levels
• Centrism as enabling of elite control
• Radical individualism and social alienation to isolate members of the demos and prevent strong communities and a truly vibrant civil society

One question that has to be asked is, what is the proper role of the political theorist in this?  Is this really a book that promotes democracy if it’s written by someone who has a doctorate in political theory?  Shouldn’t it be written by the demos?  First, I think the role of the political theorist here is exactly the same as past writers in the “mirrors-for-” genre: an advisor who shares political education and experience with those who are supposed to be political decision-makers.  Since most of the members of the demos don’t have high levels of political knowledge, it’s perfectly permissible for those who do to offer advice for their consideration; and since that’s all that it is, advice, there’s nothing objectionable about it.  (Advising the demos in order to help them is perfectly fine; if it crossed over into the line of contemptuously judging them to be incapable of understanding would be elitist, and to trying to take direct control would be authoritarian.)  Indeed, if a political theorist believes in democracy, it is not only allowable, but, one could argue, morally obligatory for him or her to share it in democracy’s defense.  Second, yhe common people, collectively, have great expertise, but it is divided up between its members.  To draw on it the individual members must offer it up for public consideration, and that's that’s being done here.  (I am a part of the demos:  I am neither wealthy nor in a position of political, military, or bureaucratic power.)  That being said, I do think it would ultimately be useful to use the handbook as the core or beginning, of an online democracy wiki in which people can contribute; the problem would be preventing elite colonization of it once it is open to all.

* Many classical republican thinkers, including the American founders, focused not on restraining the tyranny of the elite few but on restraining the tyranny of a majority, to prevent elite classes from being crushed by what they viewed as mob rule.  I think that this has, mostly although not entirely, been a way for elites to perpetuate their class privilege, wrapped in the rhetoric of preserving the good of all.  This is a complicated topic that I cannot adequately address here.  It should suffice to say that, in our time, the major trends are against democracy, so it is the demos and so that is the class that needs to be bolstered. 

How Should One Live in an Unjust System?

While most of what I write focuses on topics of political and philosophical interest to me in an effort to help change how people think and thus, in the long run, change the world, the personal ethics of the writer, philosopher, and activist are a necessary topic to explore too.  If one finds oneself living in unjust times, how should one conduct oneself?  That question may seem like it has an easy response: "As best as one can."  But of course such a general answer is practically empty and needs to be fleshed out.

It’s not an easy task to live morally even in the best of circumstances, and certainly not when social and systemic pressures work strongly against a moral life.  Today's world is full of injustices, and for progressives most of the major trends are going in the wrong direction.  While over the last several decades we've made some very laudable, and real, progress on inclusion for minorities, women, and LGBT persons, on economic class and inequality, community, political transparency, democratic participation, and last but not least, the environment, we have gone backwards -- and the main trends all continue to go in the wrong direction.  As Chomsky wrote last week in an article, “Will Capitalism Destroy Civilization?,” advanced states, while nominally democratic, are mostly governed in the interests of finance and corporate capital, which is on a path of ecological and social destruction.  The powers-that-be use a plethora of sophisticated coercive, political, bureaucratic, economic, ideological, disciplinary, surveillance, media, and social techniques to maintain their privileged position, diminishing the material quality of life for all and making a moral life difficult to live.

Capitalism operates according to profit and is indifferent to justice, and that indifference routinely permits or produces grave injustices.  With its power to hire or fire, to grant or withhold investment, capital exerts economic control over individuals, communities, cities, and countries, ruining lives along the way.  With its control of accumulated wealth it buys enough political influence to steer public policy in its interests.  It establishes its norms and ways of thinking everywhere, privileging the commercial class over all other groups and peoples, leaving billions in poverty and billions more unfulfilled and struggling.  

As has often been noted, capitalism infiltrates and colonizes most areas of life.  Daily life is infused with buying and selling -- almost everything that you use, from your clothes and food to your electricity and water to your computer and communications, are all things that have been bought in a commercial transaction.  In advanced societies people engage in commercial transactions dozens or hundreds of times a day, and as john Dewey noted nearly a century ago the ways of thinking of the merchant become so ingrained into daily life that they seems nature and normal -- doing cost/benefit analyses on everything, seeking to maximize personal gain, career ambition through self-promotion, withholding the truth or outright lying to make a buck.  Capitalism extends its reach everywhere, such that it is almost impossible to escape -- and even if one could, that wouldn’t help to change the system.  One has to have a job; one has to use money; one may even have to invest in stock, and so exploit other people’s labor; one may even end up in a position that demands that you act unjustly against others or, if you refuse, deprives you of your entire income and possibly even everything you have.  

Thus it become a moral imperative to develop the ability to see the catch-22s and other traps that the system lays for people, in order to try and avoid or minimize them.  The Frankfurt school critical theorists asked how to overcome false consciousness under such conditions, with the hope that increased awareness itself will help change the system.  Critical theory does go far to ameliorate this problem, as do other discourses that critically interrogate discourses of power: feminism and the other identity liberation movements have helped teach us how to pierce the fog of conventional ideas that maintain systems of power, which has led to more egalitarian policy over the long run, even when resisted by those in privileged positions.  In the end this has led to greater inclusion into the existing economic and political structures of oligopoly capitalism, which is a good thing: more inclusion is obviously better than less.  But critical interrogation of the economic and class power structures and ideology is a tougher nut to crack than racial or sexual identities, for class is where real power and wealth lie.  A capitalist can accept letting women and minorities into the system, for he can then exploit them better both as workers and as consumers while giving up nothing material; but he can't let the working class have real political and economic control as the working class, for that would entail giving up every advantage that he has.

The question then isn't merely raising consciousness, but actually changing the economic structures,  Unfortunately that's going to take a while, so until we can achieve real change, it is important to find a way to be as moral as possible within them.  I recall that Michael Walzer lamented in Dissent some years ago by that he would not see democratic socialism in his time; we younger progressives are not likely to see it in ours either, and even securing rudimentary social democracy and averting environmental disaster sometimes seem like ambitious goals.  (I do think that we can potentially achieve great changes in a short time, and should continue to try to do so with all the vigor and confidence that can be mustered -- systemic changes can never be predicted, but it is wise to always be ready to promote them.)  Our current system seems likely to be around for a while; even if a systemic shift happened tomorrow, the process of building a new way of life would take years or even decades, and anyone forty or older (like me) would have, when the tally is made at the end of our lives, lived most of days in an unjust system. 

So how can one live a moral life within an unjust system, even as one works to change it? 

America's Political Filters: A Veto on Majority Rule

I have observed America’s political system for 25 years now waiting for some progressive legislation to help deal with our many social, economic, and environmental problems.  The last real liberal program was enacted in the 1960s with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  A few times since then watered-down laws have been passed, such as the Americans With Disabilities Act (of 1990!) or Obamacare; and sometimes a bit piece of reform manages to squeeze through after too long a delay, such as the revocation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  But on the whole, week after week, month after month, and year after year, nothing substantive happens to solve our main of inequality, alienation, and environmental destruction.

American laws are still technically passed by Congress, but legislation- and policy-making is in reality done during the lobby process, in which a horde of interest groups negotiate, maneuver, and horse-trade in order to make laws that benefit little factions rather than the good of the whole, or the good of common people.  These interest groups are legion, and while a few groups sometimes represent interests of some general benefit (such as, at times, the American Association of Retired Persons), the lobby process is dominated by corporate, military/security, and culturally regressive interest groups,because they are the ones who have the most money to effectively promote their interests.

The end result is that any proposal must pass through a series of interest-group “filters” in order to be made into a law or policy.  Indeed, these filters often define and delimit political discourse itself.  These filters are defined by the prominent lobbies and cliques in Washington with vested interests, who have the power to block, bog down, capture, or dilute legislation.  They thus have, in effect if not formally, a veto over proposed laws, albeit early in the policy-making process before legislation even reaches the floors of Congress for a vote.  Legislation also must pass muster of the centrist Washington establishment which imposes its own filters.

These filters include, but are not limited to: 

• Oil/Hydrocarbon energy -- the research funds and massive seed capital alternative energy needs to address climate change is blocked by the oil extraction industry and its corollaries, including the auto industry.
• Militarism -- the military-industrial complex has so much power that military solutions to problems become the preferable, and even default, choice. 
• Security/Intelligence -- After 9/11, considerations of privacy and human rights took a back seat to those of intelligence collection and security, such that in some corners of the government these concerns are scoffed at and seen as left-wing fringe, akin to drug legalization or environmentalism. Which says a lot.
• Centrism, "bipartisanship," anti-populism -- because the political pundit class of the Washington establishment lacks real expertise on matters of substance, it has but one lens by which it evaluates policy: is it somewhere in the middle? Is it based on middling compromise, no matter how asymmetrical the bargaining positions of the two sides, and no matter what policy is called for by facts, experience, and good judgment? 
• Preference for privatization of public goods -- every damn thing has to be done by some supposed “entrepreneur” or another, with the dogma that the private sector always delivers services better than government taken as a given, whether it’s true or not, or whether there are other considerations at play.  This leads to systematic venality and profiteering, as when war-fighting functions or the delivery of critical public good like healthcare or electronic voting are privatized. 
• Consumerism -- Before the first Gulf War in the oil-rich Middle East, George Bush Sr. said that “The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation,” and after 9/11 his son called upon American citizens, in response to the attack, to start shopping again as soon as possible to get the economy moving.  Green, communitarian, and other non-consumerist philosophies are filtered right out of political discourse by the need to keep the consumption machine chugging along. 

There are many other such filters, including the American work ethic with its atomized, rugged individualism and Social Darwinism;  American exceptionalism which must declare the USA to be the best country in the world in though it lags behind in so many areas, and the anti-intellectualism/anti-science prejudice that has so plagued American political culture since the founding Puritan days. 

America’s political filters are sometimes conceptual schemata set down by ideological powers, sometimes criteria set down by powerful vested economic interests, and sometimes both.  Policy and discourse must pass through the filters to be heard.  The filters prevent rational, systemic, deliberative policy-making in line with democratic majority preferences by making a precondition of passage the approval of all the relevant interest groups.  

The result?  When circumstances call for a needed reform, as today’s circumstances do, what usually happens is that symbolic measures are proposed or even passed that rhetorically address the issue, or appear to address it, but in fact do nothing to actually address it. 

Finally, it is critical to understand that the people do not vote for any of this.  Whatever policy platform the electorate thinks it is voting for or against is irrelevant to the effective veto power of the groups that can impose these filters: “majority rule,” which is supposed to define what democracy is, is effectively negated by the existence of the filters.  

Minimum Wage, Minimum Raise

According to a study by CEPR highlighted in Huffpo, if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity since the 1960s, it would be $21.72 an hour by now.  If you "only" go by inflation it should be $10.52; it currently stands at $7.25. The tipped minimum wage is $2.13 (although employers are supposed to make up the gap to meet $7.25). 

In the State of the Union speech on Wednesday, Obama proposed that the minimum wage be raised to $9.00 an hour. This proposal is typical Obama, and typically centrist: propose something too weak to begin with, so it can be negotiated down to almost nothing by the mule-headed Republican party. We'll be lucky to see an increase that breaks the $8.00 barrier.

Obama's strategy should go like this: "Since productivity indicates $21.72, that would be the just minimum wage, and therefore that's our baseline standard. My starting position will be a $30 minimum wage, because we know that Congress has a history of not raising it properly, so we must pad it now because working people can't expect another increase for years. That's only fair.  And we also have to make up for decades of lost minimum wage increases.  That's only fair too.  Alternatively, we start at $27 and tie the minimum wage to automatic increases based on productivity and inflation, so we don't have to rely on a procrastinating Congress to increase it." Once you’ve made a strong starting proposal, you then negotiate from there, and privately send out signals that your do-not-cross red line is $25. When Congress fails to act, you use that fantastic Obama campaign machine to mobilize lengthy workers' protests, you have a full PR blitz of speeches and commercials, you whip out the veto pen and use it as a weapon (Obama has only two vetoes, whereas Bush, Jr. had a dozen, Clinton 36, and Bush Sr. 44). You might even call Congress into emergency session until they pass a $25 minimum wage so working people can feed their families in tough economic times.  

That way, you have at least a chance of a real reform that will help people and make things a little fairer.  And a more directly confrontational approach will clarify conservative opposition to the public interest in people’s minds, too.

Demographic Change Is Not Enough

Much has been made since last year's election of demographic shifts in America and their effects on our politics.  Pollsters, pundits, and politicians have all pointed out that the racial, ethnic, and gender makeup of America is evolving.  Soon whites will be just one of a number of minority groups, bringing an end to the politics of fear and resentment on issues of race, sex, gender, and secularism, which has been used so successfully by conservatives to resist economic egalitarianism.  While angry white males and cultural conservatives still retain much political power, especially in Congress, and while they appear hell-bent on maintaining that power by disfiguring democracy through vote suppression and electoral college manipulation, the power of demographics in the long run is like the power of flowing water to wear away rock.  It thus appears that reactionary politics may have peaked, with the worst now past.  Progressives can be hopeful that the changing face of the country will lead to positive policy change in the long run. This is undeniably a good thing. 

Political change is often demographic, when growing aspirations and influence by marginalized demographic groups lead to demands for inclusion, as the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ movements have been demonstrating for the last 40 years. One kind of demographic change that is very important is generational change, when an influx of young people into politics generates new ideas, new energy, and new political will for reforms to ensure their future. Youth movements have been critical in creating political change since the second half of the 20th century at least, with the protests of the 1960s the most famous example.  History is full of other examples of political reform or revolution triggered by generational change, including America's own founding generation; today, youth movements are a key part of the Arab Spring, of protests in Eastern Europe, and of demands for change in China. 

I hope that the demographic shifts in America do ultimately lead to real political change, especially on climate change, for American political institutions have become so sclerotic that they seem thoroughly resistant to any other force for change.  They are not responsive to the will of the people: no matter what happens in our national, state, or local elections the same bad basic policies and processes continue unimpeded.  Polls for years have shown that while people have bought into the conservative media's dislike of the term "liberal," on most matters of substance they support liberal positions. Furthermore, they want good government, meaning that they want politicians to implement effective policies for the public good, and to do so in an effective and timely way; the fact that they are not getting this is the source of our political legitimation crisis. So this demographic trend is positive, for it seems that America cannot change any other way. 

But that itself is a problem.  Progressives should not get too comfortable with demographics alone.  Despite the positives of the current trends, change should not come this way only, for the fact that it does is undemocratic and slow.  There are several problems with reliance on demographic change: 1. It is contingent, a product of arbitrary historical forces.  What if the demographic trends were going in the opposite direction.  Would liberals be happy then?  2. It is not a result of democratic choice; change is coming about because of social forces, not deliberation.  3. While it is true that in political systems rapid or revolutionary change can easily go awry, our system has gone too far in the other direction: it is thoroughly unresponsive to any real change, especially democratic, electoral change.  Politcal change should come through elections that reflect the experience and deliberations of the public, and which result in really new and different policies, if the public so wills it.  4. Demographic and generational change is too slow: having to wait for a new generation to exert its influence allows injustices to persist. In the past mass numbers of African-Americans, women, LGBTQ persons, and other groups have endured oppression and exclusion for their entire lives while waiting for the political system to grant the rights and inclusion that they were due.  As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied.  Additionally, the glacial pace of political change in our system is far to slow for the environment to bear: we must act soon on climate change in order to avoid catastrophe.

In short, while demographic trends are going in a positive direction, the discussion of them in the media highlights the dysfunctional sclerosis on our system, and relying on generational change prolongs injustice and is likely to be too little, too late for the biosphere.  Instead, we should insist time and again that our political institutions be altered to make them more responsive and democratic until that sinks in to both the public at large and the elite.

Expect No Real Change Until We Build More Political Will

Two issues that have grabbed post-election headlines were gun control and filibuster reform.  The first got attention, of course, due to the tragedy of the shooting deaths of some twenty schoolchildren in Newton, CT -- only the latest in a long string of mass murders by guns in America.  The second was prompted by the growing realization that the Senate has become entirely unable to function, mainly because of the supermajority requirement of the filibuster.  Nonetheless, prospects for substantive reform in each area are dead or dying.  

In the Senate, despite calls to scrap or strictly limit the filibuster, the initial reform proposals were weak.  The strongest was the “talking filibuster,” which only aimed to restore the traditional practice of requiring the opposition to actually stand up and talk for hours or days to hinder the passage of legislation, rather than continue with the current practice that allows stoppage with the mere threat of a filibuster.  That reform would not have been good enough, as it would only take us back to the way things were in the mid-twentieth century when the filibuster was routinely used to delay civil rights laws to protect African Americans and other oppressed minorities.  Indeed, historically the filibuster has mainly not been used to stop unjust laws, but to perpetuate injustice for generation upon generation. That is the main reason it needs to go into the dustbin of history, and that fact also puts the lie to the common argument of some centrists and center-leftists: “When it comes down to brass tacks, even the left wants to preserve the filibuster, so they can block legislation they don’t like when they are in the minority.”  But in our political culture the filibuster has normally been biased asymmetrically against reforms from the left, and only rarely to block egregious laws from the right.  If you tallied up the pace of progress over the decades we would be far further along today if we had never had the filibuster, even if an occasional piece of right-wing lunacy would have gotten through (which without the filibuster could more easily be repealed anyway later).  Yet even the modest reforms proposed for the Senate at the beginning of this term went essentially nowhere.  All we’ll see is a few procedural adjustments that will not end the right’s ability to prevent needed legislation from moving forward.

Similarly, gun violence has been a huge problems costing the very lives of tens of thousands in America for decades now. Other countries long ago dealt with this horrific problem in the very sane, rational, and obvious way, by severely restricting access to firearms in their countries.  In Australia, the 1996 Port Arthur massacre of 35 people led to mandatory licensing, a 28-day waiting period, requirement of a genuine reason for firearm possession (such as pest control or hunting), and other restrictions.  Great Britain took a similar approach after the Dunblane massacre.  These countries found that safety is not a matter of putting more guns on the streets in the fantasy that criminals will fear victims, nor is it a matter of improving the level of civility and politeness in society or some other such tripe.  They found that it was a matter of gun control.  America needs to follow the sanity of their example and protect its citizens with a rational approach to gun control, but this has been prevented by the false ideas of a minority who identify their freedom, personal power, and often masculinity with the ownership of a weapon of death, and by their representatives in the gun lobby, primarily the National Rifle Association. 

Why More of the Economy Should Be Made Public

The current neoliberal consensus on economics holds that markets are the most natural and fairest basis for an economy and that private enterprise is the most efficient institutional structure for production. Therefore, any deviation from private ownership requires justification with very good reasons.  Thus the manufacturing of consumer goods, for example, should (“Naturally!”  “Of course!”) be done by privately-owned corporations, but it is acceptable for, say, the military to be public, because we can come up with good national defense and security reasons for doing so.  (Although even in the military as much as possible should be privatized, and so unfortunately the manufacture of weaponry and, increasingly, military functions themselves, are done through private enterprises).  Many forms of infrastructure -- roads, airports, schools -- are often thought to meet the bar for public provision too (but again, as much as possible should be privatized).  But not much else is accepted as “naturally” public. Even our the votes in our elections are counted by private companies. 

Thus the default position is that private ownership of society’s production apparatus is normal, and proposals to the contrary have to meet a very high burden of proof to be acceptable.

OK, for sake of argument, let’s accept that for the moment.  Even if we do, I still think there’s good reason for the following industries to be publicly owned, in whole or in part (I’m sure there are others sectors that would benefit from public ownership, or partial public ownership; this list is meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive):

The military: for security reasons as already noted, with no privatized functions at all; defense contractors should be nationalized too.

Courts, prisons, and police: justice is a public good. Period.

Elections and vote counting: democracy is a public good. Period. 

Banking and finance: given how important finance is, and how bad private ownership has been for the public at large -- remember the crash of 2008? -- all banks, stock brokerages, and other financial firms should be made into public entities, owned locally or nationally as appropriate, with rigorous supervision. 

Energy: Energy -- oil, gasoline, coal, nuclear, hydro, solar, bio, etc. --  provides the fuel and electricity that makes the whole economy run.  It is therefore inherently a matter of public concern.  This is magnified by the fact that private energy companies are a huge cause of our greatest looming threat, climate change, and have a stranglehold on our legislatures and are preventing change.  All hydrocarbon companies should be nationalized immediately, and other forms of energy be made into public utilities under strict pubic watch; and sustainable form of energy such as wind, solar power should receive huge public subsidies.

Education -- a country can’t remain a democracy without an informed citizenry, so schooling from kindergarten through PhD should be public. 

Transportation -- governments have always provided the necessary infrastructure to make transportation systems work, from roads and bridges and highways to railways and seaports and airports.  Partial or full public ownership of airlines, railways, subways, light rail, and bus systems helps to make the smooth and comfortable flow of people and products easier.   

Communication and Media -- the best media companies in the world are not the private ones like Fox but the public ones like the BBC.  As social networking advances, I think that we are also going to find that the public equivalents of iTunes, Facebook, and JSTOR will be needed to make information widely available to the people who will do the most with it. 

Now, when I say “public ownership” here I don’t mean “totalitarian state control of a command economy like the Soviet Union had.”  There are many forms of public and semi-public ownership, including utilities, independent public corporations (like the Federal Reserve in the United states or the BBC in Great Britain), local and municipally-owned enterprises (like local savings-and-loans), worker-owned cooperatives, and more.  So if your first thought is to scream the words “Pinko commie socialist” at me, take a step back, count to ten, and go ahead and open your mind up to new ideas.  I know you have a mind, because you’re reading this, and now is the time to use it: our world is in trouble, and the main source of that is the private ownership of the means of production, so let’s all work together to get creative here, OK?

In fact, rather than just providing better reasons for a larger public economic sphere, we should ask: why is it that only public ownership of society’s productive capacities should face such a high burden of proof?  Shouldn’t it be the case that, for any particular sector, we adopt the forms of economic organization that brings the most benefits to the public at large?  Shouldn’t we be open-minded, experimental, and empirical about specific forms of company organization, rather than simply and unreflectively default to one norm?  Shouldn’t we flexibly endorse the most beneficial, most productive, least polluting, least destructive forms of economic arrangements?  Maybe in some cases private enterprise is indeed best; maybe in some the public utility form of ownership is best; maybe is some cooperatives are best; maybe in some local community control is best; maybe in some nationalization is best (certainly for the military, and perhaps for many others too). 

So let’s reverse the question: rather than only requiring good reasons to warrant public ownership, maybe we should require private ownership to provide warrant with good reasons too.  Justify your existence, Mr. Capitalist: why, in every case, in every sector, in every industry, should society allow private ownership of the productive enterprises that create our goods and services, provide our jobs and incomes, and in fact shape so much of modern life?  Why should something so important be entrusted to people who otherwise have no accountability to the public at large?  Who have very little oversight by the communities, countries, and peoples who are most directly affected by how businesses produce and distribute their goods and services?  I mean, the economy belongs to all of us, why should we let you play in it?  

More concretely, what I’d like to see is an explicit statement of justification for the private ownership required of every company that exists: they should have to account, in numbers as well as with explanation, for how the fact that society entrusts them with the privilege of ownership is a benefit to the public at large.  And this should be done before public boards consisting of citizens, chosen by lottery to serve as the representatives of the public interest for a year or so (and paid for their time).  They would be like long-standing juries passing judgment on economic enterprises.  And these boards should have the power to review all applications, and to revoke privates incorporation charters and convert them into cooperatives or utilities or whatever other form they think best, when, from the public’s point of view, a company’s activities or organizational structure no longer accorded with the public good, in their judgment.  And that would be a good start to creating an economy that benefits everyone, and not just those at the top who run the show. 

Non-Reductionist Materialism III: Spiritualism as a Non-Sequitur

The non-reductive but still materialist point of view is that phenomena exist, and really exist, not merely as collections of parts and particles but also as mid- and large-level physical objects (in a context of relations with other mid- and large-level physical objects).  Accepting this perspective allows us to avoid one easy trap that people sometimes fall into: taking a rejection or critique of materialism as implying that spiritualist explanations must therefore be true.  I said last time, 

“There is a common association between reductionism and materialism, which is so ingrained that people sometimes think that materialism automatically implies reductionism.  This gives many people pause because they become uncomfortable with narrowly viewing very complex and important phenomena, such as cognition, emotion, beauty, and the like, in reductionist terms.  Many then revert to spiritual or supernatural language and philosophies to deal with these phenomena, and so the narrowness of reductionism repels many people from the materialism that its proponents would prefer people to adopt.” 

It can be easy to fall into thinking of the small and the large as a simple binary: if merely atomistic, i.e. “physical,” explanations of things do not give us a complete picture of the world, then necessarily some god or universal force guides and explains the larger whole.  How else could one explain holistic phenomena?  

But this pattern of thought is a non-sequitur, and rooted only in the easy dichotomy of its set-up.  It does not follow from a rejection of reductionism that non-material entities or forces exist or, if they do, that they affect our material world in any way, for holistic objects are fully real and material too.   

This pattern of thought seems to me to be common both among theologians who still hope to defend traditional religion -- sometimes with very complex arguments -- as well as acolytes of New Age “spiritual” forces, auras, crystals.  It also appears to be increasingly ubiquitous among common people at large, many of whom report that they are “spiritual but not religious,” and who believe in some vague entity or force that gives purpose and meaning to an otherwise empty cosmos.  Since this conceptual pattern is so common it is worth attending to. 

Non-Reductionist Materialism, Part II: Implications

Last week I discussed what I’m calling “Non-Reductionist Materialism,” a view which, as the name implies, sees the world as fully material and physical, but which does not privilege microscopic analysis in which the smallest parts of reality are taken as definitive of reality entire. Rather, all scales of reality are recognized with the same ontological status as real, from the smallest quantum fluctuations up through mid-level objects like people and societies and planets up though the cosmos as a whole. While analysis of the small certainly has its uses, so does analysis of the other levels, and the universe itself shows no recognition that the smallest parts are in fact the most important.  This week I want to flesh out some implications of this view.  

There is a common association between reductionism and materialism, which is so ingrained that people sometimes think that materialism automatically implies reductionism.  This gives many people pause because they become uncomfortable with narrowly viewing very complex and important phenomena, such as cognition, emotion, beauty, and the like, in reductionist terms.  Many then revert to spiritual or supernatural language and philosophies to deal with these phenomena, and so the narrowness of reductionism repels many people from the materialism that its proponents would prefer people to adopt. 

This is compounded by the fact that the basic metaphor for the reductionist method is mechanism, is which all natural phenomena are conceived of as consisting of interacting parts, as in a machine.  This mechanical metaphor – and it is only that, a metaphor – has in the modern period exploded to encompass and even envelop entire systems of thought, and is often taken to be an accurate, defining descriptor of the universe itself.  It too drives many away from materialism.  (Again, the point here is not that mechanism is wrong per se, only that while it is useful for some purposes, it is not for  all. Some phenomena can also be analyzed with other metaphors, such as organic ones.)

Furthermore, privileging reductionist-level analysis also has a tendency to go hand-in-hand with privileging quantification and measurement.  When a scientist or other analyst is at a high level examining a lower level, it is a good position from which to delineate and define the smaller parts, categorize them, and line them up for the purpose of counting them.  Privileging reductionism thus both narrows things to mechanics and privileges the usefulness of measurement.  

Reductionism, mechanism and “measurementism” turn some people off from materialism and science, since they find these methods of analysis inadequate and incomplete for many phenomena.  Many people, even reasonable people and the science-minded, don’t want to reduce art or emotions to measurable mechanics.  And they are right to detect the narrowness of such analysis and to resist it.  And they don’t have to accept it: non-reductionist materialism allows us to shift our point of view to approach these things rationally as mid-level objects that are just as real as their molecules and atoms, with their own mid-level properties and mid-level relations and interconnections with other mid- and large-level things.  For example, the emotions that lovers feel for each other are real qua feelings; they are not real only as electro-chemical reactions in their bodies and brains.  They are indeed that, and it can be useful to examine the neurochemistry of emotions, but emotions are also real as emotions experienced at a mid-level by mid-level organisms.  Those emotions cause really-existing entities of the universe (the lovers) to interact in certain ways, ways not comprehensible from a microscopic viewpoint.

Non-Reductionist Materialism, Part I: What Is It?

I would now like to discuss reductionism, which I think is one of our society’s conceptual blockages to moral and social progress.  Reductionism is a form of analysis based on taking things apart and examining the small pieces to determine their properties, in order to create a description of how larger things function in terms of their smaller components. It is also sometimes called the resolutive-compositive method: as when one disassembles an engine, resolving it down to its parts, and then re-assembles the engine into its composite form again, to see how the parts work both individually and together.

Reductionism is the predominant method of modern science, especially the physical sciences.  Although the sciences do at times make use of more holistic analyses, and have shown somewhat more willingness to do so since the 1960s, reductionist approaches are, I think, generally considered to be necessary for doing science.  This approach is a very valuable one for many purposes and has produced a great many benefits, and my aim is certainly not to attack science, or to claim that reductionism is methodologically wrong, but only to argue that it is a limited form of analysis that should only be understood as one of the analytical tools in our intellectual toolbox.  Reductionism, when taken to extremes, can lead to a sort of atomistic fundamentalism: the belief that not only is our universe made up of particles (meaning not just atomic and sub-atomic particles but whatever the smallest quantum fluctuations), but that these particles are fundamental, definitive of reality itself. The universe, of course, consists of particles, but they are only units of analysis for one level of observing reality; one can also rationally say that reality consists of larger objects too.  I would like to show that particles are not definitive of reality. More on levels of analysis in a moment.