The Price of Hemlock

I was watching The View this morning. Rebbie Jackson, Michael Jackson's sister was a guest. She talked about her new album and her work for bi-polar awareness, and of course she talked about her brother Michael. After The View went off, the local news at 11 came on. News of Charlie Sheen's hospital visit. I know that, even before hearing the details about what happened, somewhere in the story, the words "porn star" or "stripper" are sure to play a part in the drama. While I was watching, I wondered, why am I so interested in this man's life? Why do I care about about the Conrad Murray trial? If I think the man had anything to do with Michael Jackson's death, it doesn't matter. And my disgust with Charlie Sheen isn't going to do a damn thing to change his behavior. It's really a sad commentary about priorities. I know who these people are; I know about what drugs they take, who they're fooling around with, and occasionally, via a sex tape, their O-face. Not too lng ago, Time magazine issued its list of the "100 most influential people in the world". Alongside Brazillian president "Lula", Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and Barack Obama was Taylor Swift, Ashton Kutcher, and Lady Gaga. No doubt that Taylor Swift, Ashton Kutcher, and Lady Gaga are famous. And in their fields they may be influential, but are they truly among the 100 most influential people in the world? When we think influence, are we really talking about popularity or are we saying that these people affect life across the globe in an actual quantitative way? Or, if they are influential, could it be that their influence is heading us in the wrong direction? Socrates was condemned to death for urging people to question the established orthodoxy. The Socratic tradition, the pursuit of truth, is embodied in the ideals of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was the 17th and 18th century political, scientific, and philosophical movement wherein Europe emerged from the dark age of ignorance and superstition. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hume, Kant, Adam Smith, Rousseau, and early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, believed that rationality was the key to progress, and re-evaluated the sciences, education, economics, the laws of nature, ethics, and philosophy to fit their new view of humanity and its relationship to the natural world. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that the motto of the age should be "dare to know". When the Enlightenment hit U.S. shores, the concept of natural rights influenced the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. American statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson believed that a properly informed public will make rational decisions. Ok, what am I getting at? It's this: we make decisions based on the quality of the information that we get. This is especially important in the area of politics, since whoever is chosen to lead affects the lives of the nation. But it's difficult to get the right kind of information if my local news choses to cover Charlie Sheen's hernia than cover something important, like explaining exactly why our economy continues to collapse or informing the local voting public as to who their congressional representatives are and how to reach them. The sad thing is, is that this reality, if you will, isn't new. It's been like this for years. And this fact has led me to ask, have we reched the end of the Enlightenment? Sure, we've got the Internet, I'm using it right now, and the Internet can deliver information at the click of a mouse. But, having lots of information readily available does not necessarily mean that I can say that I have knowledge. And it's not just me... I live in a culture full of people for whom an abundance of information does not lead to knowledge. In fact, one could make the argument that our culture values knowledge less than we value trivial information. The stuff that I as hearing on The View and about Charlie Sheen on the news is information. More to the point, it's trivial. It's the type of information that Chris Hedges says is a part of our "junk culture". Junk culture, according to Chris Hedges, puts its emphasis on celebrity. It is shallow and unconcerned about questioning about life's meaning. Academia, Hedges says, is a target of junk culture as junk culture is an assault on academia. I think that Chris Hedges is right. I remember when Al Gore was running for the presidency against George W. Bush, a frequent criticism of Gore was that he carried himself like a smarty pants. Is being smart and knowing it a bad thing? Is showing other people that you're smart something to be held against you when you run for the presidency? I'm more than aware of the fact that there are people who are fans of Sarah Palin because she's not a high-falutin' Ivy leaguer like Barack Obama. Is this good? I'm certain that if we held Jefferson or Madison to the same standards that we hold now they would have never been elected to the presidency. But here's the thing: The Enlightenment might have undid itself. It just may very well be the case that Enlightenment thinking is much like Karl Mark said of capitalism. That is, the Enlightenment might have within it the seeds of its own destruction. Follow this closely: The Enlightenment emphacized reason. Through the use of one's mind, one can discover truth. Philosophy spawned, among other things, the field of psychology. Psychology asked not what we reason, but how we reason. Freud's psychoanalysis detailed certain fundamantal laws of human behavior, including the influence of subconscious drives on human behavior. The field of public relations (one of the founders of public relations was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud), using psychoanalysis, demonstrated how behavior can be manipulated by appealing to drives such as fear or sex. Public relations is closely associated with advertising, which is essential to a capitalist economy, which leads to a consumer culture, where product is associated with celebrity, which is by nature, shallow and decidedly un-academic. Altthough there is plenty to lament about the end of the Enlightenment, the end in itself may not be a bad thing. Let us not forget that some of the evils of history were also products of the Enightenment, namely the enslavement of Africans and the birth of eugenics. Let me explain how that works: 1) reason + science --> theory of evolution 2) evolution + reason (theory that some groups of people have better use of than others) --> social Darwinism 3) social Darwinism --> eugenics --> genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, etc. Perhaps what is going on is a paradigm shift, a time when the orthodoxy is challenged and ways of thinking is changed drastically. Maybe what is to come is not so much of a dark period than a dim one. We might be heading towards an era where we start to correct unhealthy thinking, to lose elements of our culture that are destructive or counterproductive. The end of the Enlightenment isn't necessarily an end to intellectualism, as Europe's Dark Ages was an age when the works of the ancient philosophers were unknown to all but a small group of people. We might be in the process of shrugging off our relentless fascination with the self and celebrity that has until now passed for deep examination of the self and knowledge. We're getting rid of the cult of the self that emerged when Enlightenment ideals were distorted. And who wouldn't like to turn on the news and not hear the name Snooki?

Sucks To Be You

"Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matt: 19:24)

"Don't give me that dogoody good bullshit" Pink Floyd, "Money".

Despite my Liberal inclinations and my Leftist fantacies, I am painfully aware of this one thing: THE UNITED STATES IS A CAPITALIST COUNTRY. No, really, I get it. It is. We love money here. And one of the great things about being here is the fact that there are opportunities to make money. Lots of money. Oprah money.

Although I took econ in high school, and I remember something about the objective in our culture is to "make money", I don't remember learning very much beyond that point, nor do I remember learning much about the creator of capitalism, the Scottish economist, Adam Smith.

Honestly, I didn't read Smith until I got to college -- in a philosophy class.

I also know that I am not the only American who has had this experience.

What I had learned in school is that being a capitalist means that, if I made a shitload of money and other people didn't, that the appropriate response to their misfortune is "sucks to be you!". I had plenty of teachers on this kind of capitalism, mind you. I learned from the media that "greed is good", and that if I made a whole lot of money that I could get on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous ( I guess it's getting on something like Real Housewives now). I learned that pursuing one's interests above all is not only the key to success, but the only truly American way to do it.

Funny how sometimes you learn that you didn't know what you thought you knew when you actually read something.

Like the American Founders, Smith was a product of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment emphasized science and reason, which was meant to counter the prevailing belief in stuff like superstition and the diving right of kings -- stuff that told people that wherever they found themselves was their lot in life, and that if you were born poor, you were consigned by God to be poor. The Enlightenment threw all those old ideas out and relpaced them with new ideas like, any one can be as rich as a king (and if you really know how to play the game, even richer). The idea was that man could improve on himself. He could be inventive and that by using the skills of an entrepreneur, he could make himself rich. This sounds ok so far. But here's the deal...

The Enlightenment stressed reason as it's primary motivator. That is, reason was vaulted as paramount among the virtues. So far so good. But, this thinking led to the idea that there are some people who just can't ( for some reason or another) reason like other people. And if this is so, there must be some sort of explanation. This of course led to the idea that some people were naturally inclined to think better, and since thinking was a virtue and virtues are a sign of excellence, people who were better thinkers were not only better thinkers, but better people. This notion got a big help from Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was, by way of the likes of folks like Herbert Spencer, turned from the natural world, to the social world. So, societies that were better thinkers were better societies. Those better societies were superior to other less-thinking societies. So, if you couldn't think, using Darwin's theory (as applied to people) you had inherited a set of bad genes. Not just you, mind you, but your entire culture had done so. And people who are stupid don't succeed, and if you don't succeed, you can't get rich. So, if you're poor, your biology made you poor. You're not "fit" as Spencer would say. This ethic was best expressed by Dicken's Ebeneezer Scrooge. When Scrooge is asked if he will give to charity, he says he is not in the business of making idle people merry and that the poor will have to do with what they have . When Scrooge is told that thre poor will die if they do not get help, he says (rather famously) that they had better get to it and "decrease the surplus population". Scrooge is merely repeating the capitalism-meets-Darwinism vibe of the latter half of the 19th century. He believes that not only are the poor to blame for their condition, but that they are taking up room and worse yet, sponging off of hard working capitalists like himself.

It's by no mistake that we are supposed to be outraged by Scrooge's comment. What he says isn't only cruel, it's not capitalist philosophy, either.

Although Smith wrote that self-interest is the prime motivator for acting in the market, he believed that men would automatically also benefit the whole. Men, Smith believed, had an intuitive sense to work toward the common good. In benefitting ourselves, we also benefit society as a whole. Smith writes that no society can flourish if a part of its people are poor and miserable. Smith writes that with the improvement of the "lower ranks" of society, the entire society is likewise improved. He says that we should not think of tis as troublesome but as an advantage. The pursuit of capital is not a free-for-all, nor should wealth be gained while the greater population suffers. Business, Smith observes, is not to go unregulated. Smith wrote that business should be conducted as if all transactions were conducted under the watch of an "impartial spectator". Smith wrote that the spectator is, in reality, the watchful eye of the individual over his own actions (this is tied to the oft mentioned idea of the "invisible hand". The supposedly invisible market forces that influence the behavior of capitalists and capitalism). However, Smith recognized that actual government regulation of markets is necessary to ensure that business is conducted in a manner that does not harm the greater society. Smith knew that, given the ability to collect large sums of personal wealth, greed can impede one's ability to regulate what one consumes. That is, Smith recognized the fact that rich people tend to be greedy and will consume more than their fair share of resources. We need regulation to " restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections...". Smith wrote that we need regulation to make" nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among its inhabitants". For Smith, unlike what we hear in the popular discourse, being a capitalist didn't mean that we should, or even that we have the right to allow others to fall by the wayside while others clearly make and consume more than they will ever need. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Smith was nearer to Socialism than he is to the "capitalism" that we practice here in the U.S. I don't think he'd be a fan of any sort of socialistic distribution of wealth scheme. What I think that Smith is saying is that when we value money over other people, we are bound to get into trouble. That trouble, unfortunately, tends to affect more than just the handfull of greedy people who may have thought that they can, or should get more than everyone else. You don't have to watch TV for long to see that unobstructed greed isn't just wrong in some sort of abstract, moral sense. It's wrong in that people die and nations are brought to the brink of collapse when we think of capitalism as a "take what you can when you can" (that's a line from The Secret Of NIHM) way of running markets. Adam Smith wanted us to have the opportunity to get rich, but he wanted us to be cautious about what we may put on the line in our pursuit as well.

I'll end here with another Smith quote,

"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices".

Gee, it's not like that's happened recently.

Yes, Mr. Rotten. I Get the Feeling I've Been Cheated

Thinking about all this health "reform" debate. There are people out there eho are saying that they want their "country back" (from whom, I ask), and that we have to get back to the Constitution, whatever that means. I listen to what some of these people are saying, and sometimes I feel that some of them have no idea what they are talking about. I'll be the first to admit here. I'm no scholar. I'm not an expert on the Constitution (although I've actually read it), nor am I in any position to dictate what and who can or cannot speak against or criticize the government. But, I do on occasion watch television, and I gotta say that there are some of us who really need to read before they speak. There's a sentiment out there (both here and abroad) that Americans (of which I am one) are stupid. All one needs to do to confirm this is to go to YouTube and look for "stupid Americans". When our global neighbors called former president Bush a "cowboy" they weren't being friendly. I don't think that most Americans are stupid. Misinformed, yes. Ignorant, definitely. Undereducated... my God yes! It may upset us to admit it, but there are people out there who are just plain apathetic. It's not that they're stupid people, it's just that they don't care. I don't think that I'm stupid. And I take offense to anyone who says that "Americans" (as a blanket term) are. What I know that I am, however, is I am undereducated. I don't think this was by accident, either. Call it a conspiracy theory, but I think that somewhere in my learning, someone decided that I had learned enough, and then proceded to stop teaching me and my generation. When I look back on my education, it started off well enough. Teachers stopped teaching. I know that it was this because I hadn't lost the want to learn (that didn't happen until high school). Sure, my teachers were nice people, but they didn't seem very motivated to do the thing that they had been hired to do (i.e. teach). By the time I got to high school, the want to learn anything had been bled out of me. No joke, during my US government class we watched The Price Is Right. This was the class where I was supposed to learn how to be a citizen, but instead I learned that the Navy guy always wins the final showcase. In fact, I don't remember reading anything beyond the Preamble of the Constitution during my entire stay in public education. Funny, because so far as I've been able to tell, the Constitution is the owner's manual for the country. The writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was an advocate of public education. In his Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, Jefferson wrote what he felt that the objectives of a primary education should be. Jefferson wrote, " To enable to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing... to improve by reading, his morals and faculties... to understand his duties to his neighbors and country... to know his rights". Jefferson felt that the purpose of an education was to teach people how to be citizens. "To form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend". I don't see how my teachers could have looked themselves in the mirror every morning knowing that they had in no way taught their charges how to operate such a complicated machine as the United States of America. Maybe it's because vampires don't have reflections (ha, ha). I know that, if a child fails to learn, that oftentimes that child is blamed for not learning. But I know for a fact that at least until I hit the tenth grade that I wanted to learn. I loved reading. I still do. I remember that, when I was in elementary school, I used to win all sorts of RIF (reading is fundamental) awards, and I did it because if you read so many books during the school year, you'd get to pick out a book (for free!). But to say that my teachers were the ones that were lazy would be too easy. It was something beyond that. It seems that the unwillingness to teach went beyond one or two lazy teachers -- it was systemic. Someone didn't (or doesn't) want us to learn. They say that stupid people are easy to control. That when a dictatorship takes over a country, they get rid of the intellectuals first because the intellectuals are the people who are most likely to question what the dictatorship is up to. But in a democracy, there's the idea that everyone is equal. That everybody has a fair shot at success, no matter from what class a person comes from. If we work hard and we use our noggins, we can succeed. This sounds great, but there's this little economic program that we adhere to called capitalism. And as we all know, one of the big ideas in capitalism is scarcity. If everyone gets everything, then nothing is scarce. When you have an economy driven by want, people gotta want what they ain't got. Which menas some people ain't gonna get. So we can say that we're a meritocracy and that all it takes is elbow grease and the right education to get ahead, but the problem is, is that somebody out there has to clean the toilets and wipe gramp's butt at the nursing home. There has a disincentive to achieve built in the system. There has to be something that lets some get ahead and holds others back. But the real kicker is that nobody can know this. So we tell kids either a) that they can succeed no matter who they are or where they come from, or 2) (and I think this one happens more often than not) nothing. We simply stop educating them. Of course, we keep telling kids the old song and dance. The one I heard goes like this: Our democratic ideal are rooted in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment stressed a break-away from the beliefs of the dark ages (in superstitions and scholaticism) to beliefs in science and progress and that man is ruled by reason. Through his rational mind, man can progress. This sentiment is most supremely expressed by Thomas Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence "All men are created equal". Blah, blah, blah. We know now that when Jeffersin wrote that he was only a fourth telling the truth. We know that as the man wrote one of the greatest documents conceived from a human mind, he was probably looking out of one of his many windows at Montecello, with a full view of the slaves that labored in his fields. Of course, we know that in addition to Jefferson, that the Founders included the likes of James Madison, the "father" of the Constitution, and Alexander Hamilton, who, the more I read about, the more I'm a fan of Aaron Burr. Madison and Hamilton, who co-wrote the Federalist Papers with John Jay, believed that government was better rested in the hands of those who were fit to rule (think Plato's philosopher-kings, here), rather than allowing the people to rule. Hamilton wrote," ...our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep". Hamilton continues,"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government..." This is what Hamilton, the dude on the $10 bill, thinks of us. Democracy didn't get rid of the idea of an elite that rules while we, the rabble, sit passive like sheep, it merely hid it from view, and gave it a veneer of "choice". My favorite founder, Alexander Hamilton wrote," Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?". Not to be outdone, James Madison believed that "the more capable" should rule government, and that government should be led by a "benevolent philosopher". If the Enlightenment was at all inspired by the writings of the ancient Greeks, then for every Jefferson who wrote that the people should be educated to rule, there was a Madison or Hamilton who believed that to rule meant that one had to naturally be fit to do so. This idea hasn't changed. When i use the word "rule", I'm not talking about anything more than the ability of an individual to rule himself. Self-rule, believe it or not, is rooted in our ability to think for ourselves. And in turn, our ability to think for ourselves is rooted in our education. Of course, no one wants to admit that they believe in social Darwinism or that they believe in neo-platonist ideas of who is and who are not naturally fit to rule -- especially if one is a politician. So as politicians worry about campaign contributions, whether or not someone will uncover their secrets (whatever they may be) or the diatribes of Glenn Beck, so-called intellectuals need no be so quiet. Echoing the sentiments of Plato and Hamilton, Walter Lippman wrote "the public must be put in its place" and "responsible men... [must] live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildering herd". People, according to Lippman, are "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders", who have no business getting in the way of those who run society, namely the elite. But things aren't so easily kept under control in the age of television and other multimedia. So how do you maintain an elite while people are able to figure out what you're doing? Simple. it is accomplished by the manufacturing of consent (Edward Bernays said that the engineering of consent is the "very essence of the democratic process"). You don't rule by the fist and the sword. You simply sway the public's interest from the important things, like paying attention to exactly who is running their country, to paying attention to the latest feud between Jon and Kate or what "Speidi" is up to lately. The Romans figured out that what the people really want is bread and circus. And that's exactly what we get. All the while, we hear that we live in a democracy and that we have the right to choose, and so long as we work hard and play by the rules, we'll get what we deserve. That's what we are made to believe. We're not educated with the idea in mind that we'll be better choosers in elections, we're educated so that we'll be better choosers of the next American Idol (I know, people pick on American Idol alot. So what? Do you think that Simon Cowell cares one damn that I hate his show?). When you live in a country where students at the University of Michigan riot because they stopped serving beer on campus (this actually happened), it's time to stop criticizing people like the French, who, when they riot, are actually rioting about something. The point is that it is exactly as President Obama said, when we are content with being uneducated, we not only shortchange ourselves, we undermine our country as well. If we are going to own this democracy, and if we intend to participate in it, it is our obligation to know how she works.To be the informed citizenry that Jefferson wrote about. To understand that, when Jefferson wrote "We the People", he meant all of us. We are not seperate from the government, but that the government is us. But then, none of what I'm saying hasn't been said before. But it certainly is worth repeating.