“Some Device For Simulating Action Is Indispensable:” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Some device for simulating action, when action is impossible, is indispensable in a sound and functioning democracy.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (50^th Anniversary Edition: Houghton Mifflin, New York 1979)

Pp 141

“Honest, Intelligent and Courageous Government Can Solve Many Problems:” F.D. Roosevelt Address

“Today there is emerging a real and forceful belief on the part of the great masses of the people that the honest, intelligent and courageous government can solve many problems which the average individual cannot face alone in a world where there are no longer one hundred and twenty acres of good free land for everybody.”

F.D. Roosevelt, addressing the Jackson Day Dinner in 1939.

Cited in Milton Metzer, Brother Can You Spare A Dime? The Great Depression 1929 / 1933 1991: Facts On File New York (1991). (Originally published in a different form by Knopf, 1969.) Pp 117

WHAT WOULDN’T YOU DO? Our Obligation to Prevent the Theft of Power

You wouldn’t throw yourself out in front of a car to keep yourself from getting hurt, would you?

Would you throw yourself out in front of a car to keep someone else from getting hurt? Your kids? My kids? Dick Cheney’s kids?

We, the Editors, wouldn’t throw ourselves in the path of an election. We are not Politicians, or Public Officials, or Your Representatives. Seeking public office seems tantamount to throwing ourselves in the path of certain pain and probable destruction. We wouldn’t do it to save ourselves. We have come to recognize a perpetual crossfire when we see one.

We don’t want to be in public office. But there is a yawning, immense gulf of things we wouldn’t do to get there.

It is pretty much the same gulf of unsavory or unconscionable things we wouldn’t want you, or anyone who might represent us, to have done to get there. Things ranging from the crassly hypocritical to the unquestionably dishonest to the outrageously illegal to the unspeakably evil.

We have all collectively and democratically established that there are things that shouldn’t be done to get into public office. Mostly they just simply shouldn’t be done. We are not going to do such things, and we don’t want you to do such things, and we don’t want you in office if you do such things. Actually, we hope to imprison you if you do. Kind of obliged to, really.

In fact, we generally believe that even a willingness to do such things ought to ineluctably exclude you from public office. Or at least exclude you from fair election to office by We, the intelligent and compassionate, People.

We reluctantly give rise to the question of WHY some folks do things that are at the very least dishonest to get into powerful positions in the public trust, in theoretically representative public institutions.

It is inescapable that, once they get there, greedy and abusive people will do great harm to you, me and other things living or not.

It goes without saying that they are seeking power in order to do things we wouldn’t want done, not in our public trust, not in our public institutions, and not in our names. They will range up through the criminal to the thuggish, and right on into the unconscionable. Hopefully, for a while, at least some of these things will be illegal- at least in more advanced, civilized and ethical places than the Executive Branch of the Government of the United States. We will set this aside for the moment.

“Falsification becomes an essential talent for the elected, and eagerness to be duped a characteristic for the citizen. This also suggests that only people with severely deformed characters will be able to rise to high office. The system can’t help but reward those whose primary talents are acting and punish those who are straightforward.”

John Ralston Saul: Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. New York, MacMillan; 1992. Pp. 496

Bad people do bad things to seize power. They will. They are doing them now. Look. This is the undoing at the core of theoretically representative government. Undemocratic people will do undemocratic things to get power. In power-seeking as well as in exercising power, they will always have the advantage over those who would uphold democratic principles and scruple at behaving anti-democratically. But we will set aside this for the moment too.

Peculiarly enough, people who wouldn’t imagine themselves doing such bad things themselves will willingly, eagerly and resolutely vote for people who do. This is a matter for future pondering. But we refer you to our essay entitled Extremism Is Safe and dated 05 September 2008, and set this too aside for the moment.

Here is the question we would now put before you. To excavate, articulate and bring into our public conversation.

What would you do to keep these people from plundering power?

These people differ from you and we. This is nothing less, and nothing more, than an undeniable ethical difference.

What will you do to keep them from stealing our community welfare?

We know that others –some certain particular others- will do harm in public office that you couldn’t yourself do. And we know that these are very great abuses that will do terrible damage, and that these others will, without hesitation or scruple, do these harms. They will do them in YOUR NAME.

Furthermore, they will do wrong just to get there- to get into these positions of power. To get YOUR VOTE. We are preparing an Essay with the working title What Would You Make Them Do. We anticipate posting it within a day or two.

What damage does this do to our democratic institutions, to our society, to how we govern and guide one another and ourselves? What irrecoverable harm does this anti-democratic hijacking of the electoral processes of democratic representation do to the very foundations of how we dwell together? But we will set this question too, aside for the moment.

Do we scruple at the same points- the same junctures in the path of ethical conduct- to PREVENT people from doing these harms?

These harms will occur if we do not act, publicly and ethically. What do we, as participants in a civil society, do to prevent harms we wouldn’t commit?

“Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.”

Sam Harris, The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. 2004: W.W. Norton, New York. pp 202

We think this is an important question, now. As members of the planetary community, our ethical “compasses” arrest our conduct. What ethical compass guides what we do to arrest –prevent- specific, predictable injuries done by the nefarious?

It is obvious that we individuals must make these judgments. We make the ethical choices, and we are finally doing the killing: throwing the switches and the triggers. Writing parking tickets, defaulting mortgages, endorsing the World Bank, or pinning little cloth stars on lapels for that matter. Obviously, all of we individuals in such a society are responsible and accountable for the killing. Obviously, all of us are killers. Especially, all of us who advocate for such policies. There is no dishonor in honesty. Real, participatory, representative government is not trivial. It is not enough to put a magnetic ribbon on your car. Take it off. You delude yourself. No-one is innocent.

We have restated the established, peremptory argument for why communities could, or should, sanction personal behaviors that jeopardize the community.  Questions such as whether you or I might kill to prevent another from killing. Or argue that a society could, or ought to, kill to prevent killing, or other more general arguments of this color and stripe. This is nothing more than the argument that to obstruct harm-doers, we- as individuals and as a society- are justified in exacting the same measure of harm as others would themselves do. The same, in principle, and in practice. The same, in moral equivalence. The same measure, for reason of deterrence as for reason of potential gain. The same, in a utilitarian calculus of greater good. The same, organ for organ, limb for limb, eye for eye.  We talk of deterrence and pre-emption. We are not only justified, but obliged, morally required, to match evil with sanction, with evil for evil, by this social calculus. This kind of argumentation has a proper place in our recent collective anguish about the terror of torture undertaken in our names in foreign places and domestic ones. This is not a new argument. In fact, this line of inquiry might be banal, but we are trying to give shape to this more specific, final question.

To what extent are you and I responsible for the wrongs, the inevitable killing, of power-seekers who do not yet act in our names?

Imagine the deeds of power-seekers who would appropriate and seize your power, and act in your name. Imagine that you are at this moment accountable for their deeds.

Imagine what you might do to prevent them. At this moment. Imagine that you are accountable for what you, at this moment, DO NOT DO to obstruct them.

Are we absolved in the exact measure of what we scrupled –refused- to do to appropriate power ourselves?

We are guilty- guilty to the full measure of the deeds that are done in our names, but in a further measure, to be added to it: That which we did not do. That which we refused to do, that which we scrupled to do, that which we lacked the courage to do, to keep evildoers from taking power.

This is the net marginal difference between what we did not do to take power ourselves, and what we did not do to keep evildoers from taking it.

This may be the calculus of what distinguishes true democracy and representative government from something else. This may the precise measure of the obligatory burden of representative participation. Again, no-one is innocent.

What wouldn’t you do?

What would you do to keep another from doing harm?

Harm to our common welfare- mine, and yours? That of your children? My children? African children?

What would you do to keep another from the specific act, at this moment, of seizing power, of appropriating your public institutions, of appropriating YOUR VOICE? How does this differ from what you would do- or would not do- to appropriate power yourself?

Would you throw yourself in front of a car to keep from getting hurt?

What will you do? Can we interest you in a yard sign?

PRESUMPTUOUS NOMINEE: “Presumption,” Intelligence and Policy

The press, and many other largely illiterate Americans, refer to a candidate who is not yet nominated, but presumably will be, as a Presumptive Nominee. This is one of those conventionally received usages of a term that is a commonplace. Maybe it sounds smart, but it is finally ignorant because it is unexamined. To my ear, the ordinarily intelligent sound stupid when they parrot this term.

What we think is meant is the candidate in question is the presumed nominee. Unless what is meant is the Presumptuous Nominee.

If what is meant is the Presumptuous Nominee, then we might excavate a little deeper and recover some further meaning.

It is possible that what underlies accusing Senator Obama of being presumptuous is that he sounds superior.

Does raising the question of whether he seems presumptuous allow us to ask ourselves whether he acts superior, or acts as though he feels superior, without actually acknowledging this? Without being intellectually and personally honest about what we are suggesting?

Goodness knows, True Americans don’t want their candidates or their representatives to sound superior or, god help us, to feel superior.

“…Bush did not have to work at sounding like a regular guy with a less than elite education; despite summers in Kennebunkport and stints at Ivy League institutions, the words “nuclear” and “government,’ which presidents must use with considerable frequency, will always roll trippingly off his tongue as “nucular” and guv’mint.” Bush’s presidential demeanor has been characterized by a sneering, aggressive provincialism, which he displays not just at home but abroad, for the edification of foreign leaders.”

Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason. Random House, New York: 2008. pp. 285

Electoral politics here has a long and august history of resentment and rejection of those who sound superior, or intellectual, or informed, or literate. We are thinking of Willie Lomax.

“During the last four decades America’ endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a news species of semi-conscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds with not only the nation’s heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics.”

Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason. Random House, New York: 2008. pp. xi-xii

Certainly, we understand those who fear the (unspoken) ridicule of those who are educated and erudite. Hell, they can’t talk without making you feel stupid.

Insecure, fearful and resentful Americans truly resent the hell out of people who sound superior. That might mean erudite, or educated, or literate.

Unfortunately it often extends to informed, or sound of mind, or sound in judgment, or honest.

What a pickle! Without even examining the cruel logic we have created, we have ensured that we will never even allow someone who might be perceived as sounding as though they might feel superior, or even be superior, or be better, or even be good, to become a Presumptive Nominee!

And since we are such a doggedly populist, inclusive and fair group, some among us never relent in their digging up the yet more uneducated, stupid and inferior against which we must weigh, and discard, our representatives.

Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George Wanker Bush have all been unable to speak in grammatically correct and complete sentences, even simple ones. McCain doesn’t either. And think about the literate and the articulate: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore.

This is a truly telling cultural divide. In Governor Palin, we have for the first time in my adulthood embraced a candidate who is determinedly and resolutely presented as being truly low-brow. We have met Joe Six-Pack and She is Us. We can hope for fireside chats about tips and tricks for home-reloading your own ammo. What caliber do you recommend? And she is the Governor of fucking Alaska, for god’s sake.

When the Right would like to trot out their disingenuous Populist disguise, they actually cannot, and won’t, speak correctly or in complete sentences. Think of it.

To appeal to this electoral demographic, one must be, or persuasively appear to be, stupid. The aggrandizement of this group, the continual pandering of Right extremists to the self-image and underlying sense of inferiority of this group, now perpetuates their righteousness and pride in self-identifying and perpetuating themselves as the Great Stupid. Nixon’s “silent” (inarticulate, angry, mumbling, white) majority. Fortunately, they have people who are at least literate, like Karl Rove, to help them sort out who’s who.

At least for this group, we have available a simple and precise mechanism (foul line) for ruling out candidates. The smart are excluded. Even the dishonest, clever smart among them are almost sure to exposed and “outed” for the smart that they are.

It is, after all, very difficult to appear to be smart, or even articulate, while espousing and defending positions and beliefs that are at best wrong, ridiculous, unsupportable or stupid, and at worst vilely and transparently hypocritical. It is pretty easy to spot the true believers- those who are hypocritical in a loud, clear voice of unquestioning conviction. No mumbling, so dissembling or prevarication, just… wrong. Simplicity! Clarity! Joy!

We are quick and automatic to dismiss anyone from qualification to speak for us, who can speak. We reject anyone who is functioning ordinarily, as “superior.” We revile the articulate as presumptuous. Or presumptive…?

Let’s examine the term superior for a minute though. Senator Obama will serve as an excellent example for our little analysis. Senator Obama is educated, charismatic, informed, knowledgeable and erudite. There is a lot of presumption here. We presume that we share a common basis for understanding what constitutes a good education in the canons of Western civilization. That charisma is, at least, a not-undesirable characteristic in a leader. That there is a community of knowledge about which we might agree. An accepted body about which it would be unreasonable (damn stupid) to disagree.

Schoolyard Diplomacy: Erudition is somehow competitive. Superior erudition is somehow a victory. Until you beat them up.

Then comes the presumption. That those among us who are educated, knowledgeable, charismatic, reasoned, persuasive, are somehow intentionally, deliberatively, ridiculing us and deriding us with their tone, their high-brow dance of mocking words.

Then we lose. When such things become games,  there are winners and losers, and the un-intellectual are the losers. Certainly, those who are suspicious of erudition and charisma are losers. By the very definition of the terms of the game, they lose.

So the problem is superiority. The smarter, more informed, more educated, more reasoning, more qualified and intelligent among us sound superior. There is the problem.

We will make a Judgment Here. In public discourse, leadership and government, policy-making and the determination of public policy, erudite is good. Charismatic is good. Literate, educated, informed and knowledgeable are certainly very good. A Presumptive Candidate with these features would be good. Better than one without. Superior even.

And we think, and you may agree, that within a certain realm of human endeavor- the public, thinking, reasoning, choosing, acting, consequential, intellectual one- these attributes and capacities are good. Better even. Superior. But that would be only among us intellectuals we bet.

Take a moment and consider the idea that maybe we ought to encourage, welcome and elect the intelligent among us. That we should directly ask ourselves if they are superior, in the characteristics that might matter to policy. And willfully, gratefully, elect them.

Or maybe it would be easier to just see if they are convincingly (if inarticulately) hypocritical about logically unsupportable and inarticulate “issues” like guns, abortions, gays, environmental degradation and violence abroad. And elect them.

Let’s ask ourselves if our prospective, presumptive representatives are superior, and have the courage, honesty and integrity to embrace, elect and fully support them.

Any Decent Individual is Free From Responsibility: Karl Polyani

“No society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function. It was an illusion to assume a society shaped by man’s will and wish alone. Yet this was the result of a market view of a society which equated economics with contractual relationships, and contractual relationships with freedom. The radical notion was fostered that there is nothing in human society that is not derived from the volition of individuals and could not, therefore, be removed again by their volition. Vision was limited by the market which “fragmented” life into the producers’ sector that ended when his product reached the market, and the sector of the consumer for whom all good sprang from the market. The one derived his income “freely” from the market, the other spent it “freely” there. Society as a whole remained invisible. The power of the state was of no account, since the less its power, the smoother the market mechanism would function. Neither voters, nor owners, neither producers, nor consumers could be held responsible for such brutal restrictions of freedom as were involved in the occurrence of unemployment and destitution. Any decent individual could imagine himself free from all responsibility for acts of compulsion on the part of the state which he, personally, rejected; or for economic suffering in society from which he, personally, had not benefited. He was “paying his way,” he was “in nobody’s debt,” and was entangled in the evil of power and economic value. His lack of responsibility for them seemed so evident that he denied their reality in the name of his freedom.”

Carl Polyani: The Great Transformation. 1944: Boston, Beacon Press.

This is useful when digested with the quote from Susan Griffin: A Chorus of Stones (1992: Doubleday, New York.) that appears here dated 01-02-07. Nobody is innocent.