Weebly Page 1.9, Part 3, Sections 11-15
11. REINCARNATION: A FEW RECURRING THOUGHTS
In this section we look a little closer at one of the oldest philosophic and religious ideas, reincarnation. In Greece’s philosophic tradition it goes back at least as far as Pythagoras, and from there into Plato as well; Socrates too may have accepted the idea. And of course in many other countries it's been a popular idea since native times. In fact reincarnation may be one of the world’s oldest spirit-ideas. Strictly speaking it’s not one of Dewey’s topics but he examined all dualistic philosophies and religions, and so some of his ideas might help people think a little more clearly about it. It's also been an important part of India’s conservative religious tradition, so why not take a look at it?
A Little Reincarnation History
While mankind continues seeing life more and more as a natural event, and less as spirit- caused, reincarnation still remains a very popular idea. It's practiced worldwide in both native and civilized cultures. It's found in west and southern Africa, central Australia, Indonesia, Oceania, North and South America, popular Buddhism, as well as Celtic, German, Greek, Jewish, Scandinavian, and Indian religions! It’s even popular in Hollywood as well. (Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, v.12)
As we’ve seen, in native cultures reincarnation celebrates the idea of soul-spirits somehow living on through many lifetimes, sometimes even in animal and human bodies, and sometimes even in natural events like fog and clouds. How did it evolve? No doubt, it too expresses the feeling of wanting to keep living – a natural result of propulsive habits. As we saw in Part 1, the more habits are practiced, the more propulsive they become; the common saying ‘force of habit’ reflects that feeling. If Dewey's right, then all habits are propulsive; all habits keep pushing us forward day in and day out, to keep satisfying our needs. Probably the most powerful habit is our eating habit, and why it’s so difficult to improve and re-shape. In short, those propulsive habit energies are what life feels like on the inside. Thus the feeling of wanting to live on after death was perfectly normal and natural, and so rituals like burial arts, and ideas like heaven and reincarnation helped satisfy the propulsive feelings of peoples’ habit-arts!
It no doubt had other causes too. As we’ve seen, almost certainly our native ancestors felt their dreams were very real events; if so, then eventually the idea of an inner spirit helped express such feelings. For example, reincarnation helped explain why children often look like deceased relatives -- their spirit had simply been born again. It also helped explain why so many natural patterns in the night sky, in clouds, and on earth sometimes resembled human forms, and also why animal actions sometimes resembled human actions; they too could all be explained with spirit-ideas like reincarnation. Then, in ancient times, the Greek religious Orphic-Dionysian tradition of Pythagoras openly celebrated the idea. One story tells how Pythagoras once stopped a man from beating a dog, saying it used to be a friend of his. And of course his great admirer Plato liked reincarnation too. For him knowing nature’s eternal and unchanging spirit-ideas would lessen the chances of being born again. What’s more, so much of nature too has cyclical and recurring rhythms to it, rather than evolutionary rhythms, and so it often felt much more natural to believe such spirit-controlled movements produced such events, like recurring yearly plant growth, as well as star and planet recurrences. In fact, early Christians had to convince many people their non-recurring idea of heaven was the truth.
Long before Plato's time such spirit-ideas helped paint pictures of human nature too. In the 500s BCE Greece's Orphic religion pictured peoples' pure and eternal spirit-psyche like a prisoner confined in a bodily cell; it helped explain why some people felt sad and depressed; it was their psyche wanting to be free. What's more, to many it felt good to believe their spirit was pure while their body was impure; spirits could live on while bodies died and decayed. At times Plato was a little more optimistic; he imagined his spirit-psyche was like a ship's captain steering him through life, perhaps even as his god-ancestor Poseidon wanted; he also may have believed when the gods fought, humans were forced to fight too. Even today one imaginative Western religious sect confidently says such returning cosmic spirits arrived on earth tens of millions of years ago. Needless to say those imaginative and creative ideas are easy to picture, but in this section we’ll also look at how the idea was often used to build fixed and unchanging social castes and classes, in which people were kept all their lives. Then, we’ll look at one of its most important ideas, Karma, and how it can be used even by us Deweyan liberals.
When All Else Fails, Be Practical
Almost all native peoples believed in spirits; for that idea we have much evidence from around the world. To our outdoor-living, woolly-mammoth-hunting-and-running- from native ancestors, reincarnation ideas often felt satisfying. Both in the heavens and on earth they felt nature's yearly recurrences much more than modern indoor-living people feel them today. So to help explain such recurrences many pictured them as controlled by thousands of different spirits; earlier the system was called animism. To use another metaphor, all of nature, including people, was often pictured as merely a theatre where spirit-powers caused movements. Rain falls because a rain-spirit causes it, and people get sick because unfriendly spirits cause disease. Similar ideas continued throughout the ancient and medieval periods as well. Stars, planets, sun, moon, winds, rain, snow, war, and even tigers taking bites out of people all became more understandable as they were connected to spirit-ideas. How many have felt an obnoxious in-law was once an animal?
Animistic spirit-ideas had many practical uses. For example, they helped our ancestors feel they knew how and why things changed, and as a result they felt less fearful, more connected, and more familiar with nature’s rhythmic movements. Why did warfare exist year after year after year? Well the planet Mars, named after the Roman god of war returned each year, and so helped justify war. It was more satisfying to 'know' why things happen than to know how life could become a more peaceful and satisfying place to live. And so reincarnation ideas created the satisfying hope for a better life after death; if people were good they could be re-born as a higher life-form or into a higher caste. It also helped lessen the fear of death itself, and that fear was very widespread in the native world. Thus, if modern native cultures are similar to earlier ones in that respect, then the belief in reincarnation is probably tens of thousands of years old and had many practical uses. No matter what happened in this life to good and kind people, the next one would be better if people acted well in this life. How many millions of people today feel more connected to natural events by believing friendly spirits can be controlled and perhaps coaxed back to live another life on earth?
Today, however, for millions of other people life is becoming much more naturalized and secular with scientific knowledge, and as a result more people are demanding some real evidence before believing in such ideas. For those kinds of people reincarnation has become merely another experimental human model of life and nature, rather than absolute truth. People today live mostly indoors, sheltered from nature’s cyclical recurrences, including butt-biting tigers, so the need to feel connected to the recurring stars and seasons has weakened. Today if we want to know about the universe we listen more to astronomers and astrophysicists, rather than gurus and astrologers. In short, habits of experimental testing have begun greatly reconstructing the human psyche. In ancient times, for example, many people believed the constellation Orion was a god who could bless their hunting expeditions, but today many might say Orion is a movie-making organization! New meanings for the same words are always growing as new inventions keep growing. How many cycles do people feel today besides a weekend cut-the-grass cycle, or a Wednesday/Saturday sex-cycle for men?
Today science has shown us Mars is merely another lifeless planet, not a war-god. Today war is justified with much more sophisticated propaganda, like they’re always evil and we’re always good! As a result millions now are focusing more and more on making life here and now more peaceful, pleasurable, and enjoyable. In short, people are becoming more psychically liberated from such superstitious ideas. Thanks to science and experimental learning more people than ever are focused on making life more stable and enjoyable for everyone, especially when it’s now known the closest livable planets might be 4 light-years away -- hardly within walking distance. Until we can send people off to explore such places it just might be a good idea to start taking a little better care of our own world, like with better re-cycling and population control habits. In short, today more and more people feel much more connected to their TVs, TV shows, and TV Dinners, rather than recurring starry constellations and changing seasons caused by recurring animistic sprits. In ancient Greece many thought a new growing season was caused by a goddess returning from the underworld.
Easing the fears and emotional pains of death was also another practical use for reincarnation ideas. As many people know today death can be emotionally painful, especially if we lose a loved one or a close friend; such a death can upset all of life’s routines. So acting as if a loved one’s spirit would eventually return to life no doubt felt good. Pleasure has been, is now, and will be a powerful force in life. What’s more, the native world is much like many of today's nightclubs and casinos -- they’re all ultimately mysterious places, especially to teenagers and those who think they can get rich in them. When mankind’s tools were quite simple they could only reveal life’s simpler relationships; thrust a stone-tipped spear into a hibernating bear and it could mean fresh kabobs for dinner. Scrape the animal’s hide with stone scrapers and it might help keep one’s butt frost-free during another Ice Age winter-spring-summer-fall. But for most everything else, including fire, nature remained the great unknown, and that, of course, included death itself. Ever today who can accurately predict the weather, much less what happens after death? Accurate and reliable knowledge has been our most important problem for at least the last 100,000 years, and remains so today. Do greedy bankers really create more jobs with their billions, or just keep making themselves wealthier? After talking arts evolved it became much easier to ask simple questions, like what the hell’s going on out there? To answer such questions spirit-ideas like reincarnation were useful; they helped people picture death was just another one of life's journeys.
Reincarnation ideas encouraged some other practical results, even at the native level of human culture. For one thing, at funerals they probably helped people bond emotionally to form a more caring tribal community, much like today at weddings and other public ceremonies. Even one Neandertal burial showed people gathered flowers from many different places to put into the grave. And the more they bonded, the easier it become to practice more excellent character arts like kindness, sympathy, and eventually righteousness amongst themselves -- in short friendly civilized ethical habits. After all, friendly spirits might help us get what we want if we’re kind to them and share our juicy and tasty mouse-kabobs, and there’s some evidence for that idea too! And, such feelings also may’ve helped people get over their grief and sadness and back into their natural daily routine rhythms.
Some Social Results of Reincarnation
In time however, towns grew into cities, warring produced more slaves, and business arts and trades produced more or less permanent economic and social classes. We’ve seen some of Plato’s and Aristotle’s very cold and unkind aristocratic feelings about those classes too, feelings no doubt common to many ancient aristocratic classes. Later on in Western civilization Christianity helped eliminate almost all ideas of reincarnation, but in places like India and Tibet they continued being used to control the lower classes and reduce the chances of their revolting against the status quo. However, such social and psychic results continued preventing the growth of more civilized democratic habits and systems for learning more about nature as well as making life better for everyone. In India, for example, certain Aryan probably invaded in the 2,000s BCE, after which a complex and rigid caste social system evolved. To help justify such castes to the native population, ideas like reincarnation and Karma were used. In place of animistic spirits grew the inevitable and eternal law of Karma. Not only social class structure but diseases like leprosy too were explained by saying it’s the result of some past-life sin, and so we really can’t do anything about it. As a result, medical science remained weak and unhealthful, as it did in the West with the idea of god’s will. What can anyone do? All such events are the result of Karmic law, or god’s will. The result was the same: a weak and unhealthful response to nature’s dangers. Only with more energetic and vibrant experimental habits did such dangers slowly become better understood, controlled, and less dangerous. In short, ideas of both reincarnation and god’s will helped keep life dangerous and socially divided for millions of people. Also, people like aristocratic Plato and Aristotle could easily feel they really were superior and holier than everyone else. Thus, in such systems not only science suffered, but the more civilized feelings of sympathy and helpfulness remained weak at best. To its credit Christianity adopted the liberal Greek idea of human equality, even if it was in god’s eyes only.
However, at the same time ancient Greeks added the philosophic arts and skills of logical reasoning and questioning to life. For conservatives like Plato, and similar people in India, their reasoning and questions were often aimed at preserving the status quo; after all, they were the ones who were benefiting most from it. Why feel as if life is something to keep improving and make better when everyone’s actions are caused by uncontrollable spirit-forces like Karma or god’s will? The spirit we're re-born with makes each of us what we are. Why even feel health can be improved with our own actions when it too is controlled by spirits or past-life Karmic sin? As a result, more intelligently liberal personal and socially democratic habit-arts existed on small scales if they existed at all. Those who resigned themselves to a Karmic-caused fate often did what they were told and rarely saw how life could be any better; how could they; they weren’t very educated and thus had nothing to compare their lives too? It takes some education to begin seeing how some ideas are being used to control how people act, and also to see more intelligent and liberals ways of acting. In short, questioning and examining such conservative spirit-ideas were left to liberals who continued talking and examining how reasonable such ideas were.
To better see what I’m talking about, we can imagine three people looking at a man with leprosy -- a Christian theist, a reincarnationist, and a liberal experimentalist like Dewey. Nowadays of course it's natural for all three to use modern medicines and scientific tools to cure such a disease; thankfully creative experimental testing has finally begun tapping into nature’s energies, and learning how to help all of us live better lives, rather than just a small wealthy upper class. But imagine those three people living, say, a thousand years ago, and then ask each this question: How can we best cure such a disease and restore the person’s health? The theist might say ultimately god's own cosmic plan determines every event; the best we can do is offer comfort to the person and pray for god's help and mercy; god-willing the disease will be healed. In short, the man’s painful and crippling disease was all preordained by some kind of spirit-caused Fate, or as Thomas Aquinas might say, it was merely a conditional necessity, -- in other words an unnecessary necessity! In any case, the best we can do is help ease the person’s suffering and ask god to miraculously heal him if it chooses. Such passive and accepting fatalistic actions were in fact a part of the Christian and Hindu lifestyle for many centuries, and thus encouraged the current social status quo. As we’ve seen, Christian leader Benedict discouraged medical research to learn how diseases could be cured; even Aristotle didn’t know as much about the human body as many high school students today. Such knowledge took a long time to evolve. After all, the more people learn about secular cures, the less they need depend on the Church and its healing rituals!
To the same question about leprosy’s cause a reincarnationist might say past life Karma has determined the leper's fate; in short, it’s his own fault! Even if leprosy could be cured other diseases would take its place; Karma is a universal law of nature! As we'll see in Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence, even many modern Hindus believed leprosy wasn’t a disease caused by anything physical, but was indeed a Karmic punishment for not paying one's debts either in this life or a previous one. In any case, however, the most obnoxious result for us Deweyan liberals was to keep ignoring the search for cures, and remain passive spectators or just relieve symptoms. The Bible tells us how such people were merely kept isolated from others. As a result, however, medical science itself stayed weak, as did democratic ideas. Philosophers call such ideas ‘fatalism,’ and it’s remained a part of both conservative philosophy and religion for centuries, although today scientific power is helping make such feeling less reasonable.
So, then there’re the liberal naturalistic humanists. They, no doubt, would say some physical and natural cause is responsible for all terrible diseases, even leprosy, and so our best way to help those people is to first get off our butts, start testing different ideas here and now to start learning its physical causes, and then, if we’re lucky, find a cure to better control it. It may take a while, but then nature doesn’t often reveal its secrets easily.
Obviously I’ve over-simplified the example, but it may also help us see one reason why modern science gradually evolved in Western Europe. There, just like in ancient Greece, naturalistic thinking was preceded by a great deal of active and persistent social and artistic experimentation with nature itself. Examples are the great worldwide sea explorations in the 1500s, religious experimentation during the Protestant Reformation, and of course artistic experimentation during the Renaissance, often financed by wealthy bankers who realized wealth is best used to make life more interesting, beautiful, and satisfying for everyone. All such events began helping many more people gradually ignore the very old and widely accepted idea of spirit-caused events, either by god, demons, or Karmic-controlled fate.
No doubt, many others factors played their part in the growth of modern science, like the growth of new mathematical systems for describing how nature moves, and new inventions like the microscope and telescope. Still, where spirit-ideas continued to be taught to children they tended to depress and weaken peoples’ active, exploring, and experimental habits. Like ancient Greece, for a few decades early Islamists too was bold and more secular-minded; they became the true heirs of liberal Greek science and philosophy. Eventually, however, its schools too became controlled by conservatives who wanted to control as many people as possible, rather than teach them liberal ideas of independent thinking, reasoning, and experimental testing.
Philosophic Problems Too
There are, however, some serious philosophic questions about such ideas. For one thing, reincarnation habit-arts promote dualistic models of life and nature, even though no objective evidence has ever been verified for spirit-objects like an immortal soul. Like Plato, Karmic ideas too artificially divide nature into 2 completely different realms, where spirit-souls are controlled by spirit-mechanisms like Karma. As we’ve seen already, all such ideas produce some serious philosophic problems, caused by simply defining spirits or Karmic Law as supernatural events. Merely assuming there’s an entire realm of non-physical spirit-souls and Karmic Law creates some rather baffling questions. For example, there’s the interaction question: How can two completely different realms possible relate to each other in any way? How can any spirit-mechanism know anything about sins in the natural world? That was perhaps Plato’s and Christianity’s most challenging question.
Also, if the soul and body are completely different objects, then in what sense is there in saying a non-physical spirit-soul is located IN a physical body? How can any reincarnated spirit-soul be at all 'located' when it has absolutely nothing to locate? It has no length, width, height, mass, or any physical quality. As I mentioned earlier, even Buddhism’s founder Siddhartha Gautama apparently felt such problems and often refused to even talk about spirit ideas; to him they may've been just more of life’s many delusions -- merely more false ideas. If so, then he was probably closer to agnostic Protagoras and experimentalist Dewey than any other religious teacher. After all Buddhism is a godless and therefore atheistic religion, relying on scientific knowledge to form its models of life and nature!
Thus, reincarnation too has an unsolvable mind-body problem, the same mind-body problem conservatives in the West like Rene Descartes (d. 1650) faced. It’s simply this: If non-physical mind-spirits exist, then how can two completely different objects -- mind-spirits AND bodies -- ever interact? And if they can’t, then how can spirit-souls possibly affect peoples’ physical bodies in any way, either to move them, steer them, cause disease, or even tempt people to commit sinful actions? In other words, how can any spirit possibly make anyone commit a sin, or even communicate a temptation? Spirits and people are two completely different objects, existing is 2 completely separate and totally different realms. And yet some people accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages were forced to admit they had sex with evil spirits. No doubt, the threat of severe torture if they didn’t confess helped convince many to admit such things; the use of force in India also maintained caste separation. Thus another interesting question comes to mind: Were ancient liberal Sophists right; did might make right in all situations?
Western Solutions
How did some early modern conservative philosophers answer such mind-boggling mind-body questions? To those like Spinoza (d.1677) and Leibnitz (d.1716) the best solution was to simply admit spirit-objects DON’T interact with our natural world at all! Spinoza seems to have built a pantheistic model of life and nature; he simply equated god with nature itself! Thus, there’s no interaction problem because god and nature are the same! It was much like Hegel (d. 1831) said over a 100 years later; for him the old Christian god was dead and a new evolving god took its place.
Conservative part-time philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz was even more imaginative. He created a model of life and nature called Parallelism. For him the spirit and natural realms are completely separate, but god has created them to run exactly parallel to each other! An idea we think of now is also happening in a spirit-realm. In his model nature spirit-souls don’t interact with natural bodies at all; for him god created a system wherein spirits and bodies run exactly parallel to each other! What feels like our ideas is really ideas in a spirit-realm!
Dewey eventually asked a rather obvious question to challenge all such ideas. If, for example, spirit-minds are really eternally superior to natural events, then wouldn’t we always be seeing all the truth about life and nature all the time? Also, wouldn’t everyone see the same truth all the time? Clearly none of those results has ever happened, except maybe in a few mystics who claim to know ultimate reality, or in those for whom god is best felt during orgasm. Frankly, I think there’s something to be said for that last idea.
As we’ve seen, in a dualistic model of life and nature, miracles remain a problem. In what way? Well, if spirit-souls exist in a parallel universe, and the 2 realms are completely separate, then how can any spirit-caused miracles possibly happen? If spirits and bodies run parallel and don’t ever interact, like Leibniz said, then how can miracles happen? How can even a spirit-god itself change anything in the physical world and yet still remain a spirit? Centuries earlier such problems with Plato’s dualistic model of life and nature no doubt helped Aristotle quickly abandon that model soon after Plato died. The model itself was just unnecessarily complicating philosophic thinking, and religious organizations weren’t powerful enough to control him or his work.
However, the situation was quite different in the 1600s. To publicly say anything challenging any part of the religious status quo could cost people their lives. In fact, one of Spinoza’s inspirations was an Italian free-thinker named Giordano Bruno, and in 1600 he was burned to death in Rome. Even in the 1600s philosophic creativity was still just too dangerous for people like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. The Inquisition was still too powerful a social censor, and so Descartes even burned some of his books. In more liberated England, however, more liberal thinkers like John Locke (d. 1704) were freer to talk about more naturalistic ideas like science.
Yet another result of a dualistic model of life and nature seemed most serious of all. Like any dualistic model, reincarnation seems to have its own inbuilt logical contradiction. To see and feel it we can conduct a little Socratic-like thought-experiment. During cool Athenian evenings sweet Socrates liked to test others’ ethical ideas for their contradictory results, and like him we too can look at another one of reincarnation’s RESULTS to see, perhaps, its biggest problem.
Let’s first assume reincarnation's true. Eternally timeless spirit-souls exist in another dimension, and somehow our good physical actions automatically create something called good Karma in a spirit realm. Also, hateful and mean actions automatically create bad Karma. However, it seems even with just those basic ideas reincarnation itself becomes a useless idea. Why is that? Well, if those assumptions are true, then a person's good and bad acts AUTOMATICALLY produce good and bad Karma, whether one believes in reincarnation or not! In short, if spirit-souls exist and are automatically affected only by physical actions, then all beliefs in reincarnation are completely useless for the soul's enlightenment! Like the ancient Zoroastrians said, only good actions are best for the soul's betterment, not what one merely believes! Thus, kind and helpful ethical actions produce good Karma whether we believe it or not! Thus, if reincarnation is true, and only our good actions automatically create good Karma, then there's no need to believe in reincarnation! If true, then Karma will happen anyway -- it's an automatic mechanism! And obviously if it's not true, if there's no such Karmic mechanism, then there's still no reason to believe in reincarnation! So whether reincarnation exists or not, there's no logical reason to believe in it! That is perhaps its most serious problem. Can you see why? Well, if what’s just been said is accurate and true, then all such models of life and nature automatically reduce themselves to a Deweyan naturalism! For us Deweyan liberals, actions and their healthy and helpful RESULTS are ethically excellent, not beliefs and ideas. Kind, constructive, respectful, and healthful social ACTIONS are ethically excellent, not just believing ideas like reincarnation or some person was really god.
Thanks to many different modern events, like centuries of more active experimentation, science today has helped make many of life’s problems much more controllable and manageable. Athens’ Parthenon has become one way Pericles was immortalized. Still, science doesn’t automatically make a better world. In fact, it’s helped create some serious problems too, like trying to eliminate all those nuclear weapons built by people who want the neurotic power to quickly kill millions of people. What’s more, today many theists and reincarnationists are regularly educated to use science’s more powerful knowledge to help others. Just recycling our own human wastes more intelligently has helped many others avoid many kinds of sicknesses and diseases. No doubt, once dangerous conservative philosophies and religions have now become more civilized with more liberal habit-arts, but as current economic facts keep telling, improvement for everyone is far from everyone’s goal. Many people are still working to reconstruct many old religious and social ideas.
In many parts of the world even today people still live in filth and squalor while obediently accepting ritual magical cures rather than scientific ones; many simply can’t afford to pay for them. And millions of schools around the world are still far from teaching the liberal democratic habits Dewey felt were best. Also, when homes and churches keep encouraging young folks to accept and obey such ideas, then it’s even more difficult to benefit from our strongest knowledge -- experimental science! For the most part, conservatives want people obeying the traditional ideas and habits they were taught; social pressure from them continues making such habits propulsive. So, young folks still are taught to have faith in the ‘old’ magical ways of miracles and obey their religious leaders. Two obnoxious social results, however, are racial and sexual inequality; some people still believe god made one racial and sexual group superior to all others. In any case, however, the dangerous social results – the bad social karma -- from such habit-arts make the spread of democratic equal rights more difficult. The more that happens, the more people will continue dividing people into unnecessary social classes with different social rights. To keep needlessly dividing people like that merely continues making life not what is could be, namely more peaceful, satisfying, and enjoyable.
As we’ve seen before, for Dewey weak personal habit-arts of passivity and acceptance were two of the worst results from all spirit-matter models of life and nature, including reincarnation models. The real shame is that they weren’t just common to religious ideas. During Dewey's life-time, in fact, passive and accepting social habits helped allow 2 world wars and other ones; that’s how dangerous social passivity and meek acceptance can be. Often, such habits, either secular or religious, can produce disastrous social results – bad social karma. In Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Korea, the Middle East, Africa, and in the US too, excessive obedience learned in our public schools has helped cause needless and violent death to many millions of innocent and helpless people. The vicious and brutal Inquisition is merely one example of bad social karma often helped by overly conservative public schools.
The stronger peoples’ habits of passive obedience are, and the weaker their habits of intelligent thinking, kindness, respect, and equal rights are, the easier it is to feel only my model of life and nature is right and everyone else is wrong. Around the world today government, military, and corporate orders are to be obeyed and not questioned, no matter who gets hurt, killed, or injured. After all, why question any social ‘superiors’ who can fire, expel, or imprison anyone who disobeys? In short, such intolerance remains a serious social problem. The German race is a master race and Jews are polluting it; Communism is The Ultimate and Final Political Truth and capitalism is trying to destroy it; submit, obey, and be saved; have faith all Africans, gays, and lesbians are sinners and should never have equal rights -- those are some examples of irrational social myths allowed to grow within peoples' habits of passive obedience. The sad part for us Deweyan liberals is such habits begin forming in conservative schools where obedience to the teacher and their book assignments is demanded day after day after day for years! As long as such habits continue being taught, and they are being around the world, then the more difficult it becomes to build more intelligent democratic habits and peaceful societies – more good social karma. The more young folks are encouraged at home, school, and in church to keep quiet and do whatever they’re told, then the more ignorant and violent actions – bad social karma – will continue threatening social peace and security.
From Dewey’s liberal point of view, such results have been one of mankind’s greatest educational tragedies. Many people like the feeling of having power over as many people as possible; it helps them feel they and their ideas are really true and worthwhile, when in reality they’re merely tools of control and power. However, with Dewey’s liberal model of ideas as merely mental tools, all such ideas of obedience can more easily be challenged for their harmful social results – their bad karma. For years spreading such ideas has been a goal of mine too; there are certainly more colors for painting pictures of good karma than conservative spirit-colors, just as there are many colors for artistic painting itself. Some people like Impressionist paintings and some like more abstract art, but in either case people have the right to choose what feels best; it’s part of the new growing democratic freedom. Across that psychic threshold marks the birth of every modern person.
No doubt, more and more liberal people in our modern world keep encouraging young folks to build more active, experimental, testing, and intelligent habits. Is there a better way to solve any problem? They’re our best tools to keep artfully re-constructing our old world to better serve newer modern needs. What're important for us Deweyan liberals are their useful results – their good karma. Again, that’s the great modern psychic revolution separating medieval from modern thinking. The more our schools, homes, and churches teach such liberal arts, the more widespread modern psyches become. The more children use their knowledge to actively keep improving their own health and their neighborhoods here and now, and the more their schools become miniature democratic cities in themselves, then the more intelligent and modern adult life will become, rather than continue being dominated by a small class of wealthy conservatives like Plato who want the status quo to continue on forever. In short, they want what is unnatural; nature is a place of eternal change and evolution, not conservative sameness. Many wealthy conservatives want the present economic and educational systems never to change. All of us are what we practice. Democratic people bless and welcome nature’s peaceful varieties and the restricting of power; undemocratic and authoritarian conservatives try to stop their growth and keep increasing their power.
A Few More Thoughts About Karma
Luckily, there are now working in life 2 rather different definitions of karma. First of all there’s the one with a capital 'K' Karma; it’s the one conservatives like to say exists in a spirit-realm of nature, and determines what kind of life a person will have. We’ve already seen some results of accepting that idea. However, there’s a more liberal secular definition of karma with a small ‘k’ growing more popular today. It’s the one helping hold people responsible for their actions, both helpful and greedy. So, a choice is possible. E. Washburn Hopkins makes that point.
"The ordinary (conservative) view of Karma is that it is a natural law operating throughout the universe whereby every act has its effect in the next birth; it has been called a blind mechanical law of cause and effect. It is a ‘power not ourselves which makes for righteousness’.
The tendency of Karma is (said) to improve the world and (eventually) bring its spiritual elements to perfection… … one drawback (however) to the ethical effect of the Karma doctrine is that it lessens man’s compassionate interest in his fellows. Practically, the thought that a cripple or any unfortunate human being is … (paying for) some crime or fault in a previous existence tends to a feeling of indifference. Karma is apt to become a form of fatalism…"
Of course, for those more conservative people out there, Karma will be seen as determining everyone’s fate even before they're born. As a result all feelings of free choice and self-determination are just illusions. Similar ideas have already been mentioned in the earlier leprosy example. But then, however, he also mentions a much more liberal and secular definition of Karma: "What is to be will be, says the lazy coward. Reject this wisdom of the incompetent. Your fate is in your own power (with the help of kind and helpful actions). A brave (person) makes (their) own fate (with their own good karma)." (268, 269; as always, additions are my own)
Obviously defining karma like that quickly results in a naturalistic ethical model of life and nature quite similar to Dewey’s! What best endures is the good done for others! So how do YOU define karma? If you believe in promoting personal responsibility for one’s actions, equal rights, and democracy then you'd probably define karma the second way; it pictures everyone as free to determine their own enjoyable fate IN THIS LIFE with their kind and helpful actions. If so, then it’s easy to feel all of life is a series of experimental choices aimed at producing good or bad karma. Disrespectful and illegal actions produce bad karma, and thus make one vulnerable to being treated the same way. However, respectful and helpful actions produce good karma, and thus help make life more satisfying and enjoyable.
It’s another interesting philosophic choice people have. Either there is a Karmic spirit-mechanism operating within everyone’s life, or there isn’t. If there is, then peoples' fate -- their social class, characters, and choice of careers -- is indeed not controlled by them. In fact it’s fixed by their soul’s previous bad Karma. However, if only karma exists, if people are treated the same way they treat others, then karma becomes a way of helping people become kinder and more helpful. And it also helps people feel like they really do have some power to guide and control their own lives with their own actions. In short, karma helps make people more responsible for their actions, thus helping them think about what they do BEFORE they actually do it! It helps people think more about the results of their actions. For us Deweyan liberals the choice is easy. Because we have no objective evidence for spirit-Karma one way or the other, we naturally choose the second secular definition of karma, the one helping keep people responsible for their actions. The popular phrase is what goes around comes around, if not sooner, then later.
Small ‘k’ karma makes it easier for people to become more responsible for their actions, both kind and mean. Karma can thus be very educationally useful even for us Deweyan liberals. As we’ve seen many times already, Dewey firmly believed it's socially and ethically excellent to hold people responsible for their actions, disrespectful as well as respectful ones, and the sooner that happens, the easier it becomes to teach someone more intelligent ethical habits. He would no doubt agree with the secular idea of karma. And I, too, know from having been born to, and raised by, a rather depressive mother, secular-karma exists. When she was growing up she was treated miserably by her parents and older brother, and so she felt she should give to her children what was given to her; what goes around can come around.
In short, many parents feel they should treat their children the same way they were treated. As a result, even today in much of our 'civilized' world, it often looks like a ward of walking-wounded; what came around to the parents went around to the children, no matter what the habits were! Hence the saying -- everyone has their weaknesses; what's usually left unsaid is such weaknesses come from parents who were taught the same weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits! For us Deweyan liberals, however, such situations merely define one’s problems; the object of Behavioral therapy, however, is to keep improving and strengthening such habits with more intelligently enjoyable actions here and now! It’s the main difference between Freudian and Behavioral models of health. Freud believed merely knowing why we act as we do automatically liberates us from our unhealthful actions; Behaviorists like Dewey, however, believed health involves building a more healthful habit. It’s one thing to know why we have, say, a weak habit of independent thinking and acting, but it’s another thing altogether to actually build a more independent thinking and acting habit! For that only active, enjoyable, and intelligent experimentation is best.
Seeing even famous people struggling with the same kinds of ethical challenges as they have may be encouraging. But when all such habits are seen as a naturalistic kind of karma, then the road to a more intelligent kind of excellence depends on our kind and helpful experimental actions here and now; they’re one key to helping improve our own weak, excessive, and unhealthy habit-arts. The more we help others, the more others will probably help us. In any case, however, whether we got them from our parents or our own actions, the idea of karma still helps us become more responsible for our own actions. How else can we build a more excellent kind of karma -- a more intelligent set of character habits -- unless we make the effort to start practicing more excellent actions producing good karma here and now?
Of course that secular kind of karma is still growing in our modern world; most everyone is still just emerging from conservative kinds of spirit-habits into a world where the neurotic quest for more and more money is often pictured as excellence. As a result, however, such people often don’t build a good sense of how karma works, or how our own joyful, playful, and intelligent actions here and now can often come back to us. Many people thus feel their own habit-arts are already excellent, even if their results are socially obnoxious and unkind. Such feelings helped encourage people like Hitler, Stalin, some US leaders, and even common criminals to keep disrespecting people and endangering their own lives. Because they weren't held responsible for learning liberal kinds of excellence, and produce more civilized kinds of results, they became socially dangerous to millions. Sadly, US history in the 1900s offers many such examples of bad karma, many of which they were not held responsible for.
No doubt, it could be much worse; just imagine what life would be like if no one were held responsible for their actions – if there were no karma. Imagine what social chaos there’d be if everyone were suddenly free to do anything they wanted without any bad results happening to them. No doubt, civilization itself would soon become more gang warfare than it is already! The history of Western civilization alone pictures brutal acts by the thousands caused by arrogant tyrants and dictators who weren’t held responsible for their mean and vicious actions! Might made them right, and that was the end of it. Today the sectarian violence and killing of innocent people in Iraq is another example of what can happen when people aren’t held responsible for their actions producing bad karmic terror. Even many US presidents weren’t held responsible for helping kill tens of thousands of Native Americans during much of the 1800s! Such excessively harmful results tell us a system of social karma is still growing, rather than in place, and as a species we’re just emerging from such feudalistic social systems.
In far too many places today people continue doing what they think will increase their own personal, political, or economic power, rather than produce good karma with kinder and more helpful actions. Not holding people responsible to their actions is still a kind of unhealthful social weakness the world over, pointing out, once again, the real need for more liberal kinds of schools where children practice respect for themselves, others, and just laws. US conservatives, for example, are notoriously against any kind of international police or court system; they want to continue being as free as possible to keep building the US economic empire no matter who suffers or is injured. In fact, they’re been building such an empire since the country was founded in 1776! No doubt, they are also against all forms of karmic justice too. In the 1800s the entire US ethic was summed up in 2 words – Manifest Destiny. God had destined the white race to rule the world. A finer example of arrogant conservative propaganda would be difficult to find.
Some kinds of ethical karma can even be seen as an improvement on the so-called Golden Rule -- treat others the way you want to be treated. No doubt, the Golden Rule helps others feel how important other people are, but in many parts of the world power is the goal, not ethical goodness. But, there’s the question about how we want to be treated. If someone wants to act like a miser and hoard money, then how can the Golden Rule reduce such behavior? On the other hand, however, the more young folks are encouraged to produce constructively kind and helpful karma, at home, in schools, and churches, then the easier it becomes to practice such ideas. And of course, the more that happens, the easier it becomes to actually keep civilizing life itself.
In short, without Dewey’s more positive kinds of karmic results, looters will be merely looted, and liars lied to. Earlier we saw an example of such a world with Harold Lloyd's film Why Worry? No doubt, it’s important to hold people responsible for the results of their karmic actions, but even that generalized idea still leaves the problem of knowing when and how to produce kind and helpful karma, and, again, that can only be learned with intelligent experimental testing.
In any case, however, the secular model of karma seems useful to us Deweyan liberals, but only when it tied to teaching more positive, constructive, and helpful kinds of actions in our schools, homes, and churches! Such training best builds civilized character habits. With that idea of karma I'm sure Dewey would agree completely! So, whenever and wherever the idea of karma encourages not only holding people responsible for their actions, but also actively teaching them more positive and helpful kinds of habits, then we Deweyan liberals certainly celebrate the idea! And for those who refuse to learn them, well no doubt the local doctor, jailer, and undertaker are certainly ready for another customer. For us liberals such thoughts are worth recurring, and speaking of recurring, here’s another in a series of rashly righteous recurring limericks.
A man on his way to heaven sent
For his wife who whispered while bent,
If there is a next life
There might be more strife!
I hope not he sighed, for I owe back rent!
12. MODERN ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, 101
In this and the following 4 sections we leave the world of religious habits and enter the modern world of economic, political, and educational habits. As we’ll see, our modern world is still a place where much brutality and violence still exists, but again, the more we know about it, the easier it becomes to improve it. This section, then, will be a short introduction to those important modern subjects. I’ll first describe an article written by my favorite public bank supporter, Ellen Brown. A recent article of hers was posted at her Web of Debt website on April 6, 2015, and entitled How America Became An Oligarchy. After that I’ll offer a few of my own comments. Then, in the following 4 sections more examples will be offered to show why some new habits need to be built to better meet the many new economic, political, and educational challenges growing in the last 4 centuries.
How America Became An Oligarchy
Oligarchy, by the way, is an ancient Greek word, meaning rule by the wealthy. In fact, both conservative Plato and moderate Aristotle thought it was a degenerate and corrupt form of government, as did many liberal democratic Sophists, Atomists, Cynics, Skeptics, and of course modern liberal democrats like Dewey as well. In short, virtually the entire ancient political spectrum of thinkers rejected rule by the wealthy, and yet today, thanks in large part to a still psychically disconnected voting citizenry, such a political system is very much in place in the world’s oldest and wealthiest democratic-republic, the United States of America. That it is in fact so will be argued in the following 4 sections; with them readers will be challenged to once again judge for themselves.
I quote from Ms. Brown’s article. (additions are all my own)
“…a new study (by) Princeton … researchers Martin Gilans and Benjamin Page concluded … rich … individuals … now steer the direction of the country, -- regardless of … the will of the … voters. …
Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?
…the doctrine that ‘all men are created equal’ – that all people have ‘certain inalienable rights,’ including ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’—is an American original. … those rights … have the right to vote at their core. …
The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States’ by … Dr. John Cobb. … he points to the rise of private banking, which … (took) the power to create money from governments (beginning in England after 1688).
‘The influence of money (he says) was greatly enhanced by … private banking. The banks are able to create money … (by) lend(ing) amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. This control of money-creation … has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs. In the US, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions … directly attributed to Washington’
Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to … (1688) when the privately owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became (an indebted) servant to the (Bank of England).
In American, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George 3 forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.
… the (new) system … (was) called ‘fractional reserve’ banking … (meaning) only a fraction of the gold … (lent out) was actually held in their vaults. (Their paper money was) lent at interest, (thus) putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who (printed the money) with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.
President Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasure notes called ‘Greenbacks’ that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.
… between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. … (With the help) of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback Party, Greenback Labor Parties, The Labor Reform Party, the Anti-monopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They (said keep) expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.
The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money. According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard … politics after the turn of the century (saw) a struggle between 2 competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. (Political power) sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these 2 big-money players.
In (her) book All the President’s Bankers … Nomi Prins names 6 banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated (US) politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, … they have to compete with 2 entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks. …
In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting (voting rights) to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed (in the 1800s), big money controlled elections by other means:
‘First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden. Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote, or of the issues to be dealt with. Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media. There media, in turn, (became and remain) controlled by moneyed interests.’
Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, (voter districts drawn by politicians themselves called) gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.
The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was ‘globalization,’ – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:
‘(T)oday’s global economy … (operates beyond national borders). The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their (power to limit profits) . … Thus, transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.’
The (latest) most glaring example today is the secret 12-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. … If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environment, labor, health and other protections.”
Improving Our Oligarchic System
So, how is this oligarchic system to be improved for everyone's benefit? Ms. Brown offers the following solutions. “The federal government should take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as … Lincoln did. … it could issue some very large denomination coins … as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank (the Federal Reserve system) and … fund infrastructure (projects), education, job creation, and social services (like retirement and healthcare).”
So, by now it should be a little clearer. Building competitive public banks has become one of the most important challenges to all those liberal folks who care about peace, and making life more satisfying, enjoyable, and productive for all law-abiding citizens! Put simply, the problem has become concentrated, monopolistic bank power! Not only are they a challenge for those living today, but for all future generations as well! Such power can and does control what students pay for college, and even what teachers are teaching in those colleges. Conservative professors often get appointed and funded by wealthy conservatives.
I would also like to make a few more comments of my own, to perhaps paint a little more accurate picture of US economic and political history, before expanding on them in the next few sections.
First all, I think an oligarchic political system was, in fact, built into the US Constitution by its framers. Many of them were the wealthiest people on the continent. In short, in practice the US government has always been an oligarchic system! I’ve redd Charles Beard’s important book helping prove that point; it’s entitled An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States; after it was published in the early 1900s conservative US history professors around the country erupted in a wave of criticism. With its help, however, I think a very good case could be made for believing the US political system was a democracy only for the wealthy colonists living at the time! After all, the Constitution was written by and for colonial America’s wealthiest class, with no popular mandate at all! Here is not the place to make that case in detail, but I will offer one more interesting piece of evidence from the conservative first US Supreme Court Chief Justice himself, John Jay. He openly said “The people who own the country ought to run the country.” And it’s basically remained that way ever since, mainly for 2 reasons. Voting rights have been kept restricted from the beginning; African slaves were counted as merely 3/5ths of a person, and of course women and property-less men were forbidden to vote too. And the habits our public schools have been teaching young folks have kept ignoring the arts of intelligent political experimentation. Today, less than half of those eligible to vote do so even in presidential elections, and much less than that in minor elections.
Secondly, the inalienable rights of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ were far from an original idea of Thomas Jefferson. In fact, as we’ve seen many times before, such political ideas go back at least as far as the liberal democratic Atomist Democritus himself! For him merely being born a human automatically entitled everyone to the same rights as anyone else of the species. And, no doubt, many other ancient liberals defended that idea too. What’s more, Jefferson himself was almost certainly an Epicurean, and we know Epicurus was a dedicated follower of Democritus himself!
Third, I think it’s a little too pessimistic and negative to say US democracy has been ‘captured by big money.’ The more I practiced my writing skills, the more sensitive I’ve become to choosing verbs carefully. To say something has been captured gives the impression all its freedom has been taken away and will remain that way. Feelings like that often promote political hopelessness to grow, and that’s certainly one feeling we liberal democrats do not want to encourage. What’s more, history too shows it’s not the case. Both our Progressive Movement in the early 1900s, and FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s shows us organized voters have great political power; many of their democratic improvement continue living to this day! So, I think a much better word would be ‘hobbled.’ US democratic rights and freedoms have been hobbled from the beginning! The word suggests the people can really help make some political improvements if they become better, educated, organized, and elect people who also have the same goals.
Fourth, we should remember only a small minority of colonists rebelled. Many colonists, perhaps most, remained British loyalists, including Ben Franklin’s own son, and so had little desire to get killed fighting them. In fact, the revolution itself was fought with what’s now called guerilla tactics, mainly because there were so few American fighters. They would often hide in the woods, attack British troops who continued marching in formation on the roads, and then scurry away to attack again someplace else. Almost 200 years later Vietnamese soldiers used the same tactics to defeat the world’s most destructive military machine ever assembled, the US military. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and of course many US generals believe tiny and poor Vietnam’s spirit of independence could be broken with their bombs and threats of nuclear war. In a more civilized world such men might have been arrested, tried for war crimes against humanity, convicted, and jailed. Such a world remains a goal of every liberal democrat on earth.
And finally, for Ms. Brown’s solutions to be experimented with at the national level, we should remember that too will depend ultimately on voters electing people who want to experiment with such ideas! Almost certainly it will not happen any other way! And if that’s true, then equally important are the challenges for building more liberal-minded public schools! In short, liberal kinds of political education should be included in any process of liberal improvement! The more students go to schools where intelligent habits of political experimentation are not taught, the longer it will take for our profit-obsessed system to become something more focused on making everyone’s life more enjoyable, rather than stressful, frustrating, and feudalistic. Liberal Dewey saw the importance of our public schools in that process in the 1890s when he began experimenting with such a school at the University of Chicago. We’ll see more of his educational ideas in a later section.
13. ECONOMIC CHALLENGES, 101
In this section we take a brief glance at some modern political developments. After all, it's been a topic of high interest for philosophers since ancient times, and in Part 4 political events will be described in much greater detail. Then after it is a section on education; only after we know the kind of political system we want can be best build an educational model to produce it.
I thought about calling this section politics marries the money, but then thought it would sound too accurate and high schoolish. In any case the marriage between the aristocracy and the government goes back to ancient times. In this section, however, we focus mainly on some modern results of that marriage, mainly those based on Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic ideas, upon which conservative capitalism rests today.
In the 1800s many new economic and political movements were growing laissez-faire democracy, capitalism, socialism, moderate utilitarianism, liberal progressivism, as well as Hegelian, Marxist, and anarchist pictures. Most of them offered solutions to the many less-than-excellent results the Industrial Revolution was helping create in the Western world, like limited democracy, poverty, joblessness, recessions and depressions, and of course limiting the corrupting influence of political money. But despite such political and economic diversity, for Dewey the most important feature of political excellence was its democratic and humanitarian actions, like universal voting rights and helping the poor and uneducated. Such actions have continued anchoring the liberal democratic tradition in its on-going battle with greedy and militaristic capitalists; just like any tool, capitalism too can be used intelligently or selfishly.
Although today the political choices have been confined generally to conservative and liberal democratic pictures, and although many Republicans and Democrats share some common values, there is a fundamental difference in political philosophy, especially about how the government should be used. In the 1900s liberal politics has become more socialistic than rugged individualistic conservatism, and we today still struggle over which is better. Thus today people are still challenged at each election to keep voting for which picture they think is best, and of course judging each by its results. Only in that experimental way can politics, like science, become more intelligent. In any case, however, to an ever-growing number of people around the world today, Dewey's liberal democratic picture still feels best.
Are You Booked Yet?
In Dewey's Individualism, Old and New (I, O & N), Liberalism and Social Action (L & S A), and Freedom and Culture (F & C), Dewey goes into some detail about modern social and political evolution, and how today's world is calling for a more intelligent form of individualism, based on experimental learning rather than military or economic force. I've been reading Liberalism... again and I'm still learning more from it. So we'll begin with some more info about why laissez-faire economics evolved, its basic psychological assumption, a few of its so-called natural laws, some of its harsh social results, and also begin looking at some different economic pictures.
Why bother? That’s easy. In a democracy public tax money pays to keep it running, and so all taxpayers have a right to say how much people should pay, and also how those monies should be spent! If not, if people don't accept that modern political challenge, then almost certainly upper class folks will continue using the system to protect and keep increasing its own wealth while largely ignoring the public good. Even during Washington's first administration his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton recommended to congress a number of ideas to help business grow, like establishing a National Bank -- called today the Federal Reserve Bank -- and several tax laws to increase federal funds. And when some small whiskey-brewing farmers refused to pay the new tax Hamilton himself mounted up and led some soldiers to enforce the new law. He was buried close to Wall Street itself.
So from the nation's start money has come to play an important role in political life, and that marriage is now affecting the lives of millions here and home and around the world. How did it happen? Well, as the wealthy continued making huge fortunes they then used some of it to control politics itself, thus playing the same dominating role Church rituals played in medieval times. By itself that wasn't bad; wealth can be a very useful social tool, but without an income tax people were allowed to hoard their fortunes. Thus, because economic capitalism alternates between boom and bust periods on a regular basis, unskilled and undereducated people were kept in virtual slavery, and with little government help; for all practical purposes the government ignored job creation, healthcare, safe working conditions, advanced education, corporate regulation, and of course creating a fair and just tax system. People simply weren't organized to demand such services, and so they didn't exist.
The good news is this: whether liberal or conservative, at last the political tool for intelligently improving such results is growing as never before; I mean democracy itself! Since World War 1 it has become the dominant political system in the Western world, and is now finally growing tremendously in the Muslim world too, as is capitalism. No doubt religion will continue playing an important part in the new Islamic democracies, but even so a major political challenge continues growing for everyone to better regulate and control a wealthy upper class from overly controlling the government for their own benefit, while ignoring the public good. Thanks to a more dedicated and educated public, and our many new communicative and educational tools, greedy wealthy folks are finding it more difficult to hide these days. It was a big part of Dewey's new kind of liberal individualism.
It's an old political challenge as well. Even in ancient times Plato saw how destructive money-making was to good government. In his Republic guardian-rulers are divorced completely from moneymaking, and, as we'll see, history has shown he saw rightly. No doubt he would feel very uncomfortable in today's money-based political world where politicians spend much of their time raising re-election money from wealthy donors. And what's more, in such a world healthy political debate is often reduced to pathetic negative 10 second TV ads telling how bad the opponent is.
Even so, we liberal Deweyans certainly don't accept the idea politics will always be that way, and thus not worth even voting. The less people vote for honest and caring people, the easier it is for the greedy to keep dominating the system, shocking it economically from time to time, acquiring more wealth, and keeping people weak and confused. With all its weaknesses, Western capitalistic democracy has continued forcing even greedy status quo conservatives to think more about the public good than ever before, thanks, no doubt, to a much better organized and informed public, many of whom these days are camping out in protest over the recent looting of our public treasury to bail out irresponsible Wall Street investment firms. In short, the public good has become a much stronger political force than even before, and with more intelligent voters will continue growing.
Basic Capitalist Econ, 101
So, what's basic about it? Well, for one thing, I certainly don’t mean it’s learning where to buy the best illegal drugs, how to negotiate the best price for them, or how to fence stolen goods. If you’re into those kinds of stupid economic deals I see a great prison career in your future, if you're not shot and killed first. Now who wouldn't like to spend the rest of their life sharing a cell with guys named Monster Dude and Stiletto. What I do mean is business economics.
Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations (1776) was the first great capitalist statement at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Its natural enemy was the traditional government-run economy, called mercantilism. In that system the monarch controlled the economy from the top down, and the goal was not the public good, but simply to increase the government’s wealth in the form of gold and silver. Tariff laws, for example, charged foreign goods a fee, helping finance the government and also protect jobs and goods made at home, like foods, clothing, and just about anything else. Thus peoples’ gold and silver coins would last longer if they bought goods made at home, rather than buy more expensive foreign goods.
But as mass-producing factories started growing, run with steam engines, Smith saw businesses could grow better and stronger if they had fewer confining laws, regulations, tariffs, and taxes. The ideal was a globalized world, where tariff-free exports to other countries would make it easier for more people to become wealthier. As a result his theories of economic capitalism slowly became married to Locke's ideas about a small government encouraging free-trade, and also protecting natural human rights like free speech, a free press, and freedom of association. Tobacco growing plantation owner Thomas Jefferson and many like him, like George Washington and James Madison liked such ideas. After all, the powerful British monarchy had been causing economic tax problems for decades, forcing the American colonies to accept their goods. The new small government system would be called laissez-faire politics -- a French phrase for 'leave alone'. Smith said with such a system unemployment and thus social discontent would remain low. Also abolishing worker guilds would help keep labor costs low and also allow workers more mobility.
Mercantile absolute monarchs had overly regulated and restricted trade, often using their tariff fees and bond money to fight yet another war for more land. But as we’ll see a little later, a mercantile-type economy, run from a centralized government and controlled by a wealthy business class, has been more difficult to control than people thought, mainly because wealthy capitalists built a system against such control and regulation. Many today call that system economic imperialism, meaning using money and even military might to control foreign markets for goods and resources, like oil and metals. Thus wealthy business leaders continued using a mercantile-type government.
No doubt Smith had his reasons for preferring an individualistic, profit-motivated capitalism, where government has little control over the business sector and people are free to make as much money as they can. As we’ve been seeing, Individualism was an important philosophic idea in the 1600s and 1700s. For Dewey too it was important, but as we’ll see in a later section, he wanted to help grow a new more intelligent kind of individualism, one where people learned humane and socially-oriented habits, rather than merely joining the greedy rat race for individual wealth. Addiction to wealth can be just as harmful as any other addiction.
Such a capitalistic system of self-interested personal wealth seemed to Smith the best way to make everyone’s life better. First of all it would produce the most goods for the biggest profits, and second of all it would help create a stable middle class with a higher standard of living; they could thus afford more of what made life worth living. It was a goal of Aristotle's as well. So like John Locke, Smith too simply rejected Hobbes’s highly negative assumptions about human nature and said people are instinctively sympathetic and cooperative; that was his basic psychological assumption and for many capitalism's greatest weakness. Smith believed capitalists would continue helping more people become even more liberated from overly restrictive mercantile controls, and so life would naturally become better with less government interference.
In a nutshell that was the theory. Thus for Smith capitalism had within itself a self-correcting psychological mechanism so it didn’t need government regulation, unless, of course, it became overly monopolistic. Obviously the key word there is theory. In other words, within a regulation-free and open economic system there was a kind of invisible psychological instinct automatically regulating personal greed. For example, people would keep making whatever profit they could, save what they could, and banks cooperative banks would then loan out money for people to keep making life better for themselves. Like many other philosophic and religious systems it all sounded great on paper, until, that is, people like Hamilton began using government to not only build a wealthy upper class, but also to ignore lower class living standards; he's known politely as an aristocratic individualist and more commonly as a conservative cold-hearted capitalist. At 49 he was shot and killed in a dual with Aaron Burr.
In short, Smith simply didn't want to believe people were as greedy, aggressive, and power hungry as Hobbes said they were, even though history was jam packed with Hobbesian examples. Not only has monopoly been the favored system in politics for the last few thousand years, but all during the Middle Ages the Church showed how it would fight and brutally kill just about anyone who dared disagree with their dogmatic religious monopoly. So in what sense were people naturally and instinctively cooperative and sympathetic? No doubt it prompted modern aristocratic sophists like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) to once again remind people of how important the quest for power is to many people. That was only reliable psychology to paint; the will to power became one of his famous overly simplistic phrases. Dewey of course was less romantic and more behavioristic; for him nature was basically whatever a person’s training, education, habits, impulses, and chemistry made them.
So on a philosophic level, slowly Smith’s economic natural law theories were married to Locke's small government, human rights protecting ideas. However, as Smith’s theories actually played out in real life, and the wealthy continued controlling the government, Dewey and millions of others came to see both Smith's psychological and economic assumptions were seriously flawed. The first said people have a natural inborn instinct for sympathy and cooperation, and so the second assumed capitalism had a self-correcting economic mechanism built into it. Economic greed in the 1800s, and of course the Great Depression in the 1930s finally ended liberal faith in both of those assumptions. About the only cooperation and sympathy was between the wealthy and the government; from the nation's beginning they have been cooperating with each other to help each other.
How Many Supplies Are You Demanding?
Another of Smith’s economic ideas was called the law of supply and demand. In a largely monopoly-free world it seemed perfectly logical at first. For example, if people demand some product, like the latest electronic gadget, and there aren’t many made, then the maker can pretty much charge any obscene price they want for them, and thus make huge profits. But if the demand is low, then prices will come down until people can afford them. Also, if a business charged too much for a product or service, then people would find a different source for their needs and force the first to either lower prices or go out of business. However, with the growth of huge corporations after the Civil War that law became all but useless. In the real world huge monopolistic corporations quickly evolved, and once in place a railroad, for example, could then charge farmers anything they wanted; they had no choice but to pay or go out of business. If they couldn’t get their livestock or grain to market, then they couldn’t make any money and the bank would soon take the farm away. So, once again, monopolistic reality was showing sympathy and cooperation, as well as supply and demand, were in fact just ideas, not reality. What was happening was, in fact, a kind of class warfare of the rich exploiting the more vulnerable poor, or, perhaps more accurately, a kind of class vampirism. It also explained why prices kept rising, sometimes even during recessions; wealthy corporations could afford to keep prices high until people went back to work.
Smith was, thus, a better economist than an historian or psychologist. Down through history ruling classes had worked to create monopolies, whether it was in agriculture or religion, so naturally such competition-killing monopolies became a money scramble during the Industrial Revolution. One example even involved a plot to use President Grant to help a few Wall Street scoundrels build a gold market monopoly, and other examples were sugar or oil monopolies; they could grow simply because large companies could afford to charge less than their smaller competitors, and thus drive them out of business. Then, when they went bankrupt they were gobbled up faster than a hungry weasel gobbles hens in a chicken coop. In fact John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil often did just that to his competitors, sometimes legally and sometimes illegally, until he was the only player in a region; it could then charge people whatever he wanted for oil. Civilization itself ran on energy and oil was, and still is, the major source of it. So, the more industrialization continued, the more a few large companies began dominating smaller competitors, and then often using their wealth to corrupt -- excuse me, influence -- politicians to help make them even bigger.
Naturally the more that happened, the more businesses themselves ruined not only Smith's rosy psychological and economic pictures, but the law of supply and demand itself! Thus capitalism itself became much more cut-throat and warlike than Smith ever imagined it could or would. As a result, regulating such monopolistic practices today is a problem governments continue struggling with; how can politicians bite the hand feeding them with re-election money? Many politicians even passed laws against labor unions, often sanctified in conservative courts.
In other words, the only economic law seemed to be make as much money as you can, and as fast as you can. If you sold junk products it was the buyer's responsibility not to get fooled. So naturally there soon evolved a small number of huge corporations telling people what to buy with slick advertising, repeated again and again, and charging people whatever they wanted. And of course undereducated people soon believed what ads kept telling them.
Thus something kept spoiling Smith’s rosy theories; it was called reality. Smith said governments should repeal their old mercantile laws and regulations, increasing what today is called the right-to-work and to sell goods anywhere. Sounds like a good idea, especially if you’re a factory owner, want to pay the lowest wages possible, and keep making as much money as possible. However, if you're a carpenter or plumber, or even a woman or child, it often meant you would only earn pennies a day and work 12-15 hour days, six days a week! What’s more, rents kept going up and mortgage loans were due. And as if those conditions weren’t bad enough, because women weren’t allowed to be educated beyond simple reading and writing, they continued being tied to a baby-making role. To even mention birth control ideas and techniques even in the early 1900s was a criminal offense, backed by the Roman Church, for which many caring liberated women like Margaret Sanger were arrested and jailed. Unless people aren't encouraged to build more intelligent reproduction habits, within a few decades we're going to see more and more human disasters around the world.
Simply because corporate directors naturally wanted their profits to keep growing, so more people would buy their stock and increase its value, they often paid politicians to pass laws against labor unions. Union demands for higher salaries and a safer workplace would only eat into their profits, making the payments on that second home and new carriage more difficult. Also, it was helpful to have a large number of untrained people who needed to work, so the government began allowing huge numbers of illiterate immigrants into the country after the Civil War. Population in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles skyrocketed and thus made cheap labor available well into the 1900s; for every job there were many hungry people to fill it. Thus for decades workers often had little power to demand better wages and safer work places, better healthcare, some kind of pension, or injury insurance.
If you didn’t work, then you didn't make money and often didn't eat. Needless to say environment pollution too became a problem. Often coal-burning factories helped produce fouled air in towns as well as in coal mines, helping endanger and shorten already short lives with Black Lung disease. How such working conditions were cooperative and sympathetic was far from obvious to almost everyone who had redd Smith’s book, especially when periodic recessions and depressions put many completely out of work. One such depression happened in England and elsewhere in 1815. When Napoleon was finally defeated and there was no demand for more military uniforms or food for soldiers; uneducated soldiers became unemployed civilians?
Cheap labor became a major goal of corporate industrial captains who began fighting labor unions from the start. Today many Chinese and Indian workers pretty much fill the same cheap labor role, and so recently U. S. corporations have been moving their operations overseas, forcing laid-off people back home to learn new skills and work for less money. Profits are larger where labor is cheap, so corporations often ship their goods to be assembled overseas, and then sell them back home for as much as they can get. These days footwear and electronic gadgets are 2 such examples; aren't those $100 running shoes cute? And even environmental pollution laws still have a tough time being passed, much less enforced; they're job killers say the conservatives, as with so many other government regulations, as if workers don't get ill from polluted air, water, and soil; sometimes highly toxic, health-destroying chemicals are dumped into the environment on an unsuspecting public.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, sometimes today even monopolistic unions act like big corporations. Many times they accept lay-offs during recessions rather than lower everyone's wages to keep everyone working, keep them from losing their homes and medical benefits, and forcing them to rely on government help. But those kinds of results were a long way off in the 1800s. Back then strikes were often broken with Pinkerton workers, and hungry African strikebreakers were used also, thus increasing already high racial tensions and violence.
Thus the wealthy’s economic power became more and more married to political power, in the form of financing re-election campaigns. And in many cases politicians often became little more than corporate representatives in congress, both Democrats and Republicans. It wasn’t always bad; sometimes lobbyists helped keep people working and paying the bills, but much of the time they focused on allowing their wealthy employers to keep getting richer with fewer regulations, rather than pay their fair share of income they got from investments, rather than work.
From there it was only a few more steps to actively using force to open up foreign markets to profit-seeking economic imperialists. That kind of imperialistic capitalism began happening in the mid-1800s, and even earlier in Britain. As home markets became saturated with goods sales naturally declined. How many vacuum cleaners does one really need? So, in order for corporations to keep making as much as they could military force was often used, forcing countries like Japan and China to allow foreign in. In fact British businessmen were so eager to sell the Indian opium they bought, they forced their way into China and started selling it there; battles were called the Opium Wars. Well, business is business, isn’t it, even though Socialists like Robert Owen yelled about it? And even more recently many U. S. bankers have been arrested for laundering huge amounts of cash from drugs dealers feeding off of people who never taught themselves how to enjoy working creatively, enjoy life, and feel good about themselves without dangerous drugs.
Exactly how such living and working conditions reflected Smith’s rosy assumptions about a cooperative and sympathetic human nature, or the idea capitalism was a kind of naturalistic system, was becoming highly questionable to many people even in the early 1800s? British Socialist Robert Owen was one of them; Karl Marx was another. Periodic economic recessions and depressions put many completely out of work and kept them in poverty, made all the worse because taxing the rich to pay their fair share was almost non-existent, and so Owen and many others began working for more economic and social reforms; we’ll see more of his work in a later section.
In practice, then, Smith's laissez-faire economic ideas helped bless a wealthy industrial and financial upper class, much like Alexander Hamilton wanted. Why bother with most of the poor and undereducated; why bother with the public good for everyone? Yes, for those who were working the standard of living and pay checks went up, and would keep going up until the 1980s, and since then leveling off to practically nothing. But for unskilled and uneducated men, women, and children life remained a slavish grind, a very stressful and depressing grind. Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations, thus became the conservative upper class’s economic bible, so to speak; a kind of economic holy grail. Unfortunately society had other classes. Thus the Industrial Revolution continued creating huge corporate monopolies for a small class of owners, controlling the supply of many important products and services, like oil, sugar, transportation, and utilities, and as that happened the income gap continued widening and choking off options for the lower classes. While most people made a few dollars a week and lived on a bare subsistence level, some were making millions a year and living like Persian kings, not because they were any more talented or intelligent than others, but often simply because they were born into a wealthy family! I don’ mean to imply the wealthy just sat around and collected interest from their tax-free municipal bonds, or dividends from their stocks. Most worked, sometimes long hours, especially lawyers and financiers. But many had monetary resources working for them even at birth, resources most everyone else didn’t have.
Also, many new universities like Duke, Vanderbilt, and Stanford were built, and many others got large financial gifts too. How else was the next generation of managers, engineers, and football fans to be educated? But often such endowments were used not to make student fees cheaper, so more could be educated, but to merely become big businesses themselves, even investing in businesses making money from slave labor, as was the case in African and South American countries.
Some corporate captains like the confirmed agnostic Andrew Carnegie became major philanthropists after he sold his steel company to J. P. Morgan. He then eventually gave away almost all of his $300 million fortune; the entire country benefited from it, but sadly he was the rare exception. John Rockefeller’s 4 sons would eventually be worth some $20 billion dollars each! While that was happening most people still lived from paycheck to paycheck, and often didn’t even have that. Thus it's obvious why laissez-faire economics became, and remains, the favorite picture of a conservative upper class, or to be more accurate, the conservative wing of the upper class. That class has a progressive liberal wing as well. But according to recent figures, since 1980 incomes have been leveling off for every class except the wealthiest. According to recent figures, over the past 3 decades the top 1% saw their income grow by over $185,000 a year, while the poorest 20% saw their income grow by only $2,000! Now while some may argue nature is merely selecting out the fittest to make the most money, liberals like Dewey would say many have merely inherited their wealth and have worked to increase it with the help of paid accountants, stock brokers, and of course friendly politicians; many politicians become lobbyists themselves, and make much more money than they did as a politician.
Wealth does have its privileges. As is common knowledge today, there are 2 tiers of stock and bond investors, the wealthy and everyone else, and as usual the wealthy are treated differently. Most of such money-making tools are owned by the wealthy, and so they often are given the benefit of special information on what to buy and when to sell. As a result they make more money which then is often plowed back into the stock and bond markets, giving stock brokers nice fat commissions. And so simply through campaign contributions the government is still controlled by the wealthy class, just as barons controlled their protective knights in the Middle Ages with a feudal system. In fact since the 1930s government bailout systems have been helping big businesses avoid bankruptcy, thus practicing corporate socialism on a much wider level than ever before, and that trend seems to be getting worse.
How has it been working? Well, for example, when faced with bankruptcy as a result of reckless investing, or even looting the company itself, deposits in many banks are now guaranteed by the federal government. It was one reform FDR created during the Great Depression, when thousands of banks went broke and millions of people lost their savings. In the 1980s, however, we saw the weakness of such a system when the Republican Reagan administration de-regulated the savings and loan industry, allowing bankers to also sell so-called high yielding junk bonds; until then they were merely in the savings and loan business. Many, however, not only took advantage of the new deregulation, but even diverted funds to their own personal use, to live a so-called jet-set lifestyle. Why worry? Depositors were all protected by the government; if the S & L went broke, which many did, then people could get their money back courtesy of the American taxpayer; in effect it was another example of corporate socialism. And when the federal bailout funds ran out, it just meant corrupt businesses could keep bilking the public. Eventually the ultimate damage to public tax money was estimated at a mere $500 billion dollars, according to Kitty Calavita in Big Money Crime. A few went to jail for fraud but were soon released, to spend who knows how many millions of taxpayer money. In short, Smith's ideas of a cooperative and sympathetic human nature were proved false yet again. Thus a persistent problem reared its head again how can free-market capitalist systems find ways to keep regulations in place, and better redistribute concentrated wealth for the public good, rather than merely channel more of it to those already wealthy? Wealthy folks seem to have a persistent problem to soothe their fears about not having lots of money, they keep wanting more it.
Sadly, that wasn't the worst example of greedy corporate socialism either. Another even greater financial looting of public money has taken place more recently in 2008-9. When huge financial corporations are unregulated by the government, as they have been for the past 3 decades, then the money-making instinct often becomes anything but cooperative and sympathetic; it becomes an addiction for which millions of taxpayers now pay. More accurate might be the picture of a public-tax-money sucking vampire! Just recently in 2008, when huge recently unregulated financial corporations began selling tons of questionable home loans to people with unstable incomes, and then bundling them together to sell to other investors, they in effect loaded the system for another financial disaster.
It happened some 70 years earlier with the stock market, where people needed only a small amount of money to buy large amounts of stock. But in 2008 the highly inflated housing bubble burst and many Wall Street firms then asked and got some $700 billion to cover their losses, thus sinking the American tax payer, their children, and their grandchildren into the largest debt hole ever, some $15 trillion deep! The number is so staggering it’s almost impossible to imagine, especially for those of us who live on small fixed budgets and do our own sowing, clothes not oats. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, conservative Republicans began saying the public must now take huge cuts in services so we all can pay our debts while still allowing the wealthiest not to get even wealthier!
In other words, several wealthy Wall Street corporations engineered a completely legal transfer to money from the people to the wealthiest among us, and in the process began threatening the very reforms designed during the 1930s to help the poor and needy! If I hadn’t lived through it, I probably never would have believed it was possible. Little wonder thousands are now camped out in public spaces around the world protesting such blatant greed. In essence it was a legalized form of public robbery, for which our children and grandchildren will probably be paying for decades! Now if that isn’t a form of class warfare, then I’m really at a loss to know what is. The results of not voting for the bailout convinced politicians; it was either that or see the entire U. S. economy collapse into a 2nd Great Depression, and with it the world economy as well. It was yet another in a long line of what author Naomi Klein calls the shock doctrine – aiming to dismantle liberal government reforms with financial chaos. For wealthy conservative financial tycoons the political-economic marriage has been purposely used to create a great amount of social and economic stress, and confusion, making it easier for the wealthy to then become even wealthier with the purchase of bankrupt businesses and natural resources, as if owning most of the economy somehow still isn’t enough. So what’s a good economic definition of enough? It’s always having just a little bit more. In the next section we’ll see some more of this economic history and its result.
14. ECONOMIC ASSUMPTIONS, ECONOMIC REALITY, 101
As we’ve seen, both Plato and Aristotle said the best objects to know are eternal and unchanging; knowing them was the only way to make one’s life better. Liberal democratic Greeks, however, like Protagoras and Democritus, offered people 2 new challenges. They challenged people to first know the natural events going on here and now, and then also to intelligently respond to them by building better habits. Even Western philosophy’s first thinker practiced those arts. Thales supposedly knew something about weather prediction, and when he saw the signs of a rainy season he bought as many olive presses as he could and then sold them at a profit when the harvest came in. Liberal Sophists and Atomists saw clearly, with such practical knowledge and skills people would remain less vulnerable to those with more political and economic power, and thus be able to enjoy life more.
Such basic liberal challenges live today in all countries around the world, whether democratic or totalitarian. Sure, the signs one sees may not always predict the future, but often they do. In short, those 2 liberal skills are the best way for any personal or social improvement to peacefully evolve and grow for everyone, and not just for a few wealthy people. So, in this and the next section we take a little closer look at how science and money-power have been harnessed in our modern era to build huge fortunes for a few, keep most everyone else poor and undereducated, and thus keep a feudalistic social status quo in place.
The question is: Where should people best focus their attention? In ancient Greece religious conservatives like Plato openly worked to direct peoples’ attention not to natural events happening here and now, but to knowing what he assumed were eternal and unchanging spirit-objects. For him the best source of true ethical excellence exists only in a completely different realm of unchanging spirit-objects, and they could be best known only by a few people; he called them philosopher-kings. Thus people were to do the work they were trained for and leave the task of ruling to others. The political result was to maintain a feudalistic status quo where much of life was controlled by a few people.
Moderate Aristotle naturalized Plato’s eternal spirit-objects, but otherwise he generally agreed with Plato. The best goal in life, he said, was happiness, but only those few contemplative philosophers could best feel what the highest kind of happiness is – god’s contemplative happiness. The rest of slavish mankind would never really know happiness’s highest level. They normally focused on mundane and ordinary kinds of happiness, like sexual pleasures and those found in the everyday world. In short, don’t worry about trying to make life happier for everyone, but mainly for yourself.
Against such feudalistic status quo ideas stood democratically liberal Sophists, Skeptics, and Atomists. For them democratic forms of government were opening up many new options and challenges for people, and so what deserves all our attention are the events in our changing world, especially what wealthy folks are doing! Without such knowledge all forms of liberal excellence become more difficult, if not impossible. In any case, however, with such liberal ideas they began challenging all conservative and moderate models of life and nature. After all, they too were based on mere personal feelings and assumptions, and thus merely reflected Plato’s and Aristotle’s aristocratic habits, nothing more and nothing less. Liberal democratic Dewey simply continued that liberal democratic tradition, which modern science was proving to be the best one for everyone’s good.
However, even in our modern world those already wealthy had a great advantage. They could more easily use their wealth to invest in new experimental inventions science’s new knowledge was helping create, and thus build even greater fortunes for themselves while maintaining a feudalistic social system. Thus, as the industrial age blossomed in the 1800s the poor were kept poor with slave-wages, while a few wealthy folks became obscenely wealthy. In short, it’s still very important to keep learning what the wealthy are doing with their money, and then build new liberal democratic habits to keep money circulating for everyone’s benefit, and not just a few. For example, increasing taxes on the wealthy makes it easier to build better schools and thus reduce unemployment and crime, build better homes, safer buildings, better medical services, and all the other services making life healthier and more satisfying for everyone! Thus, people today are challenged to vote politicians into office and use their taxing power to more easily accomplish those goals. Personally hoarding more and more money just makes those goals more difficult to achieve. In fact, in many ways such challenges are even more difficult today. Thanks to many new scientific inventions like TV, radio, cell phones, and computers, it’s become more difficult to stay focused on what the wealthy are doing with their money here and now, and keep working to circulate more of it. So, this and the following section will give some examples of why those 2 skills are as important to us liberals today as they’ve always been.
Some Economic History
No doubt, because our public schools continue all but ignoring economic studies in all their grades, most everyone graduates with almost no knowledge about what’s going on economically to shape their world, as well as the economic dangers and challenges they may soon face, like working long hours for low wages. Actually, our present money-dominated feudalistic world began growing much more solid in the 1700s, first in England; there the life-changing Industrial Revolution began.
Even before that, however, money’s importance began increasing in the late Middle Ages as trade increased with the East for silks and spices. Venice, Italy was the main Western end of that trade, and soon Medici bankers became powerful secular and religious leaders too. To finance many city-state wars Italian city-states offered bonds for sale, promising to pay them back with interest later on; bankers often bought them and continued increasing their wealth. Today modern cities and nations continue selling tax-free bonds to finance building roads, rail systems, and even wars; they remain one way wealthy folks make money with their money and avoid paying taxes on the interest as well; they’re tax free.
In the 1700s, however, perhaps the most important invention at the time was James Watt’s steam engine. It soon made possible the creation of large factories where much larger amounts of cloth could be made from wool than in those factories powered by water wheels. Also, as better and cheaper ways of making steel were soon discovered, and inventors like Eli Whitney invented a system of easily replacing broken parts, weapons too could be mass produced and kept in use on a scale not seen before. Such hand guns and rifles made in Colt and Remington factories made it fairly easy to take most native lands from them and thus reduce them to helpless disoriented people vulnerable to many attention-diverting addictions. It was an early example of what today is called ‘shock and awe’ warfare, where the enemy is so devastated by superior force their resistance is quickly reduced to almost nothing, making it easier to take more of their property and money from them. It’s happened many times in the 1900s. Such military power and scientific inventions made it fairly easy for the US to not only build huge money-making corporations after the Civil War (1865), but then also begin forcing much weaker nations around the world to keep increasing their debts to big Wall Street banks, again making it easier to keep taking more peoples’ money!
In short, the Industrial Revolution was largely a revolution for the wealthy, based on the new scientific inventions wealthy folks were financing. Wages for workers were increased a little each year, so they could continue buying the gadgets corporations were making, like radios, TVs, cars, refrigerators, and such. However, most all of the profits went into the hands of a small group of people, known today as the richest 1%, today numbering in the US about 30,000 people. Even within that group there are some who managed to become what may be called obscenely wealthy, like the 300 wealthiest people within that 1% group. For them it’s easy to keep using their wealth to keep making more wealth, in the form of interest on loans and tax-free municipal bonds.
Of course with their wealth it’s easy to control enough of the political system to keep getting wealthier, as the recent recession of 2008-9 has taught us. In 2007 a few big Wall Street banks began having trouble borrowing the money they needed to stay in business; the Bear-Stearns Companies, Inc. was one of them. As their stock value plunged from over $130 to a share, they were eventually sold to JP Morgan Chase for $10 a share, and that was just the tip of the investment banking fiasco. In September, 2008 the US economy was poised to enter another Great Depression, so Republican Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson went to the government and told a room full of politicians he needed some $700 billion of the public’s money to cover the investment bank losses, thus sinking the American tax payer, their children, and their grandchildren into the largest debt hole ever, some $15 trillion deep! The number is so staggering it’s almost impossible to imagine, especially for those of us who live on small fixed budgets and do our own sowing, clothes not oats. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, conservative Republicans began saying the public must now take huge cuts in services so we all can pay our debts while still allowing the wealthiest not to get even wealthier!
In short, several huge Wall Street banks engineered a completely legal transfer to money from the people to the wealthiest among us, and even began threatening the very economic reforms designed during the 1930s to help the poor and needy, like Social Security and Medicare! If I hadn’t lived through it, I probably never would have believed it was possible. Little wonder thousands of protestors quickly began camping out in public spaces around the world protesting such blatant greed; it was called Occupy Wall Street.
In essence it was a legalized form of public robbery. Eventually the money they borrowed was paid back with interest, but millions lost their jobs and homes, and those who didn’t often had mortgage payments worth more than their homes! Now if that isn’t a form of class warfare and corporate socialism, then I’m really at a loss to know what would be. Again, the disastrous social results of not voting for the bailout convinced even Republicans it was either that or see the entire US economy collapse into a 2nd Great Depression, and with it the world economy as well. It was yet another in a long line of what author Naomi Klein calls the shock doctrine – aiming to dismantle helpful liberal government systems with financial chaos. For wealthy conservative financial tycoons the political-economic marriage has been repeatedly used to create a great amount of social and economic stress and confusion, making it easier for the wealthy to then become even wealthier with the purchase of bankrupt businesses and natural resources, as if owning most of the economy somehow still isn’t enough. So in practice a good capitalist definition of enough simply means always getting a just a little bit more.
As is becoming painfully clear these days, many wealthy folks continue using their money-power to control politicians who rely on their campaign donations to get re-elected. Naturally, the more they vote to help their wealthy contributors, the easier it is to stay in office and also get much higher-paying lobbying jobs once they leave congress. Thus, taxes have become the principle liberal tool for keeping more money in circulation and helping those less well off; tax deductible charitable contributions are also a useful tool. In any case, however, taxes have become a subject of great importance. Conservative Republicans often label Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals, and rarely talk about all the people whose lives are improved with helpful social programs. To a private group of wealthy donors in a recent presidential election, the Republican candidate openly described the difference as being between the givers and the takers; wealthy contributors knew what he was talking about. And, obviously, if politicians don’t work to make the wealthy even wealthier, then campaign donations quickly dry up and re-election becomes much more difficult.
The question is, however, how accurate a picture of reality is that? In the early 1900s it may have been accurate to say wealthy folks worked for their fortunes, as some sociologists did, but since then the situation has changed drastically. Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich and many others now paint a much different economic picture of wealth in the US. In a recent article he writes:
“In reality, a large and growing portion of the super-rich have never broken a sweat. Their wealth has been handed to them. …
America’s legendary ‘self-made’ men and women are fast being replaced by wealthy heirs. … Six of today’s ten wealthiest Americans are heirs to prominent fortunes. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. …
The nation is on the cusp of the largest inter-generation transfer of wealth in history. A study from the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy projects a total of $59 trillion (will be) passed down to heirs between 2007 and 2061. …
The tax code encourages all this by favoring unearned income over earned income.
The top tax rate paid by America’s wealthy on their capital gains – the major source of income for the non-working rich – has dropped from 33% in the late 1980s to 20% today …
At the same time the estate tax has been slashed. Before George W. Bush was president, it applied to assets in excess of $2 million per couple at a rate of 55%. Now it kicks in at $10,680,000 per couple at a 40% rate. …
… the specter of an entire generation doing nothing for their money other than speed-dialing their wealth management advisers is not particularly attractive. ….
It also endangers our democracy, as dynastic wealth inevitably and invariably accumulates political influence and power. (Truthdig, 3-31-2015)
As a result of such new economic-political realities happening here and now, much of the world’s countries have remained feudalistic, rather than democratic. Many wealthy folks have learned to stay focused on controlling our political lawmakers more than anything else. International lending at the World Bank often demands governments not build more systems helping the poor and disadvantaged, like more liberal schools or public banks. Even in recent US history, conservatives worked to keep life racially divided by restricting voting rights to all but white folks. In short, today democrats of all political traditions remain as challenged as never before to keep learning about these new realities, as well as how to intelligently react to them, so life can continue becoming more productive, satisfying, and enjoyable to everyone, and not just a lucky few. Better schools will help educate young folks about over-population dangers too.
More Economic History
In fact, a liberal list of economic goals began growing in the early 1800s. English liberals like Robert Owen (d.1858), for example, followed by German socialists like Karl Marx (d. 1883), and then English Fabian socialists, began suggesting different economic goals for a nation’s science-based wealth, rather than continuing to increase huge fortunes for a few people. Instead of working women, children, and men as much as 15 hour a day and paying them pennies, Scotsman Owen spent much of his profits building better schools for children and improving his neighborhood community. Often, their aim and goal was to increase the quality of life for as many people as possible, as did the English Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832); he said plainly, the best government goal is to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He also spent much of his fortune on improving Britain’s medieval prison system. No doubt, Dewey would have added the word ‘intelligent’ before the word happiness.
Such liberal social goals were a direct challenge to all forms of slavery still being practiced at the time, both economic and bodily slavery. In fact, such liberal goals for what science should be used for went back even further, to the early days of our modern period in the 1600s. Forward-looking liberal humanists like Francis Bacon (d. 1626) quickly sensed the goal of using science's power to help make life much better and more satisfying for everyone! He looked forward to those kinds of results. He was in fact one of Dewey's heroes.
Bacon wondered how can we best use scientific knowledge to actually make life better for people, rather than merely increase the wealth of a few. In short, for Bacon science’s knowledge is power, but in reality more liberal schools were needed to actually teach young folks how to focus and harness their political power so such goals could be achieved. To this day such schools are much fewer than they might be. So, naturally, as time went on, already wealthy people could more easily control how science’s new inventions were used, like Watt’s steam engine to build bigger factories. Such engines needed coal to run on, and so already wealthy bankers and financiers helped land owners develop their coal resources, while paying miners enough to live on and replacing them when they became sick with black lung disease. Without good healthcare and healthy workplace regulations they were simply left to die. Economic conservatives like Herbert Spencer (d.1903) said it’s just the result of nature’s survival-of-the-fittest law. Also, setting the tone for wars to come, the wealthy Rothschild banking family made huge amounts of money financing the English war against Napoleon, but didn’t get involved in the US Civil War; that was much riskier. About a hundred years later US bankers and industrialists would make millions during World War 1 as millions of obedient and politically naïve people lined up to be killed needlessly.
In modern science’s early days kind-hearted liberals like Bacon began challenging people to learn about a much more democratic goal for science’s power. And also to think about building more modern secular schools where children where they would learn how to keep unlocking nature’s secrets and using such knowledge for everyone’s benefit, rather than just teaching children about religious models of life and nature. Without such liberal schools it would be practically impossible for people to intelligently control and regulate the growth of individual fortunes with their political voting power.
Bacon wanted more people to ask what would be the best goal for scientific knowledge. He had a great humanistic feeling for making everyone's life more satisfying, to keep liberating more people from life's drudgery, hunger, diseases, and economic stresses, and thus build a completely different world from the feudalistic one he lived in. In such a new world all educated people would become freer to grow their own talents and make their own constructive contributions to life, rather than just becoming another wage-slave in some giant corporation. Needless to say, such humanistic optimism was short lived; not enough people listened to Queen Elizabeth 1's banker. In fact, early in the 1600s national and religious leaders in Europe kept people distracted from such liberal ideas by conducting one of the most destructive wars in history, called the 30 Years War (1618-1648). It evolved into a religious war between Catholics and Protestants; it took Germany over a century to recover.
That war ended shortly before conservative French philosopher Rene Descartes died in 1650. Many called him the father of modern philosophy for celebrating science in its early days. But the war also convinced many political leaders to finally separate religion from politics once and for all; US Framers made the idea of first importance in their Constitution’s Bill of Rights. All well and good, however, again, without more liberal schools teaching young folks how to build useful scientific and democratic skills for the new technological world now growing, and how to focus their democratic power into a useful political tool, it remained fairly easy for greedy folks to keep making more money for themselves, like J. P. Morgan (d. 1913), and John Rockefeller (d. 1937). With billions of his own fortune Rockefeller made a show of handing out dimes during the Great Depression.
Economic opportunities drove many to immigrate to the US beginning in the 1600s. Soon after white folks arrived they discovered growing tobacco and cows were profitable back in Europe. For such work slaves had always been useful, but because more liberal schools where habits like equal rights weren’t taught, it was practically impossible to stop the brutally heartless rounding up of native Africans early in the 1600s, packing them like sardines and rats onto ships, taking them to other countries, and then auctioning them for as much money as possible. For decades ‘civilized’ bankers who financed the slave trade simply went unchallenged by a passive population, and so the practice continued. Conservative schools teaching academic trivia helped pacify young folks into accepted such cruelty as another expression of god’s plan, even though such an idea could be used to ignore believing in such a god. What’s more, in many places the Bible endorsed slavery, and so for religious conservatives slavery was just business and shouldn’t be taken personally! Only when more kind-hearted liberals became more organized and focused their political power were such actions finally stopped and then outlawed after the US Civil War. Again, however, without liberal schools teaching democratic values like equal rights, racial hatred merely found other ways to keep Africans psychically hobbled, uneducated, and dependent. Requiring money to vote was one example.
Meanwhile, scientific inventions were helping that situation. After Eli Whitney (d.1825) invented his cotton gin machine in 1793, slaves became even more useful; the new invention made it much easier to separate cotton seeds from the fiber. In the southern US cotton some became ‘king’ with slaves picking the crop. Eventually many southerners choose to go to war rather than free their slaves, end their fantasies of racial superiority, and give people equal rights.
Also, modern US slavery often became even more brutal than it had been in the ancient world. In Greece slaves were often allowed to purchase their freedom and even run some businesses, but in the US and elsewhere most all slaves and their children remained so even after their 'master' died. Not even Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. As a result, even after the Civil War many former slaves returned to their plantations simply because they hadn’t learned any other skills. It shows yet again how crucially important liberal schools are for getting and keeping any kind of peaceful and civilized progress. Incidentally, for those interested in a more detailed economic account of how science was used to perpetuate a cold and heartless feudal aristocratic society, you might like to read some of John Galbraith's books, like The Affluent Society. Little wonder most English economists in the late 1700s like Adam Smith (d. 1776), and in the early 1800s like David Ricardo (d.1823), weren't afraid to paint their pessimistic economic pictures of life, especially Ricardo. His economic model mentioned on-going class struggles decades before Marx did, and seemed to doom the lower classes to eternal poverty, and helping earn economics its ‘gloomy science’ nickname.
What’s more, as the Industrial Revolution continued making a small class of financiers, investors, and CEOs obscenely wealthy, and then use their money to buy as much political power as they needed, more and more people began asking, what's the most excellent way to control the greedy quest for economic profits? Should the government have the power to tax and then circulate more of their money, or should they be allowed to keep enriching themselves and making only their lives more satisfying, like some early pessimists did like David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and other socialists?
That general economic situation grew even worse in the early 1900s. World War 1broke out in Europe (1914-18) and the US finally joined the fighting in 1917. During it wealthy folks sensed the opportunity to make huge fortunes with new scientific knowledge. While millions lined up to fight and die on both sides, much more destructive weapons were built to increase the killing and wounding. After dynamite was invented in the mid-1800s in Sweden by Alfred Nobel (d. 1896), US companies like E.I. du Pont de Nemours made millions during World Wars 1, 2, and the Korean War, making larger and more destructive bombs, weapons, and poison gas. The result: millions of people were killed or disabled while a few rich folks became obscenely rich from others’ death.
While teaching at Columbia Dewey too was wondering if Fabian socialist economic goals wouldn’t be better for people than the conservative laissez-faire for-profit goal. After all, who would want to finance war if all the profits were taken by the government and used to build more peace-oriented institutions, like the League of Nations President Wilson (1913 to 1921) suggested. Such organizations would make it easier to resolve problems more intelligently. Naturally, the League of Nations was one idea conservative Republicans rejected almost instinctively, as they do the United Nations today; they don’t want anyone interfering with their money-making power. Adam Smith’s for-profit goal was in fact helping produce such a cold and heartless war-prone world. Conservative Social Darwinists like Englishman Herbert Spencer had invented the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ even before Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859; that book finally overturned more than 2,000 years of Aristotle’s biological model of eternal and unchanging species. Naturally, Christian conservatives caused an uproar; after all, their models of life and nature had embraced such a biological model, many Catholics and Protestants included! In fact, in 1925 the state of Tennessee sued a biology teacher for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.
For aristocratic Spencer the economic profits of science’s new inventions should be controlled by only a few people. If poor folks’ lives were made better with business profits the results would work against nature’s survival of the fittest goal. It would only allow more poor people to keep producing more poor children, and thus keep making life as difficult as possible. So, naturally, he objected to the liberal goal of using the government to make life more enjoyable for everyone. The government shouldn’t even help disabled or retired workers, or even help make factories safer to work in. In fact, when Spencer visited the US in 1882 he was hailed by many conservatives as some kind of savior, especially by those addicted to making as much money as possible, and by those religious conservatives like John Rockefeller who felt god had chosen him personally to acquire such a huge fortune.
For such people, to violate either natural or theological laws like god’s will was both intolerable and unacceptable. After all, since Plato's day poor folks had been pretty much ignored by everyone. Only liberals like Dewey and Robert Owen even bothered to sympathize with under clothed, underfed, and undereducated poor folks. They opposed such cold and heartless conservative goals. Even though Rockefeller daily preached to his family about helping others, his 5 grandsons would eventually inherit billions in family wealth. For liberals like Owen and Dewey, not allowing people to share equally in the profits from their work simply perpetuates a feudal social system already thousands of years old, and thus makes it much more difficult to better educate themselves and their children to live more intelligently in the new democratic world science’s inventions were helping build. Luckily, daily newspapers and radio were helping millions of people learn more about what was happening here and now.
More Economic History
A few decades before 1800 a few inventive Englishmen began harnessing science's knowledge. James Watt’s steam engine would soon be harnessed to run cloth-making factories and increase coal-mining production too. In the US Robert Fulton (d. 1815) soon built a model useful for powering ships, so they could more quickly deliver raw material and goods to people. Naturally, people with money or land-credit could more easily take advantage of such new inventions for their own greedy purposes. For them making money was almost too easy. They could hire passive women and children to often work for pennies during 15-hour days, much like today’s corporations are doing in places like China, Vietnam, and India; Vietnam’s minimum wage is reported to be 58 cents an hour! Undereducated and unorganized people make it easy to continue slave-labor practices. People like Owen, however, began offering factory owners a choice. They could use some of the profits to help make worker lives better, or ignore them and keep enriching their own bank accounts! A largely unorganized population allowed many to quickly choose the first option, and thus help fulfill Ricardo’s gloomy economic predictions; rich and poor classes would always be warring against each other while the rich would keep winning and the poor would keep losing.
Again, another choice CEOs had was to use scientific knowledge to keep making more destructive weapons, or not. For many the choice was obvious, especially after public tax money became available for buying such weapons. In the early 1900s Republican imperialist president Teddy Roosevelt build a modernized navy and then ordered it to sail around the world, as if announcing the US was now as powerful as any medieval king or pope. Weapons-making too soon became driven by profit-making companies, again with the help of taxpayer monies. Thus, the ties between big business and government grew even stronger as well-armed soldiers and marines made it easier to start businesses in foreign countries, often justified by saying it was god’s will and our manifest destiny. Not enough people were educated to ask if anyone could prove spirits even existed!
Today conservatives often use the phrase ‘American Exceptionalism’ to keep justifying the quest for more and more profits. After all, even in the 1800s US soldiers’ superior weapons made it easy to keep taking land from underdeveloped native peoples, and also keep most Africans out of schools and make them second-class citizens, or worse. Such weapons also allowed English imperialists to remain the ruling class in India, force the Chinese to allow opium to be sold there, and even help destroy much of their society in 2 World Wars.
Needless to say, such destructive and profit-making uses for science's knowledge continue even today! In the 1950s Republican President Eisenhower (1953-1961) warned people against the military-industrial complex's under-regulated power. However, it did little good while conservative public schools continued teaching children to passively accept all the academic trivia their teachers were handing out. The vicious Vietnam War was soon energized and the brutally vicious killing lasted about 10 years, even though widespread student protests were organized! Workers benefiting from war work even organized counter protests.
Even in the mid-1800s socialists like Karl Marx began seeing such results of industrial development, but also began offering some different economic goals to working people. He began challenging the for-profit economic goal. As we'll see in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence, Dewey disagreed with many of Marx’s ideas, especially the use of revolution as a means of improving life, and also many of Marx’s gloomy predictions of capitalism. However, at least Marx inspired other liberals to think more deeply about better organizing themselves and also creating new government powers to better control the use of wealth. Without those organizing skills and new goals people would remain economic slaves. On the positive side, however, Marx suggested a number of tax reforms even the US is experimenting with to this day, namely a progressive income tax – the more money people have, the more taxes they should pay. And what’s more, he was more optimistic than economists like Ricardo. In fact, in Germany where Marx was born, the government began helping workers with injuries and retirement benefits decades before such a US system was built.
Thus, Marx did inspire more people to feel they could keep improving their lives if they knew what the problems were, and became more politically organized to create new goals for experimental testing. So, many including Dewey began asking themselves is a greed-dominated for-profit economic goal really the best for everyone, or, should the government become a more active regulator of economic life, like Fabian socialists and liberal British voters were saying. Wasn’t Bacon right? Shouldn’t the government put human needs above profits and help build better schools, healthcare systems, affordable housing, safer food, and more recreational parks and libraries. After all, shouldn’t all people have as many opportunities as wealthy folks have?
Obviously, most of those people making the weapons didn't complain; after all their wages paid their rent and mortgages and allowed them to live the so-called Middle Class Dream -- a suburban house, 2 cars, and 2 kids. Many liberals like Dewey, however, began offering a more humanistic economic goal for everyone. Labor unions helped educate poor workers about more intelligent things to do with company profits than merely create bigger bank accounts for a few board directors and CEOs. In the 1930s thousands of labor strikes were called to demand higher wages with those profits. Conservatives finally passed the so-called Taft Hartley Law in 1947; it greatly restricted worker power to strike and organize themselves too.
As we’ve seen, during the 1800s the Industrial Revolution blossomed in Europe and the US. Ricardo's gloomy economic models became reality for many workers. Unlike Bacon, Ricardo just never had much faith in feudalistic English social systems to make everyone's lives better, and so never thought much about giving the government a more active role in the new unfolding quest for wealth, or the need for more liberal schools to teach the new democratic habits needed to create a more humane world. As a result, most factory owners continued using their new wealth to keep expanding their businesses and their own bank accounts with the government’s help. For example, in the US, while much of the country was suffering through yet another economic recession during the 1890s, Galbraith reported John Rockefeller Sr.'s oil refining businesses were making between $30 and $40 million dollars a year, and Andrew Carnegie's (d. 1919) steel corporation was taking in some $20 million a year! Those were indeed huge fortunes compared to most everyone else still working for slave-wages. What’s more, non-existent tax laws allowed them to keep almost all of it! Humane agnostic Scotsman Carnegie, however, would eventually sell his steel empire to J. P. Morgan for about $300 million, retire to a Scottish castle, and proceed to give almost all of it away to US charities.
Challenges Answered – The US Progressive Movement
In the 1800s, as industrial CEOs continued building factories, railroads, new weapons, and corporations with new scientific knowledge, many simply focused on making as much money as possible. People weren’t ready to demand government systems of regulations and taxes on such businesses and fortunes. Knowledge was power and such power could, thus, easily create ever larger amounts of personal wealth. Wealthy folks like J. P. Morgan would spend about half of his fortune building his art collection, and then building museums to display it! Like so many other wealthy folks his fortune was built with the help of a largely undereducated, unorganized, and uninformed public! Had workers and people been better educated about more liberal business goals, for example, they would have perhaps demanded more publicly owned banks be built, banks where the profits would be returned to the people rather than greedy bank CEOs.
Even Aristotle had seen the danger of such extreme wealth. It helped create violent revolutions both in ancient and modern times, as it did in Russia in 1917, in China in 1948, Cuba in 1960, and counter-revolutions too, like in Chile in 1971. In all of them tens of thousands of innocent people lost their lives and democratic practices were kept weak. So, once again, we can see the wisdom of building more liberal public schools, helping educate young folks about how to peacefully and intelligently keep improving life for everyone! In short, it took some time for enough people to see intelligent evolutionary improvements are much better for everyone than violent revolutionary changes! As they did, America’s first Progressive Movement was formed in the early 1900s. Many of its ideas have tested and found useful.
The more wealthy financiers like Morgan openly and proudly proclaimed he owed the public nothing, the more public opinion grew against such wealth. After all, he started building his fortune by buying defective rifles with money he inherited from his father, and then selling them to the federal government. Also, during the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s, Chicago meat processing companies like Swift and Armour sold the government rotten meat for its soldiers, more of whom died of diseases than gunfire. As such cold and heartless greedy business actions were reported by liberal journalists like Upton Sinclair, conservatives regularly labeled them as ‘muckrakers!’ As a result, however, the public became better educated about ways of improving their government. Conservatives, however, often wondered how dare anyone challenge their business actions? At any rate, becoming more aware of such events helped more people become better organized to create a US Progressive political movement in the early 1900s. It focused on empowering the government to better regulate and control business greed and the selling of harmful products. For example, invented in 1889 by a pharmacist, for years Coca Cola contained the highly addictive substance cocaine until enough people demanded it be removed from the formula.
Dewey clearly saw how in one way Marx was right: scientific knowledge and its business profits remained controlled by greedy people who often cared mainly about increasing their own bank accounts, and little else. Wealthy folks knew full well, politicians need re-election money, and so they could become the faithful servants of the wealthy upper class; that situation in fact remains perhaps the greatest weakness in the US political system. It allows a largely feudalistic social, educational, and economic system to remain solidly in place. Not enough people then, or now, are demanding their representatives be liberated from all wealthy donors with the help of publicly funded elections, so they can better serve the public good rather than their wealthy donors.
In fact, for almost all of US history a wealthy class has controlled the political system for their own welfare and their little economic corporate fiefs, much like governments and religions did in the Middle Ages. Even in our modern industrial age many workers often lived like medieval serfs, barely getting by as wage slaves. After all, most everyone was still uneducated and disorganized, and what’s more, weren’t even allowed to have much power to get organized, form unions, oppose owner greed, and make their lives better! The so-called Lockner Supreme Court of the early 1900s ruled time and again in favor of business interests, and against union workers and even income tax laws. After all, most of them were corporate lawyers. For much of US history the corporate class has waged a kind of legal war against unions, and to this day continues waging that war both at home and abroad, as if profits were the only god people should have.
All during the 1920s corporate America waged a war against Progressive leaders and their ideas. One such leader, Socialist Eugene Debs (d. 1926), was even jailed merely for telling people they didn’t have to fight in World War 1; to corporate leaders whose income depended on war, that was treason. However, at the end of the 1920s the modern ‘feudal’ money-based economic system proved its instability yet again.
Throughout the 1800s, regular economic recessions seemed to happen like clockwork, about every 20 years, and in 1929 it happened on a massive scale, thus re-energizing liberal Progressives around the country; Dewey even thought about running for president in 1936, as Debs had done many times before. Voters finally gave Progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt (d. 1945) the power he needed to create many government programs to help those millions who has lost their jobs and homes; many of them ended up on breadlines and selling pencils on street corners, my father included. Thank goodness many politically Progressive kind-heartedly humanists found their way to Hollywood and continued helping others with their fortunes as much as they could; they too often lived by the motto -- what goes around often comes around.
However, by no means were such enlightened Progressives everywhere. Many conservatives embraced the economic models of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus (d. 1834). For them life would always be a class struggle and workers were all but doomed to remain in poverty by what they felt were natural laws. What laws? Well, Malthus looked at population growth and began seeing the destructive results of over-population; population grew much faster than jobs were created. Thus, paying workers more would simply allow them to keep having more children and thus more workers would continue living in poverty, filth, and disease. It was all but inevitable, and Ricardo came to about the same conclusion. In fact, before the Great Depression in the 1930s such feelings remained strong for many US conservatives, many of whom took great pride in seeing life realistically, rather than optimistically like liberals. Even though worker wages and unionizing were increased, their lives would still remain poor and slavish.
Progressive liberals like Dewey saw the flaw in such thinking. Conservatives merely assumed most everyone couldn’t be educated to learn the intelligent skills they needed to live intelligently in the new industrial world. The assumption was old indeed; aristocrats like Plato and Aristotle made the same assumption thousands of years earlier. In reality, however, more people were seeing most everyone was capable of learning such intelligent habits, but only if they were educated in better schools! Thus, again, such schools became a much more important part of any form of democratic and economic progress. As a result, building more liberal schools became a crucially important goal for progressive reformers like Dewey. For most all of US history he saw our public schools as being unsuited for teaching students how to intelligently live in a new industrial and democratic society, and how best to combat mean, hateful, and undemocratic bigotry wherever it exists. For him not enough public schools were democratically oriented; they were authoritarian oriented by teachers demanding students keep learning more useless book facts, all justified with the phrase ‘producing well-rounded students.’ Even as Africans were feeling widespread housing discrimination in 1950s Democratically-controlled Chicago, I don’t recall ever even hearing about it in school, much less being encouraged to organize protests against it. No doubt, there were many more hateful racists in the North than people wanted to believe.
Workers Answer Their Challenges
Kids are often taught how the Industrial Revolution made the US a world power. Rarely, however, are they taught about all the new challenges they would face in such a world1 Schools often ignored such ideas in US history books, often written by conservative professors. Even though since the 1500s Protestant religions had been celebrating what they called the profit motive, rarely did history books talk about using profits to make everyone’s life better! As a result, only after the Civil War did progressive-minded workers start organizing and challenging wealthy owners to share more profits with them. Even when Henry Ford started paying his workers $5 a day, his corporate colleagues told him it would wreck his corporation and eventually shrink their profits too. Thus, corporate monopolies eventually became the main economic problem, even though economists like Adam Smith said they couldn’t become a problem! Smith believed for-profit capitalism had a kind of magical self-regulating mechanism against monopolies, and so they couldn’t become a problem. For him banks, however, needed to be well-regulated and controlled rather than business companies. However, US history showed even those ideas were easier said than done.
When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, more Progressive people finally became focused enough in the 1932 election to give Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic administration the power it needed to experiment with a new goal for government, namely using it to help those millions who had lost their homes, jobs, and even food. Thanks to such voters, the federal government finally became much more active in peoples’ social lives, tried putting people back to work, and make everyone's life a little better by building roads, bridges, and parks as well as retirement systems. The more it did, however, the weaker Adam Smith's for-profit economic goal became, and the stronger John Keynes’s (d. 1946) new economic system of government help became. During recessions and depressions the government could make life better with such actions.
To this day those 2 economic models continue being used by conservatives Republicans and liberal Democrats as teaching tools for people. Keynes said the government should become an employer with something he called deficit spending. The government could sell Treasury bonds to people, agree to pay them some interest, and then use the money to pay workers who had lost their jobs. To this day many conservatives continue complaining about the budget deficit, even though recent actions by Republican President George W. Bush increased the national debt by some $10 Trillion! What’s more, they continue rejecting commonsense solutions to reduce it, like taxing wealthy people more, and also reducing our huge military budget. Liberals know full well, our budget could be easily balanced simply by reduced military spending; it’s more than the closest 9 other countries combined! For conservatives, however, it remains a so-called ‘cash cow’! While not at war with anyone these days, why continue spending over $600 Billion tax-payer dollars a year on our military, and on some 1,000 military bases around the world!? How many public school educated kids even know such facts, much less know how to intelligently organize their democratic power to start demanding changes in that system? If not, they will continue paying for a US military empire mainly benefitting only a wealthy few.
Science’s Two Edges
Like every other habit-art, we liberal Deweyans picture science-dependent economics as a double-edged sword. One edge looks backward, so to speak; it helps us see what’s already known about economic history, and also how new discoveries and their challenges were used to increase economic wealth. That ‘edge’ focuses on the causes of economic power, like having weak inheritance taxes, and also allowing the wealthy to put their millions where it can’t be taxed by governments, namely in banks outside the US. Thus, with science's discoveries progress in a capitalist economy has largely produced great wealth for a few people and poverty for most, much like life was for our native, ancient, and medieval ancestors. As we’ve seen, many of them felt nature was not to be changed in any way, or as little as possible. Even Aristotle echoes such an idea when he says most everything worth discovering has already been discovered. Conservative Christians like Augustine too believed everything people need to know is already in the Bible. All such assumptions were easy to make in a science-poor world.
However, as Dewey also pointed out, there’s a 2nd ‘edge’ to science’s sword. That edge looks to the future; it asks questions like what should our taxes be used for, building more dangerous atomic weapons, and giving more money to already powerful corporations, or for building more liberal schools and a more just tax system where democratic values like equal rights are in fact practiced, and not just talked about? In short, science’s 2nd edge asked what goals should science’s knowledge be used for. In fact, Aristotle said such future-looking skills are what divide natural leaders from everyone else, and thus justify master-slave relationships. Also, when Dewey looked at the schools of his day he saw they regularly neglect teaching that important mental skill of making goals and plans to achieve them. Instead they focused on mere book assignments.
In short, smart people think about the goals and results of their actions before they act, while others think mainly about their own satisfactions. Aristotle felt if people didn’t practice a forward-looking skill of choosing goals and working intelligently for them, then they deserve to be treated like slaves, and don’t deserve to be citizens. Plato too was thinking ahead when he asked was it right to heal everyone with our medicines, like the Hippocratic Oath said, or should some people be allowed to die. In fact, today more and more people are asking if people shouldn’t have the right to end their own lives in some situations. In any case, however, Dewey felt most everyone could learn such forward-looking skills.
So, naturally, one liberal philosophic question became what kinds of future goals are different economic models offering? For example, is the best goal of conservative for-profit laissez-faire capitalism and its scientific inventions to merely increase the wealth-power of a small group of people, and keep life stressful for most everyone else? Or is a socialist goal of using science to make everyone’s life more satisfying a better one, like, say, Fabian socialists or even Marxist socialists said? Ultimately voters have the power to decide which economic goal they want their government to practice.
Since the growth of money-power in the 1800s, there have grown different economic models within liberal, moderate, and conservative philosophies. Democratic liberals like to say everyone’s well-being is important, and so children should be taught how to achieve that goal in many different situation. Conservatives like Plato said the well-being of only a small educated upper class is important. And moderates like Aristotle said the best economic goal was to grow a stabile middle class, so violence from both the poor and the rich would be reduced. Today, many conservatives say the best goal is to produce and protect a small wealthy upper class; only it will best control our political system so people won’t keep taking more money from the wealthy who create jobs for everyone. Only can such a class best keep using tax money to build the new military weapons helping protect everyone from attack by our enemies, new economic inventions like The World Bank to help improve everyone’s life, and also detect with new spying equipment those people within the country who might become dangerously violent.
Liberals, of course, have their own criticisms about such Republican goals. Recently one liberal senator offered his ideas about a proposed Republican budget plan. Said liberal Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:
“… The federal budget is about our national (goals) and our values. It is about who we are as a nation and what we stand for. It’s about how we assess the problems facing our country and how we resolve them. …
… we deal with a federal budget of some $4 trillion dollars. …
At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, the Republicans apparently believe the richest people in America need to be made even richer. It is apparently not good enough that 99% of all new income today is going to the top 1% … not good enough that the top .1% today own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% … in Republican eyes the wealthy … need more help. Not only should they not be asked to pay more in taxes, the Republicans believe that we should cut tax rates for millionaires and billionaires.
It is apparently not good enough that corporate America is enjoying record breaking profits, and that the CEOs of large corporations earn some 290 times more than what their average employees make.
… not good enough that since 1985 the top .1% has seen a more than $8 trillion increase in its wealth.
At a time when we have over 45 million Americans living in poverty … my Republicans colleagues think we should increase that number by cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit, affordable housing, and Medicaid … (and also) childcare, Head Start (school program), The Child Tax Credit, and nutrition assistance for hungry kids. …
To summarize: the rich get much richer, and the Republicans think they need more help. The middle class and working families of this country become poorer, and the Republicans think we need to cut programs they desperately need. … I do not believe that these are the (goals) of the American people.
… the US remains the only industrialized nation on earth that does not guarantee healthcare to all of its people. … Republicans … want to abolish the Affordable Care Act and take away the health insurance that 16 million Americans have gained through that program. …
Youth unemployment is over 17% and African-American youth unemployment is much higher than that. What the American people want, and what the Republican budget ignores, is the need to create millions of decent paying jobs … rebuilding our crumbling … roads, bridges, water systems, wastewater plants, airports, dams, levees, and broadband. …
… young people and their families are enormously frustrated by the high cost of college education and the horrendously oppressive student debt that many of them leave school with. In fact, student debt today, at $1.2 trillion, is the second largest category of debt in this country – more than credit card and auto loan debt. …
… Republicans … want to cut $90 billion in (college) Pell Grants over a 10-year period. …
… My Republican colleagues are concerned about an $18 trillion national debt … (largely caused by Republican President George W. Bush) cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and then conducting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an insurance written Medicare Part D drug program.
…we feel strongly that (it is both morally and economically wrong to) balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor … and ask nothing from the wealthy and large, profitable corporations. …
In 1952 corporations contributed about 32% of all federal revenue. Today, they contribute about 11%. …
When people are working at decent-wage jobs they are paying taxes. And … (helping) reduce the deficit and the national debt.” (Additions and editing are my own, from a Truthdig.com article by Bernie Sanders dated 3-19-2015).
Since Republicans took control of both the House and Senate in 2014, their political goals for the wealthiest among us have become clearer and more achievable. They’ve also provoked liberal responses like Sen. Sanders’s, and hopefully from millions of other liberals around the country. Unless we speak up, use our new communication tools to express our desires to our representatives, and thus keep challenging a conservative political agenda, it’ll be even easier for the wealthiest to keep our nation more feudalistic than democratic. Welcome to our new money-based political world.
CEO Henry stopped for a fast-food meal,
And some quality time with his friend Neal.
But, after stuffing his head,
Quickly excused himself and said,
Gotta run and close the next big deal.
15. ECONOMIC CHALLENGES, 101
Building and Defending the US Economic Empire
At this point the reader may feel not much more can be said about the way modern for-profit economics is actually practiced in the US around the world. In fact, however, a new and more interdependent economic world has recently emerged, and it has created many other challenges for voters around the world. For example, as US economic power became the strongest on earth after 2 World Wars, other countries too became challenged to limit the way they were exploited by US corporations for their natural resources and debt-payments. Sometimes such loan agreements were okayed by conservative politicians in other countries who themselves were often paid small fortunes by corporations while the educational needs of their citizens were ignored. Throughout history conservative elites have feared educating the lower classes; more educated people could only weaken ruling power. Religious habits thus became the main subjects of education. In fact, for thousands of years such conservatives have maintained their power mainly by keeping most people uneducated, poor, and dependent. After all, the more painful and dangerous life remained, the easier it was to keep thinking about a perfect life after death.
In South and Central America even after Columbus, for example, the sense of Spanish unity was almost non-existent and so they never joined together to form a United States of South or Central America. As a result each one remained vulnerable to the US's great economic banking and financing power all during the 1900s. For decades, as peasant populations remained uneducated and disorganized, powerful US banks and corporations learned how to use their scientific knowledge and technology not to educate more people and improve their lives, but to keep enslaving them economically with perpetual debt. In exchange for modern scientific technology, like railroads and electrical systems, undeveloped countries were often chained to loan-debts they might never pay off! After all, banks and financiers wanted to make as much money as possible? Thanks to the new money economy Francis Bacon’s Knowledge is Power was transformed into Wealth is Power, as religious ideas were replaced with scientific ones. Thus, quite naturally, uneducated and disorganized people continued allowing wealthy US industrialists to use their scientific knowledge to keep making life more profitable for themselves, often by increasing the value of the stock they owned in the company, and also with the help of local politicians eager to make money too. Chile’s copper resources, for example, were exploited for decades by US mining companies.
No doubt, throughout the 1900s many poor Latin American nations saw some electrical and rail improvements. After all, US corporations need ways to get their coffee and sugar back to the US faster, and also to keep track of any rebellious movement. But paying off their loan-debts often became like trying to dig a hole to China! John Perkins's insightful Confessions of an Economic Hit Man goes into much greater detail about how the US for-profit economic system was working in other countries during the 1960s and 70s. What’s more, instead of paying native workers to run their own companies, often only American workers were allowed to operate the new technology, thus keeping more liberating wealth from native workers and building a larger middle class. In short, foreign economic growth was kept to a minimum if it grew at all! Such exploitative actions merely continued a tradition going back to the Roman Empire and their turning places like Egypt and Palestine into slaves, and after them the Roman Catholic Church in much of Europe and North America, and after them many conservative Islamic leaders too. All such empires depend on an obedient, uneducated, and disorganized populace, and when that didn’t work US military power often stepped in. Even when foreign voters did manage to elect more liberal people who stood up to such unfair domination, then the US military was often used to simply remove such leaders and replace them with more US-friendly people. Often many military officers became dictators in those countries; it was the general plan in many countries around the world, again as Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States teaches us.
To cite merely one example, such a thing happened when Chileans finally elected a liberal socialist president in 1970. Almost immediately foreign corporations were notified, who in turn quickly let President Nixon know; he in turn instructed the CIA to begin working to overthrow that president and install a US-friendly military dictator. Instinctively conservatives like Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger acted to preserve US economy monopolies wherever they exist. The following year the president was overthrown and thousands in innocent Chileans were tortured or killed. As far as Nixon and Kissinger were concerned, under no circumstances were the peoples’ needs to become more important than US corporate profits. In fact, such a foreign policy was in place all during the 1900s, and if governments were elected to challenge it, they were often overthrown and replaced with more US corporate-friendly dictators. No doubt, fair prices are good business; after all, it costs money to build electrical generators, train engines, lay railroad tracks, and build electric can openers. However, the interest on the loans for those projects were often designed to keep taking more money from the public, and so keep them as economically weak as possible, and of course pay off friendly politicians in those countries. In fact, the same kinds of things are still happening even in the US today; many corporate-friendly politicians are often given very well-paying lobbying jobs when they leave office.
Dewey certainly wasn't afraid to describe some of the harmful social results of allowing greedy people to control scientific technology for their own benefit. In the late 1800s, for example, railroad technology often became monopolistically controlled in different areas of the US by one major line, and thus could charge farmers whatever they wanted to ship their crops and livestock to cities like Chicago and St. Louis. And when farmers couldn’t pay their bank loans back, many lost their farms. What’s more, in most places schools regularly left students with little or no economic knowledge or collective organizing skills, and so they remained easily dominated by wealthy folks and their hired political allies.
No doubt, in the US it's taken many decades even without good schools for the public to become better educated, but with the help of new communication tools like radio, TV, liberal newspapers, and websites, uneducated folks have slowly learned more about what's going on economically, and how wealthy folks more recently have gained even more political power than ever before. But without turning that knowledge into political power by electing more liberal kinds of people, such knowledge remains largely useless. It’s one thing to know how our political-economic system is working, but it’s another thing to actually get out and vote for those who want to keep improving life for everyone, and not just the wealthy few.
While an Industrial Revolution was raging in the US and Europe, many poor Third World nations in the 1900s often saw life get worse rather than better, as it did for many US workers as well. For much of the century there was a virtual corporate war on workers becoming more organized into labor unions; they were helping get more money for their workers and thus reducing corporate profits. Even the conservative Supreme Court often ruled against such unions. So, the challenge became what to do about it. In ancient times liberals Greeks eventually began creating a more democratic political system as wealthy folks continued increasing their money-power and with it maintaining their feudal-like economic and social systems. Eventually, however, Athens and many other city-states built more democratic systems. Much the same kind of movement formed in the US in the 1890s as many southern farmers began organizing themselves into what became a liberal Progressive movement in the early 1900s. As the movement grew new constitutional amendments were passed creating taxing power on incomes, and the direct election of US senators. In many states too direct forms of democratic power were created with so-called initiative and referendum systems. But again, if people didn’t vote intelligently to make life better for everyone, then they became merely another way to maintain the social status quo.
No doubt, not all political experiments were as intelligent. An amendment was passed against selling alcohol, and then repealed about 10 years later when the social results of organized crime became obvious. However, even that events taught voters real progress can be made if enough people become organized and focused. After all, their taxes support politicians, and so they have a right to experiment with any economic idea they like, as long as enough people vote for it. What’s more, as the Great Depression spread in the 1930s, such feelings sunk even deeper into the US political psyche. People elected more liberal Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt who firmly believed the government should help everyone, not just the wealthy upper class. Unemployment insurance and social security retirement system were 2 such ideas, as were creating more work projects around the country; unemployment was around 25% at the time. Today, however, as Senator Sanders reminded us in the last section, Republicans continue working to dismantle both Social Security and Medicare health systems, rather than raise taxes on the wealthy to better finance such systems. After all, the more people must work to pay for their retirement and healthcare, the less time they have to learn what the wealthy are doing to keep increasing their wealth, and also organize to challenge it.
To us Deweyan liberals such positive democratic events are the most intelligent way to keep making life better for everyone by continuing to break up any form of concentrated monopolistic power. Whether it’s economic, religious, or political it’s too easy to use it merely to keep increasing one’s power, rather than increasing the public good. To us liberal Deweyans, the more people are educated and organized to demand a decent wage, and demand the wealthy pay more in taxes on the money they often inherited, the easier it’ll becomes for more folks to buy the goods and finance the systems making life more satisfying and enjoyable for everyone. Really now, does anyone need more than a million dollars a year to live well? For us liberals, such greedy and selfish actions are not only mean and shortsighted, but their results often keep dividing people into hostile classes, helping create enemies rather than friends and allies, both inside a country and in the world community. Why should any true liberal who believes we are all human beings want to encourage those divisive results? Only those adolescent conservatives who’ve been taught to feel only their system of habits is really nature’s eternal and unchanging Truth feel everyone should be made to act like they act. Such conservative feelings and ideas are no longer seen as enlightened or civilized. With the growth of scientific knowledge about life and nature such ideas are at the least questionable, and at the most highly doubtful, be they economic, political, or religious. In fact, they have been, and continue being used to justify killing of anyone with different ideas.
Instead of ushering in an era of wealth and liberating prosperity for everyone, too many people have allowed science’s knowledge has been used for supporting basically feudalistic economic, political, and educational systems! In our modern era, a religious-based feudal system was merely replaced with an excessively greedy, for-profit feudal economic wealth system. In both kinds of feudal systems a small class of people continued controlling as many lives as they can. In medieval times religious leaders often encouraged poor people to stay excessively dependent on spirit-rituals like prayer and worship, while in our modern era low wages and high rents have continued producing economic slavery and perpetual debt. For-profit, under-regulated capitalism’s main critic, Karl Marx (d.1883), predicted such a system would inevitably collapse under pressure from worker revolutions, and then be replaced by an economic communism, where land and wealth would be shared equally. That of course was the theory. In reality, however, even in countries where such revolutions have occurred, like Russia, China, and Cuba, people still remain divided along economic lines. Both Russia and China has its class of wealthy oligarchs just as the US does. What’s most important for us liberal Deweyans, then, is keeping such wealth in circulation; if not, life becomes more difficult for most everyone. There will probably always be some people who have money-making talent, but for us Deweyan liberals, to allow them to merely keep making more and more money is not only psychically childish, but socially irresponsible as well.
In any case, however, what’s important for liberals like us is to keep intelligent experimentation alive and growing! It’s yet another reason liberal schools are so important for the growth and maintenance of any truly liberal democratic nation. For Dewey even the idea of violent revolution was ridiculous; history showed again and again such revolutions are often followed by an even more violent conservative reaction, thus making life even more difficult, not less. Still, in many parts of the world today many corporate and religious conservatives continue believing the sword is the best way to make life better. Some religious leaders even forbid children to be immunized against crippling diseases.
For Dewey democratic power was by far a more intelligent way to keep making any kind of improvement, whether economic, medical, technological, or political, even if such systems are more difficult to build. Under-regulated for-profit capitalism, for example, is useful for creating great wealth for a small minority, but when left under-regulated it makes life increasingly more difficult for most everyone. Thus, a great political challenge remains, namely, to keep learning more about economic reality, as well as organizing to better weaken all harmful and enslaving monopolistic power. Given such peaceful forms of democratic people-power, any improvement will be easier, and that brings us to mentioning a few specific ones.
More On-Going Challenges
Perhaps the 2 most important ones are (1): building more public banks so as to create some banking competition in a world where a handful of huge Wall Street banks have an effective banking monopoly. Such a monopoly makes it easier to keep taking more and more of the public’s money from them, rather than allowing people to keep making more local improvements with science’s help. Big banks can and do often charge cities much higher interest rates on the money they loan than public banks would. Thus, more money is available for local uses. And what’s more, public bank profits too are used to continue improving life at the local level, rather than allowing profits to go to Wall Street. Both those results alone are reason enough for people to not ask, but to demand their politicians help building such banks!
And (2), creating publicly funded elections, so our representatives can finally become liberated from control by our small obscenely wealthy upper class. Again, it’s probably best to start building such systems AT THE LOCAL LEVEL! That’s important! At that level it’s much more difficult for wealthy conservatives to stop their development. And, the more such systems grow at a local level, the easier it becomes to then grow them at the county, state, and national levels. No doubt, such systems will take time to build, but then again, what useful system doesn’t take some time to grow? In any case, however, true liberals will feel it their duty to keep working for such improvements. If not, then life at all of those levels will continue promoting a feudal social model rather than a democratic one, and seeing a small number of obscenely wealthy people control more and more wealth! Again, if such concentrated wealth isn’t better circulated with higher income and capital gains taxes, then within a few years useful social programs like Social Security and Medicare will run out of money and thus make life even more stressful, painful, short, nasty, and brutish, much like it was for medieval peasants and slavish serfs.
For much of the 1900s US corporations often used their superior scientific technology in poor undeveloped countries not to liberate people, but to enslave them. Even in communist China millions of people work for slave-wages, and even families are sometimes broken up to increase their earning power. Because their workers are still largely disorganized, they can hire young women and even children to build TVs and cars much cheaper than in the US, all in the name of growing corporate profits.
Another important improvement is riding the world of almost all horribly destructive atomic weapons! No doubt, they might have some peaceful uses, like destroying a potentially dangerous asteroid, or to stop some army from invading another country, but in general they remain a challenge for every peace-oriented person on the planet today. After all, explosive atomic energy affects everyone, and not just soldiers, as the Japanese well know. Merely one hydrogen bomb is so powerful it can utterly destroy most everyone even in large cities like Chicago or San Francisco. Luckily, the US and Russia which have the largest number of them have ceased making more, but even the many millions of tax-dollars required for their maintenance and upkeep continues taking valuable dollars away from helping create better housing and healthcare systems. Not enough people around the world have been educated about their tremendous destructive power, and so such weapons continue being built and spread. Who knows what paranoid dictator will launch one, and thus endanger all the people in that country by those launched in retaliation. For truly civilized people such weapons aren’t needed, and so remain a challenge.
No doubt, most people are still so tired after working long hours just to pay their monthly bills they have little time or energy for such important causes. Not enough people realize, as the world becomes more business-interactive, using them will also hurt the corporate world as well as millions of innocent people. What’s more, there are unhealthful psychic results too. People who have them often feel a perverse sense of pride and accomplishment at being able to use their scientific technology to kill innocent millions. Dewey might call it an unhealthy sense of power; such feelings keep people distracted from better controlling the more real threats from local radicals who feel they have a duty to kill as many people as they can with their own little homemade bombs. Who really needs more than a few atomic weapons, say 5, to keep any large army from attacking another country?
In fact, hugely destructively atomic weapons are becoming less and less useful, but not less dangerous. So, many people today are still challenged to do something about allowing their elected leaders to keep spending more of their tax dollars on even maintaining the thousands of atomic weapons we already have. Too many countries around the world today continue being too much a part of the economy, so how intelligent for economic health is merely making more of them?
After World War 2 Japan’s shattered economy recovered rather quickly, largely because it had no military expenses of its own; today it's one of the world's most productive economies. It seems more countries are learning the same lessons about the benefits of a small military budget. Brazil too has no military to speak of and its economy is working rather well, but for how long no one knows; its population continues increasing slums around the country and thus creating more and more economic stress. Can new warplanes, warships, and missiles help people become better educated and know how to keep building a more enjoyable life for everyone? Can having more powerful guns ever teach young folks how to make the world a more peaceful place, or build excellent character habits like diet and exercise? Liberal economist John Galbraith asked how can we honestly ask other nations not to build nuclear weapons when we ourselves already have thousands of them? It's like Goliath asking David not to build his own sling!
At the very least, intelligent liberals will argue such killing weapons are not what scientific knowledge should be used for; it should be used to build better schools, homes, and businesses rather than kill as many as possible, or even keep life as dangerous as possible. Wouldn’t all the energy trapped in Democritus’s atoms be better used to help light, heat, and cool our schools, homes and office buildings, rather than merely sit atop missiles ready to kill millions? Weren’t such weapons built in the 1950s by paranoid politicians and military generals during what’s called the Cold War? But what kind of reason is that to continue endangering the lives of millions of people around the world?
Thus, a rather practical question becomes important: How much longer will mentally naïve, undereducated, and disorganized young folks continue allowing such weapons to exist anywhere? How much longer with they continue ignoring their own social responsibility with their own selfish and addictive habits, like abusing alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and food? How much longer will we continue allowing our schools to keep distracting student attention away from growing more intelligent habits by teaching merely academic trivia?
Building such liberal schools is yet another very serious and important social challenge! Again, however, if focused at the local level, rather than the state of national levels, such schools can be built one at time. Almost certainly, without such schools teaching what it means to live in a vibrant and growing democratic republic, life will continue being feudalistic than not. Such results are not what modern civilized people need, and they’re prepared to challenge anyone who says they are!
As we’ve seen, for thousands of years conservatives have been educated to see the world differently. As a result, many religious fanatics believe only their philosophic and economic models are true, and they should kill anyone who disagrees with them, whether they’re innocent or not. The seemingly harmless-sounding phrase often used to mask such obnoxious results is ‘collateral damage;’ in wartime innocent people are always killed. Thus, yet another important modern challenge faces us all: taxing all the profits from war and war-related actions, and again such actions are best grown at the local level first! It’s the level easiest to improve as well as defend. At any rate, war will continue enriching the already wealthy and making life more dangerous and fearful for everyone; how many are already afraid some flying drone might kill them? Science has helped make our world more interconnected than ever, and so it's now everyone's challenged to keep improving all the dangerous systems still existing today while also encouraging more peaceful and enjoyable ones.
Economic Results Are Important
No doubt, many people today believe for-profit capitalism is the best system for giving most everyone the chance to build their own fortune, but many social results of that economic model continue proving more and more obnoxious for the public good. One modern example is Greece, where after the economic recession of 2008-9 the European Central Bank (ECB) imposed its version of economic austerity before more money would be loaned to finance Greece’s social programs. As we’ve seen, one aim of conservative capitalists is to reduce and end as many government programs as possible, so they can be taken over by private for-profit companies. As a result, Greece’s economic growth was hobbled by more debt owed to the ECB; it hobbled much needed employment programs to help get the economy rolling again. Unemployment shot up and remained unnecessarily high, thus making it even more difficult for the government to collect the taxes it needed to fund its programs. Eventually more people became aware of what was going on economically, and recently elected a more liberal government to challenge such actions! A conservative Germany government too is playing an important role in backing such anti-social austerity programs in Europe. It’s much like in ancient times. Pericles too told the Athenians they’d lose their empire if they allowed just one city-state to rebel. One can well imagine people at the ECB feeling the same way about Greece.
Modern communication tools like newspapers, the internet, TV and radio have been a great help in educating not only the Greek public, but all publics about electing those liberals and socialists who say they will best solve such problems. However, such new tools are also proving ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were wrong; most everyone can be educated to both think and act rationally! Indeed, because they assumed they couldn’t, it helped justify their aristocratic feelings about slaves and business people too. Only ancient liberal Greek Sophists, Atomists, and Skeptics realized how education for everyone was needed for any kind of democratic excellence. If not, then the results mentioned in the previous paragraphs would continue making life difficult for as many as possible.
In short, many events in Plato’s and Aristotle’s day have similarities today. In fact, with better educational tools today, more people than ever before can become much better informed about what’s going on in their new money-based economic-political system. In Bolivia, for example, even better educated natives eventually realized their own precious natural gas reserves were being shipped off to the US, practically for nothing, and helped increase their own energy costs, the made some needed changes. And, how many Venezuelans too eventually got fed-up with seeing their precious oil reserves used to make a few people richer in the US while most people remained poor as church mice? In 1980 they finally elected a socialist president who wanted to produce different results for everyone. And in the early 1900s we’ve seen how millions of US Progressive Democrats finally became organized enough to make some political improvement in their system. It all resulted from more people becoming better educated about what’s happening here and now, and then focusing their political power to start making changes! In short, liberals soon realized feeling pessimistic about improving any political or economic system only makes improving them more difficult. Lack of such educational tools in the ancient and medieval worlds was, perhaps, their greatest weakness.
Economic Events Help Educate and Organize
No doubt, at first only a few people began feeling such challenges and opportunities; all movements grow slowly. But, the more they helped teach other people about them, the faster such movements grew. In the early 1900s the US Progressive movement became strong enough to add some useful amendments to the Constitution itself, and then after the Great Depression spread in the 1930s it was easier to elect people like Franklin Roosevelt who promised people a New Deal by the government. People got tired of hearing conservative Republican President Herbert Hoover (d.1964) tell them prosperity was just around the corner. The more corners people actually rounded, the more they saw the actual results of his small-government political model: banks kept closing by the thousands; millions kept losing their jobs; and homeless numbers increased tremendously. In fact, such encampments were typically called Hoovervilles!
By the 1930s Dewey had seen how even FDR’s New Deal was being negated by the still conservative Supreme Court. He also felt FDR’s program wasn’t doing enough to help people who were really suffering. Many families didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. For Dewey FDR was too afraid of experimenting with John Keynes’s new economic ideas for using the government to create jobs, especially during recessions and depressions. Keynes saw clearly the government could easily create more jobs when the economy slowed down, as happened during the Great Depression. As always, conservative Republicans reacted negatively, even though Keynes’s new economic logic was simple to understand. During recessions people lose their jobs and their purchasing power, thus the economy slows down and causes even more people to lose their jobs, pay fewer taxes, and thus get fewer services. What’s more, the government could simply create jobs like improving roads, bridges, parks, schools and libraries by simply selling bonds to pay workers, and thus lessen the terrible social results of the Depression. More people would have more money to spend and thus keep the economy stable, if not growing.
As usual conservative Republicans instinctively opposed those ideas; all during the 1930s Hoover kept saying the government should do nothing to create jobs; the economy will recover by itself. After all, in recessions as government services are cut back, it becomes easier for wealthy folks to gain more economic control of the economy, like, for example, buying more publicly owned electrical and water companies. So, in the latest banking collapse and recession of 2008-9, conservatives offered their own version of Hoover economic austerity, though using the rather harmless-sounding word ‘sequestration’; there seems to be no limit to such propaganda talent. The rather harmless-sounding word means nothing to almost everyone.
The conservative ‘sequestration’ plan was much the same as Europe’s austerity: Cut government spending, reduce taxes on the wealthy, and they would create the private-sector jobs people needed. It’s as if the wealthy had replaced the pope in the Middle Ages; both of them gave people hope, and little else. In fact, for the last 70-some years there was really only one thing wrong with such conservative economic models: They never worked! In fact, World War 2 created enough jobs to end the depression, and even after the war the exact opposite happened in the US economy. During the 1950s wealthy folks remained taxed as high as 80%-90% and the US economy grew tremendously! The new conservative economic god based on wealth was proving about as effective as the religious god for making life better for everyone. Much of Europe and Japan needed to be rebuilt and the US was capable of answering that challenge.
As I write in 2015, the ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are working together to impose economic austerity programs around the continent. By the ECB’s demanding money payments from, say, Greece, it becomes more difficult for the Greek government to maintain the helpful services to those who need help, like retired and disabled people. Naturally, the result has been much more suffering and economic stagnation around the continent than anything else! Thus, it’s again become easier for wealthy folks to buy up many publicly owned properties and utilities at reduced prices, increase their profit-making power while higher prices energy and healthcare make life more difficult for millions! Little wonder some European and Latin American countries have become much more socialistic than the US. They saw how for-profit economic systems were being used not just to favor a few wealthy industrialists and businessmen, but were in fact used to continue enslaving people to perpetual forms of debt. As the US government has been forced to cut back on student college loans, student debt has ballooned like an atomic mushroom cloud to over $1 Trillion, much of it going to already large Wall Street banks!
Liberal Greek progressives have recently answered such economic challenges. In its most recent election they voted to elect a Socialist government with the power to challenge such confining and counterproductive austerity programs. In short, a more organized voting public began taking a more intelligent control of their lives and economic system. Negotiations between Athens and the ECB are continuing but it shows once again how organized popular actions are the key to improving any system peacefully and intelligently.
No doubt, the tension between liberal and conservative economic systems continues. It’s a battle between humane democratic and aristocratic feudal economic and political models. In reality, however, most people seem unaware of it. Liberals have managed to build more humane public banks around the world, increasing banking competition, and better serving the public interest, rather than merely a few wealthy banks. And of course huge international banks like the IMF would, no doubt, like to end all of them. True, often liberal political power isn’t as strong as it could be, but a much more active role for government in regulating the economic sector seems to keep growing in many parts of the world, as it has, until recently, in the US as well. A few Progressive and even Socialist politicians have been elected even within a largely conservative US economy, but they continue educating people about different economic and political goals possible in the US, and how to begin experimenting with them. One recent article by noted journalist Chris Hedges, The Most Dangerous Woman in America, at Truthdig.com, (3-15-15) describes some of the challenges an openly Socialist woman politician in Seattle is facing in an increasingly wealth-dominated US. And another related article The Noose Around Greece: How Central Banks Harness Governments by public bank advocate Ellen Brown (3-12-15) at the same website describes how the ECB has been manipulating national economies like Greece’s to cut back on its social programs, thus making it easier for already wealthy folks to privatize more social services for their own profit!
In short, with the continued growth of concentrated wealth, more people than ever before continue being challenged to elect more progressively liberal politicians and thus gain more control over the public’s money. The challenge is simply to better control and regulate the huge monopolistic corporations and obscenely wealthy folks now dominating much of the world's political and economy systems. What has Wall Street to do with the Public Street? Again, it’s another reason why the public bank option has become more important than ever these days. And if such banks aren’t created, then the capitalist economic cycle of growth-and-recession will no doubt regularly continue creating life-disrupting recessions and depressions in which many lose their jobs, homes, and businesses. Also, another great modern challenge is to keep building more liberal schools educating young folks about economic and political reality here and now! In them students will learn how they can experiment intelligently with different economic and political ideas, rather than just sheepishly accept the status quo models we now have. No doubt, those kinds of sheepish and fatalistic feelings are exactly what many wealthy conservatives want people to feel! The more they do, the easier it becomes for them to keep concentrating more wealth for themselves. For many such people, enough wealth is always just a little bit more.
More About Democratic and Educational Challenges
For conservatives since Plato, and even moderates like Aristotle, democratic freedoms and practices were the enemy; and they remain so for modern-day conservatives and moderates too, Democrats as well as Republicans! As the ancient Greeks found out in the late 400s BCE, democratic excellence can work best for everyone’s good only if enough citizens are educated and intelligent enough to respect and treat all people as equals. Ancient imperialists like Pericles, for example, and modern ones like many neo-conservative Republicans, regularly tell people our empire will collapse if we allow even one of our military bases to close. Thus, we must keep preparing for war and spending great amounts of human lives and tax money to defend our empire.
In such a situation liberal humane kinds of education become more important than ever. They emphasize building respectful and peace-promoting habits like paying workers a fair share of the profits, respecting all peaceful and law-abiding people equally, and also how to experiment intelligently with all our challenges here and now. History has shown so many times before, the less those ideas and skills are taught to the next generation, the more difficult life remains. Reality teaches us such habit-arts don't just suddenly start working merely because people have democratic freedom. No. In fact, such freedom is merely the first step to building more liberal, respectful, experimental, and peace-oriented habits. In reality, schools, homes, churches, synagogues, and mosques can all become part of such an education system. As we saw earlier, in the 700s, 800s, and 900s CE, Islam inherited much from the ancient Greek culture, built a highly advanced civilization of their own, and eventually even taught Christians about Aristotle’s moderate models of life and nature in the 1100s.
The modern quest for more and more for-profit wealth is challenging people today to take more responsibility for their political and educational choices. Not voting or building more liberal schools merely encourages a conservative status quo, just as it encouraged a medieval religious status quo for centuries. In both cases the challenge is basically the same, that is, to keep enlarging peoples’ power to determine their own fate and destiny. We Deweyan liberals say that can best be accomplished only with a better educational system. For example, in the 1500s the more people saw other religious options besides the Catholic one, the easier it was to finally break the Church’s religious and economic monopolies allowing a feudalistic social system to remain in place.
No doubt, another very important challenge for our educational systems is population control. The days are over when a man and woman could bring 10 or 12 children into the world and feel they all can have a rewarding and satisfying life. Our earth and its resources like water and farm land are not infinite; as many are learning today, they’re often very limited in many places. As usual, liberal schools are freest to teach such ideas and birth-control skills to the next generation. In fact, in many places already, like Russia, Japan, China, and India women are becoming more intelligent about their reproductive choices, options, and goals. Even if biologists were to discover how photosynthesis works, so that the food supply would greatly increase, providing resources like fresh water, clean air, healthcare, and housing would still be important challenges.
Another important educational challenge is controlling climate change with carbon emissions. Never before in history has one species affected the earth more than we humans have. Even today much of the world’s economy is powered by carbon-based fossil fuels, like coal and oil, but we’re learning atmospheric carbon too has its limits, above which dangerous results are more likely. Industry and homes need energy, but both coal and oil are loaded with carbon. Too much carbon helps trap too much solar energy, thus increasing temperatures and making life more difficult for most everyone. Thus industrial countries like the US, Europe, China, and India are challenged to find other kinds of energy sources, like solar for example. Like a broken record, however, many conservative US representatives often keep denying such dangerous results are only a few decades away, thus challenging voters to learn more about climate change, and then elect people who will do more than simply deny, deny, deny the evidence. In an always moving and changing world, conservatives who keep wanting to minimize change become dangerous obstacles to progressive democratic improvements.
As mentioned earlier, the teaching of excellent democratic character habits like diet, exercise, respecting others and just laws, and allowing all law-abiding people to have equal rights and opportunities are also challenging voters today. After all, crime, lawlessness, expensive prisons, and many other serious social problems all have educational solutions. No one is born a murderer, rapist, or terrorist; such habits are all learned, and thus have educational solutions. Conservative schools, however, who continue ignoring such liberal habits in favor of academic test scores become a drag on progress and improvement itself! It’s as if such schools care nothing about student well-being, and only about teaching the subject they were taught. Deweyan liberals are different. We say students should be educated in a more holistic way, where character habits are as important as any other subject. In fact for us Dewey liberals, because such habits are useful all through life, they’re far more important than any academic trivia one cares to name, including knowing many US History and literature facts.
Again, and again, the more schools keep ignoring teaching such habit-arts on a continuing basis in all grades, the more difficult it becomes to reduce all the harmful results of ignoring them. For example, it now costs taxpayers about $50,000 a year to house, feed, and clothe one dangerous criminal, but much less than that to teach children the useful job and character skills they need to start earning some honest money after high school. If young folks start learning such positive character habit-arts like respecting others and just laws, and intelligently helping those in need, then almost certainly life will continue becoming even more stressful and dangerous. Conservatives, of course, have an empire to maintain with military force, and so they want young folks to learn their job skills in it, rather than in school. And so once again people are challenged to make a choice and decide what kind of schools they want, conservative academic schools or practical liberal ones. To be sure, democracy doesn’t mean merely obeying whatever people are told to do; that’s feudalistic, not democratic. Also, liberal economic excellence doesn't mean meekly accepting greed as a worthwhile goal in life either.
Making the choice more difficult is the fact, for most all of history political and religious leaders have ignored educating all people in liberal democratic schools. Beginning with Plato, religious conservatives have worked to restrict the education of most everyone; it’s one of Christianity’s saddest results too. In the Late Middle Ages Catholics created the infamous list of forbidden books to read; god forbid people should learn any other model of life and nature. As a result, education even 4 centuries into our modern era has remained largely conservative and authoritarian. Most everyone was educated to merely accept their economic class, diseases, poverty, and ignorance as all part of god’s plan. But how can people create a more civilized and peaceful world for everyone when they're not taught how best to build it? Thus, such liberal schools remain a challenge even in much of the developed world, as we'll see a little later.
Such facts are still more evidence our world is still just emerging from an ancient and medieval feudal system, where military war-lords controlled their local fiefs and almost everyone was made to support those socially 'above' them. Until only a few decades ago Japan was a typical example. Even as science begins learning how to actually create improved plant forms, how to put millions of information-bits on small microchips, or make new medicines to help combat and cure many deadly diseases, companies are still figuring out how to make as much money as they can from those inventions. In Plato’s and Aristotle’s world they could look down on all such work, but no longer can intelligent people feel that way. All honest forms of making money deserve respect, but what’s more important these days is not how much money someone has, but what they do with it! Do they use it to merely keep making more money, or use it to help those less well off. No doubt, there are no eternal and unchanging economic laws, so the future remains open to improvement with intelligent experimentation, but only if enough people are educated to feel how such goals can be intelligently worked for!
Here's another challenging political idea we all might want to start experimenting with: what will governments look like when people have 2-way televisions and are able to vote on current political questions in real time, here and now, at the local, state, and national levels? Wouldn't a good place to start experimenting with such democratic systems be at the local city level? After all, even Aristotle admitted democracies are much tougher for the wealthy to control and corrupt than any other form of government. Today, we’re seeing more and more even the US national government controlled by a small wealthy conservative class. Who knows what new uses our electronic technology can have for building a modern form of direct democracy? A technology revolution continues evolving with science's help, but how will WE USE such machines? It’s a challenge for everyone these days. Will we allow a few wealthy people to continue having more and more money-making power, or will we begin taking more control of our own political systems for everyone’s benefit?
As always such challenges are best answered in the real world, but without some interesting ideas and goals to help guide our experimental actions, how can we make any improvements in our present systems? Thus, liberal political and educational models like Dewey’s remain important for people today. Will we keep allowing our strongest scientific knowledge to continue enslaving or liberating people, including children in conservative academic-obsessed schools? The more scientific knowledge grows, the more we're challenged to use it wisely here and now, and if we don't wipe ourselves out with atomic weapons or some deadly diseases, almost certainly scientific knowledge will continue growing. Thus, an almost perpetual challenge will be to keep using new inventions constructively and humanely for human good. In short, using experimental knowledge to achieve more liberal goals will remain a challenge for everyone; if not, then either greedy business people or religious fanatics or both will continue endangering everyone's life.
However, merely because science can continue brightening many lives, there’s no guarantee it’ll continue to do so, or that it will be better used. Again, and again, progress to a better world for everyone is not inevitable; it depends on peoples’ own actions here and now! Should we keep allowing tax dollars to send people into space without knowing what they're doing there, and how they're spending everyone's socialized tax money, especially when millions on earth don’t have enough electrical energy to study or run a business, learn how important controlling population is, keep ignoring life-threatening global warming, carbon pollution, super bacteria, and reducing our own deadly atomic wastes! Why not encourage NASA engineers to keep making life on earth as good as possible, rather than wasting precious tax dollars on even more useless missions to dead, lifeless, and dangerous planets? Almost certainly, when the technology becomes available to send a mission to another earth-like planet billions of miles away, robots will be used to start another branch of the human race. Until then, why not stay focused on using our socialized tax money to keep making life on earth more enjoyable and satisfying.
Since the Great Depression many of Adam Smith’s economic ideas have been rejected by liberal democrats and their progressive elected officials. The result has increased government’s role in peoples’ lives. After all, Smith’s capitalistic economic model has merely helped change the controlling power of feudalism from land and property to money. As Venice, for example, became an important medieval trading center gold coins started becoming more important. However, we’re all just people, and so all law abiding people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, rather than as merely interchangeable tools of the economic system, or worse, something to keep harassing and even kill if they have different habits. In fact, our own book-obsessed public schools help create homelessness by not teaching students the useful job and character skills needed to becoming productive adults. Then life becomes even more stressful as police are used to keep harassing them. Such results help us liberals think new goals for our schools and governments have become much more important than ever before. Also, regular economic cycles of growth-recession-depression-growth also help us believe better government control and planning might produce better results. Some liberal goals like social security and unemployment insurance helped give me the time to build these books, and thus help keep new liberal goals alive and growing.
In short, economic, political, educational, and even human evolution is far from over. In fact, almost certainly they will never stop evolving until our earth is finally destroyed naturally in about 5 billion more years. It looks like the only economic natural law is there is no economic natural law; there are only conservative, moderate, and liberal models of them. Our recent deep and painful recession of 2008-9 teaches us yet again, our economy could be even better controlled and regulated, especially its banking and investment sectors, but it probably won’t happen again until enough liberals focus their political power and elect enough people to make it happen! That much seems certain. In the meantime millions are still out of work with little chance of finding something meaningful, and many more will still lose their jobs while financial managers continue getting huge million dollar bonuses, largely from taxpayer bailouts voted for by corporate-friendly politicians! Again, such results tells us liberals that system needs some different kinds of experiments to better serve public needs, rather than Wall Street needs. North Dakota has had a public state bank for about 100 years now, and it’s helped minimize many terrible social results of economic weaknesses!
Another modern challenge remains taxes. Conservative politicians in the US often complain about taxes being too high as much as medieval priests complained about people sinning too much. As a result, many conservatives truly believe our economy can't grow if taxes on the rich are too high as deeply as priests believed all sinners would go to hell! But where is the public debate about those tax ideas? In fact there isn’t one. Conservatives not only refuse to even debate the issue, but to also reject any objective evidence to the contrary. They’re like little lap dogs who continue barking at strangers, or like conservative Christians who refuse to debate ideas like the Immaculate Conception, free will, or even god’s existence! In short, their ideas have frozen their thinking skills. Conservatives know full well, increasing taxes on the wealthy will only keep financing the social programs like Social Security and Medicare they want ended, so they can start taking more of the public’s money for themselves.
Without such debates and challenges, like the British Parliament has every Wednesday at noon, people in the US are kept ignorant about what their own government is doing! Are high taxes really that destructive to peoples' well-being and economic growth? For example, humane Danes give about 50% of their earnings to the government, to provide more services and help liberate more of them from economic problems. However, they still have one of the most economically vibrant economies in Europe! Could it have anything to do with creating good will with its trading partners, rather than trying to enslave them in perpetual debt, or keep them in poverty by paying low wages? Why does socialistic India or China still keep much of their business sector controlled by the government? Is it because it’s the best way to avoid economic problems for the poor? Why does Communist China still control its banking sector and yet keep growing at over 10% a year, at least until the present recession hit? Is central economic planning really that bad, or building a state public bank? China and others are poised to become world leader in so-called clean energy, with windmills and solar panels; is such centrally controlled planning really bad? Why should Wall Street have anything to do with Washington, D.C.? And here's another challenging economic question: If our tax system is so good for the billionaires it helps create, then why do we need to keep borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from foreign countries every year to keep financing our economy, and why are there still millions of people unemployed? Also, why shouldn't rents and energy prices come down during a recession? Is it because politicians are afraid of offending their wealthy contributors?
Again, one conclusion seems obvious. Today people are challenged more than ever before to keep learning what's going on out there economically, politically, and educationally. Without such knowledge the status quo will continue making life better for a few and more stressful for most everyone else. Why does our government continue subsidizing many wealthy farmers with millions in tax money so they can sell their crops cheaply overseas? Are such agricultural and corporate forms of socialism bad, and if not, then why not socialized public banks, liberal democratic schools, and universal healthcare? What about corporate socialism? Why does our government continue acting socialistically to the corporate sector, and keep bailing out corporations from bankruptcy, like just happened with some auto makers and Wall Street banks? Such actions eliminate all the moral hazards present in our economic system, and thus keep encouraging reckless actions in Wall Street.
Such actions continue creating more educational questions too. For example, if socialized government programs are so bad, then wouldn't more liberal schools lessen the need for them by teaching young folks how to experimentally solve their own problems by learning more intelligent habit-arts? Wouldn’t such school reduce the need for government healthcare systems by teaching better diets and exercise habits? Shouldn’t conservatives too want such schools? Wouldn’t such schools also reduce the need for government programs like medical health, crime, and poverty? It seems our for-profit health system is slowly rejecting more and more people, and so shouldn't we be teaching kids more about diet and exercise excellence, rather than just burying our heads in the educational sand of academic trivia? Those interested in making our society even better can certainly accept such challenging questions.
Almost certainly, hundreds of years ago Edward DeVere – a.k.a. Shakespeare --wrote the play The Taming of the Shrew. Whenever Petrucio's shrewish wife Kathryn acted more cooperatively he'd say FORWARD Kate, FORWARD! And when we use science's knowledge not to economically dominate and enslave others, but to liberate and free them from poverty and ignorance, then we Deweyan liberals too say FORWARD! Why should only the wealthy have leisure time to enjoy life and build museums to house their art collections, or even improve themselves? In short, a recurring economic challenge asks what kind of world will WE MAKE for ourselves and our children. How excellent or greedy will it be? Don’t we all now have some karmic responsibility to make it as excellent as possible? Isn’t that our greatest modern challenge?
Corporate CEO Jake was rather a bore,
For cars and homes he kept working for.
About such stuff,
He didn’t ask, How much is enough?
Enough, he felt, is always just a little bit more.
(The final few sections of Book 1 are still being improved, and should be ready soon.)