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Can the US Be Transformed? :8 |
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Part 8
A Problem with no Single Solution
When one learns that scientists like Buckminster Fuller and the bioneer group (www.bioneers.org) know how to use green technologies to meet everybody’s needs without ecological damage, one may be inclined to think at first that the problem is simply capitalism. At a later date the human population may grow so large that even though it is already much larger than Malthus thought possible it eventually really will be physically impossible to feed everybody. But that date is not now. Now our problems are social not technical. The scientists have already learned what to do and invented how to do it. But we do not take the cure they prescribe. Our decisions are guided by economics, not by biology.
Further reflection shows that although in some sense the problem may be capitalism, it is not simply capitalism. It is a generic problem. Suppose, if I may employ a fanciful example to make my point, that we the peoples of the earth decide tomorrow to abolish money. Using money to make more money therefore becomes a non-starter as the mainspring of human action; The basic cultural structure is abolished. We invent a new one; We ask the world’s biologists to calculate the optimum use of available resources to meet all needs. We –all nine billion of us—collectively promise to follow whatever instructions the biologists give us. When they tell us what to do, we will do it.
My point divides into two subpoints.
My first subpoint is that to replace the modern world-system (I prefer not to call it capitalism because systems often called socialist such as those of the former Soviet Union and those of the former Yugoslavia share its main features (see Woodward 1995)) we have to replace it with some other cultural structure. Culture will always get in the way between body and body. Any form of social organization requires a pedagogy, an ideology, and a normative framework. Any procedure for making decisions will generate decisions determined in part not by optimizing physical possibilities but by its own maintenance requirements, those of the organization and the procedure. In my fanciful example, it would generate decisions determined in part by the software used to tell everybody what to do in the absence of money, and by the requirements of achieving consensus among the biologists and making the masses obey them.
My second subpoint is that not every culture shift is possible. The one I have fancifully suggested is not among the possible ones. Neither the biologists nor the rest of us are ready for it. I hope the Obama candidacy and Eisler´s “partnership way” movement are harbingers of a shift that is among the possible ones. The possible ones are those that build on existing themes and practices people understand, and which are capable of attracting energy to fuel change.
Given that a culture-free technocracy is neither desirable nor possible, and given that the only possible transformations are ones that people are ready for (or can become ready for), I draw the conclusion that John Dewey was right to call for an “experimental society;” Karl Popper was right to call for an “open society,” and Thomas Merton was right to remark, “Every definite plan is a trap.” The formula for transformation is: caring plus openmindedness. We should continuously try out promising modifications of our institutional forms, evaluate them, modify them again, and try again. The steady trend should be one toward the partnership end of Eisler´s spectrum, steadily diminishing power and resource disparities, steadily augmenting caring and respect. Drawing this conclusion requires more premises than I have so far stated. Although I suspect that the reader is inclined to agree with me anyway and does not need to be persuaded, the further required premises have been articulated by Eisler and Dewey (Westbrook 1991) and by Karl Popper.
In The Open Society and its Enemies written in New Zealand in the early 1940s, Popper provided a rationale for a pragmatic and experimental approach to social change. Although I do not agree with all of it (Richards and Swanger 2006, chapter 9), I will not mention here parts I do not sympathize with. Popper was a near-pacifist. He would not participate in the then-dominant colonial system through which Europe governed much of the rest of the world by military force. He would not fight for capitalism or for socialism or for any economic system. He would fight for only one thing; democracy. He would fight for a people’s right to be independent and to choose its own economic system, or its own mixture of elements of various systems. He conceived of democracy as an “open society” in which the role of scientific inquiry was as important as the role of elections. Critical and independent social science would drive what he called “social engineering.” Political power would –indeed must—dominate economic power, and of course also military power. Democracy, conceived as electing society’s rulers and rule-makers by universal suffrage was the only legitimate form of government because only all can be trusted to rule in the interests of all. On the other hand, Plato was not entirely wrong (even though Popper engages in extensive polemics against Plato) to argue that knowledge should rule. Hence academic freedom and autonomous financing for science are essential parts of Popper’s philosophy. Although the risk of undesirable unintended consequences of well-intentioned measures will be reduced by scientific research that will discover the real consequences to be expected, the people as their own rulers will still make mistakes. They will learn from their mistakes because they will suffer their consequences, and because mass education will be undergirded by systematic and free pursuit of … (here I want to say “truth” but Popper did not believe in truth; he believed that science consists of falsifiable hypotheses that have withstood testing until now). Periodic elections will assure to the people the priceless right to change their minds by deposing their government and replacing it with a different one.
Openminded rational democracy seemed in the early 1940s to be a progressive modern western alternative to Hitler’s tribal madness and to the imposition by force of dogmatic versions of Marxism conceived as not requiring the people’s consent because of their scientific validity and their benevolent intentions. It seems like a distant dream today. G.W. Bush sits at the desk where Franklin Roosevelt sat as Popper wrote. Everywhere economic power dominates political power. As Noam Chomsky and others have painstakingly documented, the United States has become the center of a vast and pervasive military machine deployed to destroy over and over again what Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example.” I write this just a few kilometers away from one of the concentration camps where women and men who had just a few days earlier been free citizens of a democracy were submitted to indescribable tortures as that global military machine destroyed one of many now-destroyed threats of a good example, the progressive Chile of 1941-1973.
Capitalism has turned out after all to be the problem, not because simply abolishing it would serve any constructive purpose, not because markets and private businesses do not have important roles to play in a better future society, and not because capitalism does not (as John Maynard Keynes said it did) create a remarkable synthesis of liberty and efficiency, but rather because it has arrived at a point in its history when maintaining global investor confidence requires maintaining global economic stability. The role of the United States military according to its planning documents is to be the centerpiece of a global police force enforcing everywhere what I have been identifying as an updated jus gentium. (see www.rand.org/pubs) The security of the United States is deemed to require market economies and investor confidence in the stability of the rules of the game on a world scale.
Economic and military responses crushing attempts to construct open societies are complementary. Whenever people’s creative efforts to cooperate and share with one another to meet their needs threaten to subtract a portion of the earth’s surface from the area available for capital accumulation, there is automatic economic punishment generated by the normal operation of the rules of the system: capital flight, inflation, unemployment. As of the late 20th century (one wants to think we are now seeing or are about to see changes) the complementary military response had itself become a well-known routine that was itself nearly automatic; (1) Deliberately destabilize the local economy (more than it was already destabilized); (2) Conduct a smear campaign in the local mass media; (3) Activate long-standing close ties with the local military establishment (which becomes more and more a local branch of the global military establishment); (4) Re-establish by force a regime of accumulation. The whole continent of Africa is a bleeding victim: It is a continent in which global investors have relatively little interest, where nevertheless autochthonous local social creativity has been systematically repressed. (Hoppers 1998) I do not want to say, nor does Hoppers want to say, that all of Africa’s violence is due to its being compelled to participate in a modern world-system incompatible with its cultural resources, but I do want to say that some of it is. (See also “Power and Principle in South Africa” in Richards and Swanger 2006)
A visitor from another galaxy would be astounded to find that earthlings had organized their planet as a single global marketplace in which everybody physically depends on everybody else, while nobody legally has any obligation to care for anybody else outside the restricted sphere of the family and even that is shrinking. E.F. Schumacher called it “institutionalized irresponsibility.” (Schumacher 1973) An interplanetary visitor observing the corner into which we have painted ourselves would understand immediately that such a system can be maintained only by violence.
My suggestion is that the most promising approaches to stopping this locomotive are the ones that depressurize the steam that drives it. My hypothesis is that now the global economy requires a great global military machine to police its legal framework. I may be mistaken in believing that the system requires a global military, but nevertheless the observed phenomenon is that it has a global military at its service. The fact that the far flung network of bases and alliances and undercover agents and forward operations exists constitutes Exhibit A for making a case that it is required. Much more evidence could be adduced to show that it is required, and required precisely for continuing to live as we now mainly live, as independent juridical subjects obligated to each other either by contract or not at all. (Wood 2004) If my hypothesis is valid, then if we could move from a dominator economy to a caring economy, then the great military machine would no longer be required, and that would be a major step toward building a world in which it would not exist.
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