It has often been said that the public has a short memory. We might also add that the public is short on understanding.
But we often think in terms of a single silver bullet solution to things. We think that education is the answer. However, when people seek and get “an education” they learn all sorts of things that treat the valuation of human dignity, peace, justice and rights not at all. How many engineering majors have learned a lot about the causes of war while they were in school? What enlightenment on rights and civil liberties is got in learning accountancy? Does the “education” that is learning a computer language tell you how to interpret news, and how to discriminate and identify propagandistic claims?
Our efforts are oblique, because we seem to be relying on the likelihood that the professor in any class has had such a well-rounded education that he or she is astute about many current affairs matters. Education is only a partial answer. And each of us can make a contribution to the whole of aggregated wisdom. And one of the things we can do is not just to take in what others have to offer in learning and sagacity and informed opinion, but to maintain a healthy questioning attitude in all things. We are not mindless minions; we’re thoughtful citizens of a vibrant democracy. Aren’t we?
Question everyone. And do not hesitate in your questioning because the cocky aspirer has the podium and the unskilled bombast has the media.
There are three individuals I’d like to point directly to here as examples of how very wrong a person can be, not just in a matter foreign and difficult for him, but in the very subject with which he has the most training and experience.
No one doubts that Karl Marx was a very smart and well-educated person. He was well versed in world history. Yet, astonishingly, he did not realize that his support for a communist utopia was also support for the full subjection of the entire human race, and to achieve what he was proposing, the happiness that we derive from substantial participation in our own fortunes and fate must be removed. He valued the freedom from the tyranny of the capitalist oppressor so deeply that he failed to recognize that a wider and more thorough tyranny was what he was ultimately proposing. Capitalism had its severe drawbacks and its stark injustices, but communism offered liberation through tantamount universal enslavement.
How could he not see this? Let us look closely at what Marx thought and believed.
Marx once wrote, “A man’s thoughts are the most direct emanations of his material state.” It sounds good – until, that is, we employ our own capable intellects to the question. Marx estimated that the workings of the human mind were essentially dog-like, sniffing mindlessly and mechanically and without any awareness of things not available to the immediate visual sphere.
Marx had no concept of spirit. (“Spirit”, by the way, can be understood as “a nonphysical animating force.”) And he lacked this in his vocabulary because it was a term with religious connotation, and he was himself an atheist; he disdained the verbiage of religious ministry and theology. And because of this, he did not ever say that a man’s thoughts are the most direct emanations of his spiritual state. And without spirit deep in his thoughts and value system, he was blind to the reality of the communist order he was proposing in his Manifesto.
In mid-2003, the American Secretary of Defense was a man named Donald Rumsfeld. He was pompous and arrogant and frequently instructed the reporters at press conferences as if he were an erudite pedant at the very end of an august career and they were a bunch of sophomores orienting their eager ears to his oh-so-eminent wisdom. “There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns,” he was occasioned to say, sneering imperiously down his spectacles at his unworthy audience.
But in all his learned experience and all his unimpeachable perspicacity he failed miserably as a Secretary of State. The most important role of his life was this, as Secretary of State. And in this role, the most important issue was the handling of the Iraq War, which commenced in March of 2003. A few months later major military operations were over and the enemy had been soundly defeated. There were pockets of continued resistance, but the Iraqi military had been utterly destroyed, and all the holdouts could hope for was to kill a few more enemy soldiers before sacrificing their lives for the lost cause.
Rumsfeld’s error was this: he did not believe the United States had any practical or moral obligation to rebuild the nation it had destroyed in the war. Others in the Administration of George W. Bush echoed this view. It turned out historically that the political viewpoint was utterly disastrous for the United States. Through endless months of economic hopelessness an Iraqi insurgency grew and grew, and by 2007 tens of thousands of (post-war!) Iraqi fighters had been killed by American forces in Iraq and tens of thousands more remained to antagonize the American military presence there. The total cost of the American adventure soared into the hundreds of billions of dollars as the insurgency dragged on endlessly, and the “war” became the most costly in all American history, far more costly than even the Vietnam War or World War Two.
And all this happened because of the wrongful attitude that the United States was not obligated to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure after it had been destroyed in the war. The United States could have spent a fraction of its ultimate expenditures on the Iraq War’s aftermath – the “insurgency” – by employing millions of Iraqis in a massive rebuilding effort. This would have also saved American lives, as the number of motivated insurgents would have substantially diminished as Iraqi hands were occupied in constructive work.
What was Rumsfeld’s error? Like many conservatives, he did not place great emphasis on direct alleviation of human suffering. He chose instead to place the blame for the suffering of Iraqi children on the Iraqi adults themselves, who were responsible for their country going to war (twice) in the first place. And this moral failing led to horrific sufferings, some of them American sufferings. He started out with unfeeling for Iraq’s children, and the result was that many thousands of Americans were wounded and killed (2003 to 2009).
And it must be emphasized here that Rumsfeld made this gargantuan error in the field that was his exceptional expertise: dealing with a hostile or potentially hostile society where many tens of thousands of American troops were stationed.
And now we turn to our story of the knowledgeable Mr. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 through January 2006. To hold the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve, one must be a veritable genius in the field of economics, and Greenspan was the exemplar. It is a remarkable thing to be so capable and respected that the man remained in his elevated position for about nineteen years.
But, in late 2008, more than two years after he’d retired from the Fed, he was questioned by the United States Senate about the Great Recession, which was then in its initial months of getting worse and worse. Greenspan said he had no clue about the economic crisis, and he did not see it coming. He said he had always maintained the view that corporations would behave responsibly, most of all because it was in their own interest to do so.
But it is remarkable that Greenspan did not realize that CEOs might work for their own benefit, and that the benefit of a company and the benefit of the executive are not always so closely tied. Sometimes a money making scheme will gain traction rather under the radar; that is, a tactic or stratagem may prove useful as a short-term profit gainer. But that connivance may be disastrous to the whole economy, as first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands take part in the money-making scheme, each uncaring about the full ramifications of the practice or scheme. Each sees only his or her short-term self interest, not the good of the whole of society, and each acts on this self interest, rationalizing that self-interest is what is expected of individuals in a capitalistic society.
Yeah, all this is explainable, but how did Greenspan miss it? The truth is that we all have constructed ways of interpreting our social and political world. We employ our ideology in this task. And, in order to make sense of the things we’re seeing, we use the philosophical and organizational scheme that has given meaning and confidence to our previous ideas and values. All the stuff that is contrary is treated dismissively.
Look at slavery in the United States in the early 1800s. Countless thousands of Americans in the American South could see that dark skinned persons who were physically “African” had a considerable ability to learn. But this ability was viewed as dangerous to the institution, and in many places it was forbidden to teach ordinary slaves how to read and write. But we might ask how it is that so many people could overlook the unworkability of this oppressive policy. Part of the answer is that we pay attention only to that which serves our purposes, not to objective truths. If mom and pop taught me, in addition to their declarations of lovely love for me, that “coloreds are not to be trusted,” I am likely to follow on the logic and the actions that follow that “lovely” opinion.
We are not adherents of objective truth really, but servants of the comfortable, the useful, the opportunity-granting, the convenient, and the handy.
Let us question, and question again our assumptions. Let us grow beyond the fetid pseudo-wisdom of our forebears and parents, no matter how well-intentioned they be! Our world is changing faster and faster, and our survival in it demands that we learn to change faster and faster. And this means that we have to be ready to discard the hidebound and misguided teachings and traditions of the past.
The answer is, question!