Who's Century?

 Hey Bobby. Been thinking about something and since you are far more erudite in regard to international affairs, I thought I'd bounce it off you.

 I saw a news opinion piece sometime ago suggesting that the American century was over. I grew up with that concept and felt I was very lucky to be born into the nation which had become the leader of the world.

To be honest, I didn't bother to read the article. Still, the headline got me thinking.

I expect you remember that during Trump's first term I said I don't think our allies are ever going to trust us again. Even if Trump doesn't win a second term, who knows who we will elect next time? 

And here he is. 

It's not just that he's trying to destroy the American government except for a few powerful arms which he will remake into his servants carrying out  his will, he's already trying for a third term but I question that he will be able to get it. Not to mention, the man is damned old. I doubt he has a third term in him.

I think this is something that runs a whole lot deeper than Trump. He's just a symptom of the disease.

My feeling is that the American people are in a position that reminds me very strongly of the British at the end of World War II. After centuries of empire building (and empire holding) the British people were tired of their young men going off to die in foreign countries so that the people back home could swagger about in imperial pride and the ultra rich could benefit from the loot  collected from around the subservient globe.

They adored Winston Churchill as the unparalleled leader who led the crusade against the Nazis, but they had no interest in following this old noble in struggling to retain the British Empire.

They wanted a national health service. They wanted to be exactly what Napoleon always said they were, a nation of shopkeepers rather than a nation of conquerors.

Trump, with his whole America first thing, is about in the same position right now. The original America first movement headed by Lindbergh simply didn't want us to be used by the European powers as cannon fodder to grow their empires. The America first movement today is not that old movement brought back to life. Today it's a rejection by the American people of being the world's policeman. Many Americans don't want American soldiers going to war in foreign lands.  

They're tired of paying the price for leading the world and no wonder, it's a very expensive price. I recently saw a report that today America still spends more on its military budget than the next 10 nations combined. We could do a lot domestically with even a portion of those funds.

We're almost a century late to the party, but I really think a lot of of us are ready to turn into a more thoroughly socialized nation.

Yes, the Trumpsters say that that's what they hate the most, but as was pointed out before the affordable care act was adopted, once people have it, they do not want to let it go. The Brits traded their world empire for the NIH, but I think we're getting prepared to do that ourselves.

I hate to say it, but I think what we really need right now is Teddy Roosevelt. Not the rough rider (me he-man) but the trustbuster. Even Trumpsters might be able to get behind that if  the theoretical hero promised to bring our troops home and stop leading the world at the cost of American treasure and blood.

This brings up the next part of the question. If we do resign from the position who replaces us?

China desperately wants to, but China's in desperately bad shape. Her economy is nothing but a giant bubble. Corruption is so extremely pervasive bridges regularly collapse alongside of buildings and the rapidly built cities are on the edge of an economic disaster. Even their fake islands that they constructed in order to claim the South China Sea are beginning to erode away right out from under their naval and airbases.

India has potential but it's wrapped up in its own extreme right ring hatred and bigotry and I think lacks the industrial base to be regarded as a serious contender.

Remember a few decades back when everyone thought Brazil was going to rule the world? No one's even suggesting it now.

Russia? " I will quote Baron Stein, "Theirs is the rage of dreaming sheep!"  Russia had an opportunity to be a economic powerhouse. Putin has crushed Russia for the foreseeable future. Even if he wins in Ukraine, he has lost every other battle, including the economic struggles.

I think the best bet is the European Union. It's hard to credit tired old Europe becoming the world leader again, but a united Europe is a new beast. If Europe  can successfully stop its endless efforts to conduct war against itself, it will be an economic powerhouse with plenty of resources and plenty of manpower -- and it's highly industrialized as well. We all have assumed that Europe is that stable, but then Europe was assuming that Russia was that stable too. (remember  Angela Merkel  assuring the world that Russia was now a friendly bear?) The European Union is still an experiment that's in its early stages. If they can keep it together, I think this century will be called the European Union century.

So, lots to cover here. I wonder how you respond to my oddball thoughts.

Self-destruction: An Overview

From The Atlantic.  This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

I hope people will find the bits I have quoted from this article sufficiently intriguing and provoking to go to the source and read it in its entirety.   It is well worth the time for both right and left wingers.   

Unlike the author of this article, I loved 1984 much more than Brave New World from the beginning.  I have always realized that the answer to the question, “How did he know?” lies in an error in the question itself. It’s not how did he know what would happen in politics, it’s how did he know the nature of human beings.   There is so much that is so very obvious if you step outside of your culture and your society for even a moment or two. But doing so is profoundly difficult for the vast majority of people.  >“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote.<

Today it doesn’t take much to make either the right or the left surrender their freedom and even their intelligence.  Rationality is not a valued commodity under any circumstances and in today’s fetid atmosphere of passions it has almost entirely vanished from public discourse. >Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.<

>Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”<

While the right wing’s abandonment of sanity is based almost entirely on fear and the resultant rage and so is easy to understand, the left wing’s movement in this direction is rooted in the desire for a perfect utopian justice. >Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value.<

The articles author points out that today >...intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police<

Finally,  I must agree with his conclusion that >Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. ...Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

Again, I suggest you read the original article, Conservative or Liberal, it is well worth your time.  As for me, to quote an old and rather silly parody song about the days of the Troubles in Ireland, “Me, being strictly neutral, I bashed everyone in sight.”

Note: my apologies for the poor proofreading. My health is really not good at the moment and I’m just not up to the effort.

Not Guilty! OK, Maybe Partly Guilty

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/prescriptive-racialism-and-racial-exclusion

While this article makes an interesting point, It also makes a grievous intellectual error. I'm reposting this article because of the following comment:

> The Islamic philosopher Al Ghazali did the same when he railed against the Greek pagan influence during the Islamic Golden Age, and in doing so he extinguished the brilliant flame of scientific thought of his era. The Middle East has been dark ever since. <

In fairness to the author of this article, it has been a common belief, almost a universal belief, among philosophic scholars that her statement is accurate. But a look at Al Ghazal's actual philosophy and his statements indicate  a somewhat contrary reality.

While his positions are very complex, on the issue of scripture verses objective reality he clearly stated that there can be no such contradiction. Reality is reality whether observed through a religious or an empirical lens.  When a contradiction does appear, he insists that objective reality must be accepted as real and that religious scholars must then acknowledge that the Koran cannot be taken literally on that particular issue, but must instead be interpreted as symbolically true, not literally accurate.

This is the declaration of an individual who strongly supports science and its empirical, objective base. A  fair-minded person must acknowledge that Al Ghazali is not only innocent of the supposed offense but in fact is an exemplar of  the opposite position.  But equally in fairness, we can not ignore the fact that Al Ghazali was a religious extremist who also caused a great deal of harm to his culture and society.

In other words, he's not single-handedly guilty of destroying Islamic science but he did support and increase religious extremism. Which is to say he was a very mixed bag, like so many other human beings who tend to be regarded as exemplars of one particular trait but who are actually complex characters displaying both good and bad sides.

So who can be accused of single-handedly bringing down his own civilization? While it is very popular in the Middle East to blame the Crusades, there's no question it was an internal rot, a form of intellectual and spiritual cancer, which caused the destruction of the most highly advanced technological civilization on the planet, leaving it a desperately poor Third World entity to this day.

No one person was actually guilty of this offense, but one of the greatest contributors was Nizam al-Mulk. As visier, He established a highly influential set of madrasahs which firmly established the Islamic position of higher education as one of extreme religious fundamentalism.

These two highly influential men, living at the same time, did cause a great deal of harm and damage to their own society and civilization.  Still, I feel compelled to point out that Al Ghazali did not rail against science. Although he did contribute to the dominance of religious extremism and fundamentalism which led to the fall of the Islamic empire, he most certainly did not do it single-handedly nor did he do so by attacking science or objective reality. 

 Let me now note that I have previously stated over a period of decades that the anti-science movement founded in American religious fundamentalism constitutes an existential danger to our society. China was destroyed by turning inward into religious fundamentalism and away from science and objectivity, as was the great Islamic empire, as we will be if we do not reign in it's extremist excesses.

You Say Democracy And I Say Kleptocracy… Let's Call The Whole Thing Off!

In response to a friend's post about the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, I posted the following:

This is why I refer to governments as a necessary evil. Tom Paine was the first to express this truism that I know of, though I expect that the concept stretches back to classical antiquity.  Clearly, governments cannot be avoided. In the absence of an organized system, some thug will simply say, "Okay, I'm the boss now," and government is reborn.

This makes governments necessary.

The difficulty is that once a government exists it cannot seem to control itself. Unless it's populace is alert and vigilant, the government will turn from a necessary protector into a cancer which eats away at the very values which it was created to protect.  SWAT teams were originally created for quite reasonable purposes. Thanks to our bizarre drug laws, another example of government gone insane, the opponents of good government in the form of organized criminals became quite wealthy. They could afford to possess extensive and highly advanced weapons systems.

The problem is that once a SWAT team was created in an environment where it was necessary, let us say New York City; everyone, everywhere wanted to have a SWAT team.  It was a matter of prestige. The city that did not have a SWAT team, even if it was quite a small city, felt that it was not on the cutting edge of new policing methodology.  Not to mention, SWAT teams are cool and sexy. What mayor or governor wouldn't want to be cool and sexy?

And now we had the structure of a growing problem. Huge amounts of money were expended to create SWAT teams that were totally unnecessary. That didn't sit well with voters. So SWAT teams began to be assigned to perform tasks that did not require anything but a uniformed officer or two.

Some unknown person phoned in an anonymous tip that a residence was being used for manufacturing drugs? Instead of sending over an officer to investigate, let's send the SWAT team, smash the door down, terrorize the residents, and then later apologize because they were totally innocent.

I'm not opposed to the existence or use of SWAT teams. I'm not opposed to them under very limited and specific circumstances. I am opposed to their indiscriminate creation and their unnecessary application.

The LAPD has as its motto, to serve and protect. That is the appropriate application of the police power of the state. No policeman, no police department, no chief of police, should ever forget this.

Turning policeman into soldiers and then trying to use those soldiers to deal with civil problems is insanity.  It makes citizens into enemy combatants. It not merely justifies, but practically requires, the use of deadly force.  

Of course, I regard America as a kleptocracy. Just like other governments that once were democracies but now have fallen apart and degenerated into something never intended by its founders and certainly not supported by its citizens, the United States has turned into a criminal organization a very basic level.

Whoever is in power, and I primarily refer to congressmen, although administration officials are not exempt, are quickly bought off by what would once been called bribes but which now have become legal campaign contributions. What was once a felonious example of usury now becomes normal business practice. And instead of using thugs to threaten to break your legs with a baseball bat, the courts force you to pay your "legitimate" debts.

I could go on for quite some time, but I think I have made the point. By the way, I am not referring to America as kleptocracy as a sarcastic or satirical comment. I mean that I literally believe that America has become a form of kleptocracy. The Republican Party, seeking to create a one party state, has so rigged the election system that while the number of votes cast for Republicans and Democrats are virtually equal in the last house election, the House is totally dominated by Republicans. It should be 50-50.

One man, one vote? Not in America.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/republicans-gerrymandering-house-representatives-election-chart

The Celebration of Inbreeding

The AKA-Eukanauba National Championship is on. You know, the effort to seek out the most inbred and genetically damaged dog in the world and give it a blue ribbon.
It is an improvement. We used to seek out the most inbred and genetically damaged human in the world and give him a crown.

Old writing, never posted

The L.a. Times--February 27, 2011

An article in today’s edition refers to the dreams of Islamic North Africa creating to a new golden age. It is surprising how few Americans realize that there was a time when the best place to live within the Islamic world. Here you found the best medicine, the finest doctors, the world's premier universities, and the most tolerant society on the planet. It isn't that life was wonderful compared to today's society enjoyed by those of us in the West. But compared to the alternatives available in the world that time, the Islamic world, especially the Arabic world, was a far superior place to live.

Naturally, this fact is well known throughout the Islamic world today. Much of the hatred of the West which expresses itself in terrorism rose out of a belief that this golden age was stolen away by Western imperialism. Certainly it is true that imperialism stripped away much dignity and insulted the honor of the region, but this would hardly have been possible during the golden age. At that time, Europe was in the throes of the dark ages. It was only possible for the west to exploit the Islamic world after that world degenerated scientifically, militarily, and socially.

It seems unlikely that anyone alive when Europe was so weak and the Arabs so strong could possibly have predicted this astonishing reversal of fortune. Europe was what had been, the ruin of the richness and vigor of the Roman Empire. All across North Africa science was flourishing. Education was respected and strongly supported by society. It is natural to ask, "what went wrong?"

If you're interested in a detailed answer I suggest the book entitled, What Went Wrong? By Bernard Lewis. The answers are complex, but the pattern is rather clear. Like China, a great civilization turned inward. An inherent sense of superiority led to a contempt for the ideas found and the rest of the world. Any civilization which forgets that it had to earn its place in the world finds itself believing that its superiority is a natural law, a given, an unalterable fact of reality.

This mistaken conviction leads the deluded society into a state of rigidity. Since we are the best and must be the best there is nothing to be gained by paying attention to the rest of the world. Once a society comes to believe this it ceases to make progress, more importantly, it fails to respect the progress being made by others. Crystallized by its own sense of the inevitability of supremacy, the society ceases to move and advance. However far the rest of the world is behind this society, it now begins to catch up and in time surpasses those who were once in the lead.

It was religious extremism more than anything else, although arrogance cannot be ignored as a contributing factor, which turned the Islamic world to fundamentalism and to a sense of entitlement. Being the favorite of God, there was no need to earn a place at the head of progress. Surely this spot would just be granted.


Contrast this situation with what is currently happening in China. After decades of brutal communist repression, China is once again opening up to the rest of the world. Of course, the last time this happened, China was forced to interact with the world which they had rejected. The situation under Mao was not analogous to either of the cases I've already described above. While it's true that China under his rule was behind a "bamboo curtain", it is also true that he sought to modernize the country. His intentions were focused on science and industry rather than cultural matters, but he did much to make China into a modern nation. When Hong Kong was returned to Chinese control there was speculation around the world as to what would happen to the incredibly wealthy area. With communist ideology lead them to kill the goose that laid the golden egg? If the communists did not ban free enterprise in this area how would they reconcile that action with the collectivist beliefs which they used to justify their domination of the nation?

What happened was quite astonishing. Wealth and financial success simply could not be ignored. China needed the money and the energy of Hong Kong. The golden eggs were too valuable. Unsurprisingly, once this admission was made by the communist party, free enterprise began creeping in and spreading throughout the entire nation. Today we see a China which is undoubtedly more free that has ever been in all its history. Which is not to say that China is a free country, but by comparison to the past it is an age, at least, of hope.

So great that the changes been that the Chinese government is now strongly advocating the teachings of Confucius. Of all the counterrevolutionary ideas despised under Mao Tse Tung, the most pernicious, the most dangerous, were those of the Sage. Yet today, without any outward sign of shame, the Communist Party is doing its best to convince its citizens that the old philosopher had it right after all. It seems impossible to believe, at least for someone like me who grew up with an awareness of such extremes as the Cultural Revolution, but the government of China is now trying to pacify and please its citizens rather than simply force them into submission. I've seen much change in this world. Some of it was predictable, much of it was not. But of all the changes that occurred, the continuing democratization of the world was a change for which I fervently hoped and which I believe will continue for the foreseeable future.

There are dangers inherent in democratization, of course. After all, in a democracy the bad guy may win the election. But I believe that the world is much safer than it was and will continue to become even more so as democracy spreads. I believe the last of the great wars is over. There is simply too much to lose and so little to gain when one applies mass violence to national problems. Look at Germany and Japan today. One could argue that they have created an economic empire which reaches around the globe. Had Tojo and Hitler built their nations economically rather than militarily, that might have attained the same end without the deaths of so many millions. I hope that China has learned this lesson.

Why evolution matters

In his book, The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan expressed his concern that America was facing a resurgence of superstition which he feared would become a flood that would wash away all we have gained through centuries of scientific progress. Today, it has become, for many on the right, an acid test for Republican candidates to declare that they do not believe in evolution. In and of itself, this seems to be simply a religious opinion. If accepted at this level, the question should no more be asked of a candidate than should the question, "Do you believe in the virginity of Mary?"

However, there is a far more serious implication. The issue is not a religious one - it is scientific. What one believes in his private religious world is not important as a test of acceptability, or even eligibility for the presidency. It is only when one's religious beliefs interfere with the effective functioning of the office of the presidency that they become a valid, and indeed, essential test. Sagan's fears are well founded, not only in the intellectual and philosophical realm, but in historical realities.

The Islamic world was for centuries the highest level of civilization to be found on the planet. It was cosmopolitan, tolerant, and highly advanced in every way. Even the inhabitants of Christendom, who so hated the Muslim religion, envied their material accomplishments. Then something changed. The Islamic world began to fall further and further behind the Christian world. The civilized and cultured became the crude and barbaric and vice versa. To this day millions in the Islamic world are convinced that this is a direct result of the Crusades and a continuing western plot to destroy them and their culture.

In his book, What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis explores the actual causes of this radical change. These causes are, of course, very complex. Nonetheless, one thing remains very clear. It was not external forces which destroyed the Islamic world. The culture, the civilization, the advancements so carefully built were destroyed by internal forces. Furthermore, the destruction was not intentional. On the contrary, the forces of destruction believed they were the forces of preservation. In the name of preserving and even advancing Islamic culture, they took actions which inevitably destroyed it.

Essentially what occurred was that the world of Islam, seeing itself so clearly superior to Europe, concluded that the outside world had nothing to offer it. They forgot that much of their culture was based on the flowering of Greece and the knowledge that those Greeks passed down. They also forgot that upon this Grecian foundation, they themselves had built a beautiful architecture of civilization by keeping open minds, by testing and exploring the world around them, and by looking to the future for inspiration.

What defeated them was not the failed Crusades. It was their own decision, made for a very complex reasons, to turn away from the outside world, from the future, and from science. Believing that they and they alone had true knowledge led them to turn inward, to the past, and to fundamentalist Islam. Once they had made this about face, they did indeed move back to the past. But the past was not the golden age of fundamentalist promise, it was instead the bog of ignorance, superstition, and self destruction. This is not to say that the West did not contribute to this decline, but the Europeans simply took advantage of what the Islamic world was already doing to itself.

As the Islamic world sank into decline, the West entered the Enlightenment. As Islam threw way Greek philosophy and objective science, the West discovered them. What had made the Islamic world great would now do the same for the Europeans.

It has been reported that there is a medical university in Egypt which teaches its students of the human body has more bones that it actually does. Why would skilled physicians teach such a thing? The answer is very simple. The Koran says that it is so, and therefore it must be so. Mere facts cannot compete with the sacred scripture. At the time of Islamic greatness, European theologians are reported to have been arguing about the number of teeth in a horse's mouth. The story says that a foolish young student suggested to his masters that he should simply go out and count the number of teeth in the mouths of the horses that the professors had ridden to the meeting. According to the story, he was severely reprimanded. Obviously merely counting the teeth could not get as accurate answer as debating the meaning of texts both Biblical and Greek. This of course, is an attitude rooted deeply in one element of Grecian philosophy, that of Plato. After all, Plato said " If we are to discuss the cosmos, we must not look at the stars." (quoted from memory)

When the West accepted this attitude, it was the West which was barbaric and backward. When Islam decided to adopt it, they began their decline. When the West turned away from this concept and began to seek objective truth, they began their rise. The relationship is not coincidental. It is fundamental.

Consider the Chinese empire. Decades before Columbus, Zheng He made magnificent exploratory voyages. At this time the Chinese empire was also great, advanced, and civilized. But it was soon to begin a precipitous decline. Deciding to turn inward, his fellow Chinese destroyed the records of the great explorer. After all, what could the outside world possibly offer to the already perfect civilization of the Middle Kingdom? To this day some Chinese still blame Western plots and other outside forces for this decline. What actually happened was that China believed that they and they alone had true knowledge… well, no need to repeat it all. Suffice to say they turned inward, rejected other cultures' knowledge, and decided that their philosophy and religion were truer than true and more factual than fact.

Both these great cultures, the Islamic and the Chinese, declined because they turned away from reality. They decided that reality was in fact an option. Furthermore, it was an option that they could do without. They decided the truth was to be based not on objective, testable, and falsifiable experimentation but on scriptures and beliefs. The results were predictable and entirely self inflicted.

This is why asking a candidate, 'Do you believe in evolution?' Is not, in fact, a religious question. It is another way of asking a far different question, "Do you believe in science?" Or to put this in an historical perspective, it is a way of asking," Do you intend to permit America to continue to be civilized and advanced, or do you wish us to begin a decline into barbarism?"

People may believe, in private, whatever they wish to believe. I do not approve of religious tests to qualify for public office. There are sets of beliefs, however, which so deeply impact the ability to make rational decisions that one must take them into consideration when choosing for whom to vote. To elect a president of the United States who does not believe that science is trustworthy, that facts are facts, and is convinced that reality is optional is to begin the decline of American civilization.