For those of us who have
studied or been exposed to classical Greek philosophy, we know
how philosophers and teachers
in that era, Socrates, Protagoras, and other Sophists, valued
and equated ideals of truth and beauty and justice. Given
their search and beliefs, what did it mean at the level of law
and politics? These values have permeated into modern America;
what do the remnants of said philosophy mean for us? At the heart of the classical thinking – which required thinking,
i.e. reason – one came to appreciate nature as true as it is
beautiful and thus just. For instance, when applied in
its best sense, no Greek politicians could clamor for monoculture,
which destroyed the vitality of the land before their very eyes. A
soil, once rich, that was dry and sparse, no longer able to produce
grain, was a sign of ugliness – a sign that the Gods of logic,
reason, beauty and truth were displeased. Conversely when
used in the worst way, the tautology would justify Athenian slavery
as a system of justice. That is, slave masters could define
their position as arising from some sort of natural truth about
superior and inferior peoples.
How did Bob Marley put it?
“Until the philosophy, which hold one race superior and another
inferior … is finally and permanently, discredited and abandoned … Everywhere
there is war.”
Sadly in our current days of the modern
American empire, with her eradication of reason … through a reinforced process of unlearning
and obedience training from institutions like schools (from elementary
through university), mainstream media, corporate-capitalism,
and so-called Christian churches … we live in a society which
either cannot follow the wisdom of Truth, Beauty, and Justice,
or has lost the capacity to understand the logic and meaning
of the sages.
And Orwellian 1, 2, 3
Today, once precious words and the classic
ideology that drew upon them can be restated as so: Faith,
Simplicity, and Injustice.
Whereas truth once meant a derived conclusion,
discovered via a series of questions, postulates and rules,
with so few Americans
understanding basic logic or mathematics, truth cannot be tested. Hence
truth is merely what one “believes” not that which is found via
reason.
Simplicity has replaced the idea of Beauty
where Beauty once stood for exquisite and the fascinating. Beauty was and
is a discovery, in a scientific sense, and replication – showing
how one’s theory was more encompassing that another's. Such
was the work and thought of people like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn
and Imre Lakatose. When beauty is found in calculating
Pi to the 100th decimal place, beauty cannot be appreciated in
rules of obedience like “render unto to Caesar …” or “spare the
rod …”
And where or what is justice, when so few
can reason or recognize beauty in complexity? The 19th century claims of “manifest
destiny” were justified nicely with Faith and Simplicity. Eugenics
programs of the 20th century, favoring a certain type of White
supremacy, gained traction when one can discount 25,000-100,000
years of human existence, evidence of all those pyramids and
global travel by peoples of Africa, Meso-America, East Asia,
and other pre-Christian and non-Christian societies.
When we review a multitude of topics today
and consider how or why to address various social phenomena,
we see that an American
people so full of themselves, so trapped in unreason, have pushed
their truths (bound in faith), appreciation of simplistic and
facile thinking (confused with beauty) to generate and perpetuate
injustice … all the while calling it fair or assuming that such
is natural.
We heard the truth first: Mayflower,
crack babies, socialism
If you push yourself and others, you shall
find that multiple truths are nothing more than first messages,
first ideas, first
exposures. Given the space for and practice of imprinting
on the brain, we can find a number of examples of “known truths” that
upon investigation … must disappear, erased by evidence. Yet,
too often, we are not swayed.
“Aren’t we a Christian nation? …we came on the Mayflower…” Such
were the words of one of my students. This young lady,
whom most would perceive as Black, is a product of the recent
fusion of Africans, Cherokee, and Europeans who intermingled,
warred, and died in North Carolina. Despite evidence that
we are not children of Spain or Columbus, that we were not Christians,
that we traversed the Atlantic and the globe hundreds if not
thousands of years before Brits and Dutch came with African slaves,
this 20 year-old mother knew that “we came on the Mayflower.”
This young lady, like other students and
most of the American population also knows that there are “crack babies.” Thanks
to a steady PR campaign begun during the Reagan administration
and the Ivy League establishment (i.e. the New England Journal
of Medicine), in 1985 Dr. Ira Chasnoff published his
non-scientific “findings” that announced the existence of “crack
babies.” Though Chasnoff claims that he never used the term “crack
baby” and in 1992, published an article showing that by age two
there are no visible or verifiable signs that in utero exposure
to cocaine damages human development … the truth was created,
the damage done – as the very same White people who created and
promote the War on Drugs, who destroy Black families via law
enforcement now justify their reign of terror in the name of
protecting Black babies.
As demonstrated by Michael Moore, not only
from his latest film SiCKO, but also from previous investigation
related to his show
TV Nation, most Americans know the truth about “socialized medicine” and
references to the Canadian and or European systems of state health
care. Though he has evidence and facts on his side, Moore
and Dennis Kucinich, Tim Wise and every other person with a brain
has to fight the propaganda that precedes truth and logic. According
to Moore, the complaints against the possibility of having a
cheaper, better, and more efficient health care system that does
not prioritize profit and denial of service run like this:
We cannot have socialized medicine…long lines, poor service, …it
will be worse than the current system… [1]
As Moore shows, and as I and others have
said repeatedly, the present system is merely an insurance
scam, whereby major corporations
and their executives, like Kaiser-Permanente, pay doctors and
claims reviewers to find reasons to reject claims. But we know
the truth; America’s system of health care is the most expensive
and hence the best.
We know the simple truth on Windmills, Iraqis, and Immigration
In the face of years of invention, innovation,
creativity, and research into wind power, electric cars, solar
technology, and
multiple means to reduce the use of fossil fuels, carbon emissions,
and global warming, American corporate media, filled with journalists
who know nothing of and care to know nothing about basic physics
and their paymasters (in oil, gas, and the American auto industry),
working in conjunction with brilliant minds in Congress have
told us what is simple and beautiful: SUVs, burning carbon, and
jobs are more important than the eco-nazi plan to crush all that
is good (capitalism and excess consumption) in the land of poor
air quality and bottled water.
Denouncing the latest moves in Congress to pass federal legislation
that would only encourage the exploitation of wind power, Lamar
Alexander (R-TN) claimed that
such would “raise our taxes, raise our electric rates, runaway
jobs, and ruin our mountain tops.” A former presidential candidate – who
sought to abolish the U.S. Dept. of Education (his 1996 campaign,
telling people to “remember their ABCs, Alexander beats Clinton”) – honestly
claims that wind power costs jobs in a nation where formerly
impoverished farmers had to bring lawsuits to get credits for
producing energy via wind mills! Of course, Alexander’s
lies were not challenged by the NPR reporters who transported
his message of “stay the course … more pollution ahead.” Perhaps,
no matter what the topic is, when a politician “just says, No!” the
simplicity of the message and its logic is so beautiful, our
media and minds are dumbstruck?
After years of proclaiming that the American
military either does not kill civilians (in Iraq or Afghanistan,
or anywhere – like
the Chagos Islands) or takes great care to avoid killing innocent
civilians (wink-wink, no Iraqis or Afghanis are innocent, they
are all insurgents, Taliban, Al Qaida, and terrorists – terrorists
have weddings too), and telling the world that they do not bother
to count non-American deaths, these lies were revealed by their
own ugliness from Fallujah to Kandahar, from Baghdad to Guantánamo.
On Democracy Now (12 June 2007), a former
member of the U.S. military, Evan Knappenberger, explained
that he and others in
the military actively calculated how many Iraqis have been killed
as a direct result of the U.S. invasion. Where in the past,
Bush has parroted numbers from the undercount organization “Iraq
Body Count” and the non-thinking press rejected the statistical
sampling method of professors from Johns Hopkins (published in
Lancet [3]),
the very method used to predict elections and interpret exit-polling,
according the Knappenberger, the ballpark figure of 650,000 excess
deaths (as of October 2006) and now over 1,000,000 Iraqis killed
at the hands of the American invaders is well-known by the U.S.
military. But perhaps it is easier to see the truth in
the beauty of “freedom’s power” and “spread of democracy” in
Iraq than in the gore and blood of an Iraqi child or the rubble
of Iraqi mosques.
“We are being invaded” cried my mother – who employs a female
housekeeper from Mexico who speaks no English. In that
my mother has been transformed from a woman who was a valedictorian
in high school, then a college graduate with 4.0 GPA (majoring
in both math and English), to become a ditto-head – who watches
Fox News for hours on end, I must concede that American propagandist
Edward Bernays (a nephew of Sigmund Freud), some man with a PhD
in German Literature (i.e. Josef Goebbels), Aldous Huxley and
Orwell were correct. If words are repeated frequently enough,
and long enough, the sheep will believe… “four legs good, two
legs … better?”
For any citizen of the United States (or daughter of slave owners)
to believe that any people could invade this nation in a way
that would be harmful, is the height of inanity and expresses
a level of hypocrisy akin to that said by Ariel Sharon:
“Call Israel by any name you like, call it a Judeo-Nazi state…Better
a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint. I don't care whether
I am like Ghadafi. I am not after the admiration of the
gentiles. I don't need their love. I don't need
to be loved by Jews…either.”[4]
Recently police in Los Angeles arrested
an American citizen, Pedro Guzman, dumped him 120 miles to
the South in Mexico on
the theory that Guzman does not belong “in our country.” I
imagine that the police determined, “We stole it fair and square,
didn’t we?” And while Bush holds hands with and kisses
dictators and anti-democrats of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan,
my mother says that we are being invaded by an army of carpenters,
landscapers, kitchen help and toilet scrubbers. All praises
to the simplistic messages of Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Sean
Hannity, O’Reilly and crew.
What is just: Prisons, War,
poverty, homelessness and infant mortality
If we think through the philosophy of Truth,
Beauty and Justice, we note that the ideals work in the form
of a syllogism. Given
the truth and that which is beautiful, the outcome must be justice. Of
course, in such rudimentary constructions, we cannot necessarily
work in the reverse and define our outcomes as just and conclude
that such is a result of either truth or beauty. However,
the use of anti-logic and flawed deduction is commonplace in
the United States.
We know that we live in an age of anti-reason
and anti-logic as evidenced through the power of Christian
mega-churches and
Bush administration policies and personnel. Exhibit one: Dr.
James Holsinger, the Bush nominee to serve as U.S. Surgeon General. Holsinger
is but a symbol of an administration and a nation which prides
itself on ignorance of a cornerstone of modernity – the scientific
method, the tools of reason, testing, reliability, replication,
and falsifiability. In an interview of 15 June 2007, on
the show Democracy Now, journalist Max Blumenthal put it this
way:
The Christian Right essentially controls
this administration…[and]
doing [a] lot of damage…by nominating someone to a scientific
institution who [is] hostile to science. …I think Dr. Holsinger
might argue that he can hold these views about homosexuals
and still be qualified for Surgeon-General. But he can't
argue that he doesn't believe in science. [But that he
has rejected science is] on the record. It's established
if you believe in ex-gay therapy, which [Holsinger] does, if
you believe you can pray away the gay, which [Holsinger] does,
[then] you are rejecting 30 years of science.
[The nomination of Holsinger] reflects
a larger trend in the administration of hostility to science.
[They] have [a] NASA
chief, Michael Griffin, who doesn't believe global warming
exists. You have the former chair of the President's
council on bioethics, [Leon Kass, who] rubber stamped [Bush’s]
veto of stem cell science. Leon Kass says that women’s
natural function in life is to have children. And [Kass
has] spoken out most fervently against what he sees as one
of the biggest social evils, “the public licking of ice cream
cones.”
When individuals and a people collectively
are anti-science, they are, as Christopher Hedges explains,
anti-reason and anti-thinking. Such
a people are primed to support authoritarian regimes (see the
latest book of John Dean). Such a people see brutality
as normal and natural and do not question their circumstances
or the suffering of others.
A people divorced from reason and thinking
reach a number of conclusions with ease. It is easier to know that “they
hate us for our freedom” instead of hate American foreign policy
and brutality. It is easier to believe that poverty is
earned and deserved than scripted and choreographed, despite
evidence showing little or know economic mobility in the United
States. It is easier to ignore the fact that infant mortality
is higher in the richest nation on earth with the most expensive
health care than to think that people in Cuba have something
to teach us.
It is easier to think that “God made everything” including a
Bible composed of 36 oft-translated and heavily edited books,
all in English, with mandates for adults to beat their children,
than to recognize that beating a child is an act of cowardice. And
it is easier to perpetuate values and ideals of White Supremacy
which hold, conveniently, that “we are being invaded” from the
South by Spanish-speaking peoples, since “we” stole it last,
than to see the inhumanity of our immigration system and unnaturalness
of resisting the movement of peoples around the globe.
These are but of few examples of what we
have wrought. Out
of the commonsense American appreciations of Truth and Beauty,
is mined nothing but Injustice.
BC Columnist Dr John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD, has a law
degree and a PhD in Political Science. His Website is virtualcitizens.com. Click
here to contact Dr. Jones.
References:
[1] See interview with Michael Moore, Democracy Now, 18 June
2007
[2] NPR, June 12, 2007
[3] David Brown. 2006. “Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess'
Death Toll Has Reached 655,000.” Washington Post, Wednesday,
October 11: A12
[4] interview with then Israeli Prime Minister, General Ariel
Sharon, originally published in the Davar (Israel), 17 December
1982. |