June 21, 2007 - Issue 234

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.

 

Your comments are always welcome.