by
Nellie Bowles
The New York Times
November 9, 2018
by
Franklin Foer
The Washington Post
September 8, 2017
Imagine observing a group of chimpanzees in the woodlands of
western Tanzania. One day, an otherwise ordinary member of the group decides he
will affix wildflowers to the hair on his head and rub a red ochre paste on his
face. Imagine further that he, so adorned, then swaggers among his fellows
gesturing to his new appearance and pointing at and laughing disdainfully at
his group mates. Finally, imagine that this same chimp begins taking overt and
deceitful actions to get what the others consider a disproportionate share of
food that the group has hunted or found.
Three Questions
1. What do you think Mr. Special’s group mates will think of
him, and what consequences might he face for such behavior? His
fellows might ignore his appearance or find it amusing. Then again, the ranking
male and female might take umbrage if the lesser females start given Mr Fancy
the attention and deference they normally give to the two leaders of the group.
Eventually and more probably, his antics regarding food, if they continue for
some time, will likely result in him being beaten and/or driven from the group.
2. Now, imagine a corollary scenario among a group of modern
humans. Think of a business office situation where someone adorns himself and
behaves in a manner suggesting to others that he is superior to them. And that
he begins stealing or bullying to obtain promotion, wealth or communal
resources to a degree that degrades the wellbeing of his group mates? For
example, a cologned, well-coiffed, well-dressed Wall Street financial manager
becomes known in the office for his vanity and arrogance. In his work he
frequently takes action to demolish low income housing that will put
thousands of low income tenants on the street in order to make way for the
construction of expensive, highly profitable townhouses on the same land. Does
our Mr. Profit exemplify the spirit of liberty, equality and fraternity in his
individual and business behavior?
3. How has it come about that the maverick among chimpanzees
scenario is an obvious affront to chimp individual and group morality, yet the corollary
among humans is acceptable?
I kindly ask that you not jump to a conclusion, in the
currently popular mode of “gotcha, see, I can think faster and therefore better
than you,” that I’m a socialist using an evolutionary biology analogy as a
rationale. Also, this essay is neither a sophistic argument intent
on demeaning all points of view other than mine, nor an attempt at rhetorically
deceiving you or clobbering you and your ideas into submission to my way of
thinking. I kindly ask that you stay with me a bit longer. I’m simply trying to
expand thinking not win points of argumentation.
First, I am not a socialist. During thirty plus years of
working and living in Africa, observing firsthand how various forms of national socialism fail, I found little in that social system to recommend to any large
society. Now, consider the following.
You might protest my chimp analogy claiming that
humans are different. Our approach to liberty, equality and fraternity, you
might say, is obviously by necessity more complicated. It’s different because
we have made technological and cultural progress far beyond that of our
hominoid cousins. Consequently, our respective social structures and cultural
systems are not comparable. That “human nature” is nothing more than what we
agree upon in the times we live. Not the pattern of morality that we brought
with us from our social mammal and primate past and the vast majority of the
300,000 years since we became sapiens. That we have been preening and
adorning ourselves around the world for a very long time, and been
competing even longer, within and between groups, for food and other resources,
and other things needed or desired. You would be partially correct.
But this type of human behavior only began within the past
6,000 years, about one quarter of one percent of the entire time of human
existence. Undoubtedly, as our contemporary social mammal and wily monkey and ape
cousins attest, selfishness, lying, trickery and the exploitation of others have always
been a deep part of the human behavioral repertoire. But there is a distinctly, more moral, human pattern that has proven successful for the greatest period of
time. That is, a way of life that one could argue is central to
whatever cultural human nature we have, one that allows for some individual
liberty yet socially safeguards equality, and fosters in individuals a binding
emotional and rational sense of fraternity or fellowship. For examples,
consider the general patterns of life practiced by our ancestral and
contemporary hunter-gatherer groups. This is the social mammal, primate, human
way of surviving and flourishing. And no, in suggesting this I’m not in a state
of noble savage delusion that these patterns of behavior were without their
problems and occasional failures. But the basic pattern of some liberty, along
with concern and action in support of and in harmony with one’s fellows, is to
be human. But, you ask, what about rugged individualism, libertarianism? Both
are mythic fallacies having no record of a society relying on them exclusively
to survive and thrive. More on this later.
This basic, long-standing pattern of self-group equilibrium
has been incurred upon and transformed twice in human cultural evolution. The
first Age of Acquiescence occurred in Mesopotamia following the origin of plant
domestication and urban living during the Bronze Age (3300-1200BCE), and
subsequently elsewhere in Asia and the Americas.
In Mesopotamia, humans were forced and/or acquiesced into a
pattern of life ruled by autocratic states that instituted social, accounting
and codified (legal and administrative) control measures. Notions of liberty,
equality and fraternity as practiced during the immediately previous
hunter-gather phase became radically transformed. See "The
Evolution of Western Individualism, Part I - From the East African Rift to
Silicon Valley."
The second Age of Acquiescence began in the U.S. in the early 20th
Century. This was when U.S. business leaders and the federal government began
using mass media to redefine notions of liberty, equality and fraternity. Why?
To satisfy manufacturers' and financiers' desires for higher profits, and to allay the political class's fear of large populations becoming less under their
control. More about this later.
After the autocracies of the early Mesopotamian kingdoms came
Greek proto-democracy and Roman republicanism. Both were early forms of
representative rule but participation was limited to wealthy aristocratic
males. Liberty, equality and fraternity under these oligarchic plutocracies was
somewhat better than it had been under the autocracies of the Middle East and
Europe, despite the emergent Christian emphasis on the importance of
individuals’ souls. Following the fall of the Roman Empire it would be nearly a
thousand years until a secular focus on the individual would emerge during the
European Renaissance.
Enlightenment I
There then came a time, again in Europe, known as the Age of
Enlightenment. It was then that a potentially better, more egalitarian way of
conducting ourselves, individually and socially, was suggested. This new way of
life was characterized by the seemingly contradictory notions of liberty,
equality and fraternity. The overarching goal was said to be a condition of
individual and group existence with a reasonable level of liberty. That is, a
personal freedom reasonably restrained by notions and institutions insisting
upon fairness and justice. Both liberty and equality, in this sense, were
anchored in the ancient, more personal notion of fraternity - we are all the
same in terms of our needs, we are our brother and sisters’ keeper, and we
should treat each other as we would like ourselves to be treated.
The Age of Enlightenment occurred
in Europe between about 1620 and 1789. It was a period when some of the
continent's best thinkers suggested that Humankind become responsible for
creating knowledge and truth through science; and, using reason, begin
establishing a moral system they believed would lead to the improvement of
individual and societal living conditions.
This was a way of thinking and an approach to knowledge and human living very different from the autocratic, theocentric and proto-democratic understandings and methods that preceded it. Enlightenment thinkers asserted (Bacon) and were demonstrating (Galileo and others) that answers to questions about the composition and functioning of the world and the cosmos could be found through empirical observation, experimentation and the scientific method.
They also believed that humans could devise better ways of behaving individually and organizing themselves socially, to the benefit of the greatest number of persons, compared to the ideas and methods of the past, by living in accordance with moral principles developed through reasoning. In the moral realm a range of ideals was put forward and gradually adopted by most European nations. These notions included liberty, progress, tolerance, equality, justice, fraternity, constitutional and representational government, and the separation of church and state.
The subsequent history of the West, 1789 to the present, saw many of these ideals contested yet eventually accepted and institutionalized. See Steven Pinker's 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Prominent among these institutionalized ideals was the importance of individual freedom from tyranny as formalized in certain declarations of human rights. Notable was the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), the motivations underlying the French Revolution (1789), and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791).
It is important to note that the institutionalization of individual freedoms and rights found in the proclamations and rebellions of the late 18th Century focused almost exclusively on freedom and protection from the tyranny of autocratic states. Other potentially tyrannical forces such as those that might somehow be imposed by members of the commercial and financial class, overtly or indirectly, were not of equal concern. Abuses made by members of the commercial and financial classes were economic matters that the people ceded to mostly local governing bodies. These bodies were, in turn, empowered to oversee and control economic activities through legislation, precedent, and regulatory and legal enforcement.
By the early 17th Century the potential abuse of power and influence by commercial and financial forces over the public was growing and acknowledged, but it was not yet as worrisome as the threats of tyrannical power from government and religion. Commerce and finance were seen primarily as concerned with the workings of markets of goods and services; and that individuals were free to participate in these markets, to any degree, or not. Governments in particular, if they chose to do so, could pass laws and mount armed force to enforce their tyranny over the people, but members of the commercial and financial class did not yet have such power, in kind or degree.
However, beginning with the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) members of the commercial and financial class of Europe began to greatly increase their power over society based on their ever-growing accumulation of wealth. This quickly led to greater closeness between the political and economic classes in terms of their common and related interests in ever increasing the power and wealth they could wield over the public. Not surprisingly, many of those cycling in and out of government were also heavily invested in business and manufacturing.
European
Colonialism (1500-1960) became the global geopolitical and economic
effort in which the mutual interests of European governance and business were
tangibly united and put into action.
1897 print depicting
a battle between British forces and Mahdist fighters in the Sudan (Library of
Congress)
Despite the beginning of the abolition of slavery movement
in England the late 18th Century, notions of individual freedom from state and
economic tyranny, especially for colonized peoples, were, at best, given lip
service by European missionaries. At worst, such protections were outright
denied by the colonial governing policies and practices of, to name only two,
"indirect rule" (Britain) and the "iron fist in the velvet
glove" (France). Some of the most horrific abuses were undertaken by the
Belgians in the Congo basin and are described in King
Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by
Adam Hochschild, 1999.
With reference to Africa the "dual
mandate" rationale for colonization was best described in 1922 by
English soldier and colonial administrator, Frederick
Lugard (1858-1945) as the civilizing of the Africans and the
production, extraction, and transfer of wealth from their land to Britain.*
Map of the world
showing the last European country to control each territory
In the U.S., the Civil War aside, it was not until the
presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) that the tyrannical powers of
industry and commerce were acknowledged and protective actions begun by the
U.S. government.
Despite the brutalities of the European colonial period that
continued up to the late 1960s, notable protections of individual freedoms and
rights were declared for all the world's people in the early-mid 20th
Century. This included the charter of the League of Nations (1920), that of the
UN (1945), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
Since the middle of the 20th Century a global conflict
and various social movements sought to return the world to the original
understandings of liberty, equality and fraternity as outlined during the
Enlightenment. These included World War II, the Age of Rights – Human and Civil
(1920-1980), the post-colonial Independence movements, among others.
Enlightenment Lost
In the late 20th Century and early 21st Century Hi Tech has not been a liberating force for greater individual freedom
and control as many people currently think. It is a continuation of the
ironclad control the powerful and wealthy in the U.S. grasped at and won during
the early-mid 20th Century. See the BBC Two documentary Century of the
Self (2002) for a chronicle of the various ways that corporations and
governments, beginning in the late 1920s, used psychological theories and
techniques in advertising and public relations to assess, create and fulfill
the desires of the public. It was this beginning of business and government's
appeal to primitive impulses that gave less bearing on larger issues outside
the narrow self-interests of consumer society - a shift from a need to a desire
culture. Paul
Mazur, a Lehman Brothers banker on Wall Street in 1929, put it this way:
"People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old
have been entirely consumed. ... Man's desires must overshadow his needs."
Although we still think we are free, we have become, especially since the 1950s, the slaves of our desires.
If I read Yuval Harari correctly, as cited extensively in the above New
York Times article linked above and his 2018 book 21
Lessons for the 21st Century, Hi Tech will lead to the coup de
grâce of an individualism of true freedom and democracy most places in the
world, and there is little that can be done to stop it.
Here are excerpts of Harari’s views from the article linked
above:
“He told the audience that free will is
an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves.
Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue
that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like ‘the customer is
always right’ and ‘follow your heart,’ and that these ideas no longer work in
the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.
“Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused
on building the future, Mr. Harari continued, while most of the world’s people
are not even needed enough to be exploited. ‘Now you increasingly feel that
there are all these elites that just don’t need me,’ he said. ‘And it’s much
worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.’
“The useless class he describes is
uniquely vulnerable. ‘If a century ago you mounted a revolution against
exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us
because they need us,’ he said, citing army service and factory work.
“Now it is becoming less clear why the
ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. ‘You’re totally
expendable,’ he told the audience.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Enlightenment was led by a variety of moral thinkers in
pursuit of better living for all individuals and groups. Currently, Hi Tech is led by
technical thinkers and venture capitalists pursuing profit. They are funded to a large degree by the federal government (science and tech research grants, and military contracts), and backed by the legislation and enforcement of the government in their joint pursuit of every more power and personal wealth for members of the upper economic and political classes. The powerful and wealthy shall prevail through
Tech and thereby have the final say over morality - freedom, justice, and
individual empowerment and flourishing.
Again, if I understand Harari properly, I doubt the elites’ quest for ever more power and wealth will ever be satisfied and they will, in turn, allow more freedom. And if they do it will be a freedom they “allow,” not one that comes from noble moral principles or organically from the hearts and minds of the people and their best thinkers. But we will continue to be led to believe we are free and our societies are becoming more just and equal. Since Edward Bernays in the mid-1920s they have never been and the future will be no different.
Again, if I understand Harari properly, I doubt the elites’ quest for ever more power and wealth will ever be satisfied and they will, in turn, allow more freedom. And if they do it will be a freedom they “allow,” not one that comes from noble moral principles or organically from the hearts and minds of the people and their best thinkers. But we will continue to be led to believe we are free and our societies are becoming more just and equal. Since Edward Bernays in the mid-1920s they have never been and the future will be no different.
That said, I think, as long as we do not become extinct,
freedom, justice and equality will survive on the fringes, and in the crevices
of our lives and psyches. In our silent walks in mountains and woods and on
deserted beaches. In our observances of sunrises and sunsets, and in our loves
and dreams. But no longer in our institutions for they are no longer ours.
There really is no stemming or reversing this tide.
But two centuries later this new and better way was co-opted
by the forces of wealth and power and reconfigured. That is, cleverly modified
in a manner where the people were persuaded that their liberty was more about
the freedom to deviate than about freedom from tyranny. That they were free to
become unequally superior to their fellows, and that their obligations to
themselves as individuals were far more important than their responsibilities
to the needs of their brothers and sisters in society. Finally, that the
manufacturers and the politicians knew just what to promise and provide for you
to excel in your specialness. And, most astonishing of all, the majority of
people believed them, bought their products, and gave them their votes.
This is how the noble ideals of the Enlightenment became
abandoned and transformed into an all-powerful politico-economic system under
which the people falsely believed they were truly free individuals and that
their groups would flourish by them pursuing style and convenience over moral
considerations of equality and fraternity. Hi Tech, led by Google, Apple,
Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) are the prime movers of for institutionalizing these views
and supplanting politics and governance as forces of tyranny. This fallacious
recasting of the Enlightenment has spread from the West, the U.S. in
particular, to the rest of the world.
Now, you can say that people are free to support or not
support GAFA. But are they really, based on what we’ve learned about the
wealthy and powerful’s powers of persuasion via marketing and mass media?
Beginning in the 1930s and especially so since the end of WWII, politicians and
Madison Avenue successfully transformed freedom into obedience to them yet
leaving the public thinking they are truly free, and persuading most of the
public to exchange satisfying their material needs as their first priority for
the pursuit of their desires and self-glorification. Some would say that the
power over the hearts and minds of the majority of the U.S. public wielded by
GAFA far surpasses all others including the political class and our
universities.
I conclude this essay with the thoughts of someone very much
in line with the thinking of Harari, Franklin Foer, writer at The
Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic. From his 2017
essay linked above, Foer wrote this about Hi Tech and the future of liberty,
equality and fraternity:
“More than any previous coterie of
corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired
image of it. They think they have the opportunity to complete the long merger
between man and machine — to redirect the trajectory of human evolution.
...
“It is assumed that
libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn't wholly wrong.
High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there. But if you listen
hard to the titans of tech, it's clear that their worldview is something much
closer to the opposite of a libertarian's veneration of the heroic, solitary
individual. The big tech companies think we're fundamentally social beings,
born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the
wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic
world to be made whole. ... By stitching the world together, they can cure its
ills.
...
“Rhetorically, the tech companies
gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the ‘user’ — but
their worldview rolls over it. ... The big tech companies are shredding the
principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed
privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their
hostility toward intellectual property. In the realm of economics, they justify
monopoly by suggesting that competition merely distracts from the
important problems like erasing language barriers and building artificial
brains.
...
“When it comes to the most central
tenet of individualism — free will — the tech companies have
a different way. They hope to automate the choices, both large and small,
we make as we float through the day. It's their algorithms that suggest the
news we read, the goods we buy, the paths we travel, the friends we invite into
our circles.
“The time has arrived to consider the
consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our role in determining the human
path. ... Something like the midcentury food revolution is now reordering
the production and consumption of knowledge. Our intellectual habits are being
scrambled by the dominant firms. ... In the realm of knowledge, monopoly
and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will
inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste.
Concentration is followed by homogenization.
...
“Over time, the long merger of man and
machine has worked out pretty well for man. But we're drifting into a new era,
when that merger threatens the individual. We're drifting toward monopoly,
conformism....”
We’re screwed, really. The Dark Mountain Project folks have it
right. Their passive, write new stories recommendation, however, is just not
good enough. I have a personal strategy including the Stoic’s “open door” if it
all becomes unbearable. I’m still trying to come up with one for Humankind.
Catastrophes may be the only opportunities to force change.
Nationally, what leaders do we produce when Enlightenment
liberty, equality and fraternity have been transformed by the wealthy and
powerful to mean freedom to become ever more unequal for members of my tribe,
not the rest of you? Obama was elected on original Enlightenment values and
ideals. The 2016 U.S. presidential election backlash of the white acquiescent
masses was profound: I am free to be unequal, may my brother get his own or
die! Why it even took the wealthy and powerful on the Right by surprise, how
effective their efforts at turning the Enlightenment against itself had been.
Dylan and others said in the 1960s “the times are a
changin’.” They haven’t. It was a loud, sincere voice for a return to
Enlightenment liberty, equality and fraternity. But it was quickly strangled by
government as a law and order matter. It was further sated by the
manufacturers, with the help of their Mad Men, with sugar-coated foods, fancy
clothes & jewelry, and all manner of affordable gadgetry. Know thyself? Value fairness and equality? Be
thy brother’s keeper? Tread softly in Nature? Pfft. Acquiesce.
The system of consumptive self-glorification, growing
inequality and a greater ignoring of the needs of, and in fact punishing, our
brothers and sisters for protesting their lack of freedom, equality and
fraternal treatment, ground on, and the powerful threw more laws, cops, money
and advertising at the problem.
And beating the loudest drum these days are white privileged
libertarians and others with beliefs such as these:
“Crucial about all this is that the
commercial seers who get the future right will grow stunningly rich for being
right. The more convenient life is, the more unequal are the living. But as
opposed to a sign of hardship, the happier truth is that life is truly cruel
when the talented aren’t getting rich. That’s when we know that no one is
devising ways to make our lives easier, cheaper, healthier, more productive,
and everything else good. Life without rising inequality is very much like life
with socialism.”
https://centerforindividualism.org/surging-wealth-inequality-is-a-happy-sign-that-life-is-becoming-much-more-convenient/.
https://centerforindividualism.org/surging-wealth-inequality-is-a-happy-sign-that-life-is-becoming-much-more-convenient/.
Hi Tech is the most recent mass manipulation method of the
wealthy and powerful. Freethinkers, skeptics, social activists and all others are dragged along
by the plodding, sometimes thundering, herd of humans the powerful have corralled and broken via media, and who have themselves willing acquiesced to the bridle bit of consumer capitalism.
In looking for a solution I’m only coming up with a personal
strategy. The herd and the wealthy and powerful that entice, pacify and drive
them cannot be stopped or turned. By the end of the drive, from infancy to death, we all become
fattened up for the virtual abattoirs of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and logged into commerce’s bottom lines and the media’s surveys and voter exit polls. Driven,
sated, dead and discarded - all to the glory of wealth and power, from sea to
shining sea.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Don’t talk about what a good person
should be like. Be that person.” The problem is, ideas about what a good person
should be like have been commandeered by the wealthy and powerful classes and
reformulated, both with the public’s acquiescence, to mean a kind a good that
is best for the wealthy and powerful, but not one that is best for all of us.
Being virtuous in a true Enlightenment sense in a society
with a widely accepted moral system opposing those ideals and goals is not easy. Nor is it easy
to change a moral system when the rulers and ruled are in sync. It can be done
locally, very locally, but rarely at higher social levels without great
hardship arising from catastrophe or revolution.
Enlightenment reasoning worked for two and a half centuries. A thousand
years of feudalism and darkness preceded that. Will we survive to see a second
Enlightenment? Will it be anything like the first?
_______________
*- Circumcision
and Coffee in Uganda: Bamasaaba Responses to Incursion, Colonialism and
Nationalism 1840-1962 by James E. Lassiter, 2017.
