Up against the Great Divide

The task of creating a viable social ethics and facilitating social transformation begins with deciding whether the well-being of humanity, as the fourth-of-July movements have relentlessly pursued in the last three centuries, remains our master context, rather than the broader reality of the well-being of the planet as a fragile breathing, living organism pointed to by our children’s elementary school earth science learning.

This choice has the quality of a religious conversion. The master image that guides our lives determines our behavior. The forces of liberal democracy pursued the cause of justice and equality within human society, and we are the better for their gains, but undermined their own cause in their failure to see that the well-being of the planet is the foundation and guarantee that the well-being of humankind may be achieved.

This ushering of the ‘ecozoic’ age marks the great divide among those who continue to awaken and activate the caring portion of the human family.

I am convinced that to care is to be human. There are two kinds. There are those who objectify their care, and those who simply wait to be cared for. The courage to care is a human choice; deciding to be cared for is more in the nature of a default setting, automatic and perennially self-serving. Unfortunately, some of our post-WWII progressive thinkers fell into the mistaken notion that the cause of justice requires the creation of the cult of victims who are self-consciously vocal in their assertion of rights, but silent in the matter of personal responsibility and social participation. We have in our time compelling and addictive images of those who declare themselves and their kin as victims, and proceed with reactionary measures to alleviate the perceived effects of having been trodden under.

Affirmative actions no longer are temporary corrective measures but are enshrined in the altar of rights. The clamor for human rights in some quarters led to the demonization of social forces deemed to be standing In the way of the vision for ‘equal justice for all.’ Unnecessary political polarization ensued.

Might we change the political tableau a bit? Erstwhile ex-Navy Guam Rotarian, the late W. George Bourland humorously but seriously wrote a how-to handbook on people power in the early 80s entitled, “Who Gets the Antelope’s Liver?” He proposed that society was best served when society is organized to equitably distribute the antelope’s liver. He sensed that Guam was small enough to practice direct democracy in the manner of the Swiss cantons rather than the then, and still current, system of representational democracy. Obviously, no one picked up on his proposal that might have led to Bourland’s decision to resettle in the Continent in ’83. No quarrel with Bourland; only here to point out that previous to the question of equitable distribution of benefits is the issue of ownership, control and management of the means of production, preceded still by the prior issue of access to resources.

Turning the process to its head, as enlightened business today begin factoring into its cost-benefit analysis what is called the state of the ‘natural’ capital in the economic equation, to make the well-being of the planet as the master context of social ethics and social transformation is downright prudent and genuinely conservative, and simultaneously radical in its implications.

Social transformation movements abound like trickles of streams headed towards one river. The master context is the river. Failure to see this is to scatter progressives into a plethora of pitiful pools of private piddling. The whole earth is singularly the main context. All streams must be aware of the river. That’s premise One.

Premise Two is to recognize that there are “rocks in the middle of the road” toward the attainment of the goals and objectives of the new vision. Or, to be consistent with our previous analogy, there are blocks, dams, rapids, cataracts on the river that impede the smooth flow of the healthy planetary currents. Any serious social planner will avoid the pitfalls of shallow Pollyanna idealism by identifying the social up-against-ness, the core blocks that have to be dealt it, otherwise any missional efforts are brought to naught.

Clarity on core social blocks is a personal responsibility in dialogue with emerging consensus. Knowing these blocks informs the change agent of appropriate strategies and tactics to overcome those blocks. Knowing blocks to be intimately woven into the fabric of our cultural milieu, it is difficult to name them, let alone address them with effective action. Precisely because it is painful to face these horrific blocks is our clue of their reality value.

Perusing the discussion in various media, here are four of the most important conclusions that are pertinent to pursuing the vision of a healthy planet:

1. The inordinate power of an oligarchy of transnational corporations and the interlocking web of relationship among those who manage and control them in board rooms and seats of governments has emerged as a power to reckon with. Designed for profitability and growth, these bodies of vast social power control our economic, political, and cultural lives. They have undermined the intents of liberal democracy by creating economic empires worthy of their political cousins during periods of imperial rule to the detriment of genuine democratic process. Their indiscriminate extractive technologies threaten virtually every natural environment. The fluidity of capital movement and production allocation make captive of labor and human capital. The tentacles of their control of databases and communication means frustrate even our quest for the simple truth.

2. A second important block is the various forms of what one may call “reactionary pre-modernism.” In our time, these are religious medievalist of Jewish, Christian and Islamic origins, and similar movements in almost every religious community, including the powerful and motivated fringes of Eastern sectarian groups and fanatic secular ideologues who attempt to recover some idealized past, or pursue top-imposed utopian dreams. All these tendencies are dangerous to the realization of our viable hopes for planetary well-being, as evident in the Baltic, Sub-Asian and Middle East conflicts.

3. The failure of our vaunted U.S. intelligence system, which is now being held accountable for flaws in the assessments that influenced the U.S. invasion of Iraq only magnifies the tainted nature of our information systems. Massively financed mainstream information systems serve the interest of transnational corporations and/or reactionary pre-modernists. It is difficult to get the truth about anything. Money, talent and time are now assembled to create information systems that go around (or take the place of) the grossly deceptive propaganda machines of yesteryears. Anyone with open eyes can glean the media management of news to serve expedient short-term needs.

4. But most alarming, we face the inertia of popular mindsets. The U.S. upper and middle classes are inured to live in some sort of suburban “Pleasantville” where no trouble or conflict exists. Island paradise dreaming is a Pacific version. This makes society’s “silent majority” easy to deceive by smooth-talking, easy-writing propagandists of the status quo. The poorer classes have limited skills, time, or funds to escape these same delusions. Religious fundamentalists, with their rejection of good science and their otherworldly preoccupations, add to the massive denial of sober truths, and hide from the practical citizen’s work called for in our times. As true prophets of all ages have implied, bad religion is a much more dangerous addiction than heroin and cocaine. Identifying these blocks names the “enemy,” and in so doing, they become friendly markers against which one can design winning strategies and tactics to confront them. This will be the focus of the next two remaining weeks of this vacationing teacher.