Moral Politics

¡Hola! Everybody…

I haven’t blogged since sometime in early January – the longest blog hiatus I’ve ever taken. My new gig (that I absolutely love!) has me busy. It’s a whole new set of skills I’m exercising -- mostly writing but also entailing cultivating a different perspective. I suspect I will be very busy for a long time. LOL I miss blogging and will probably resume posting regularly, though not as often as I have in the past.

Switching tact, in an essay reminiscent of a “man bites dog” story, former Goldman Sachs executive, Greg Smith, wrote a blistering NY Times Op Ed piece that’s trending today. In it he writes of “… the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity,” and that he “can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive” as he has ever seen it.

Really Greg? I’m shocked! On the other hand, you have been at Goldman Sachs for over 12 years, have made a boat load of money doing the same shit you are now rejecting as immoral, and now you come clean?

::blank stare::

Where were you before all this? Where were you during the time leading to the coming of the Great Repression in 2008? Excuse me if I call bullshit on your hypocritical ass and let you know ahead of time I will not be buying your forthcoming book I’m sure your ghost writer is outlining as we speak.

* * *

It is not what you look at but what you see.

 -- Henry David Thoreau

Most of my readers know how much I detest overly simplistic explanations. Take these for example:

Idiots are consistently voted into office = Voters/ people are stupid.

The subprime meltdown was the consequence of clueless borrowers.[1]

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

I could go on ad nauseum with a list of the foolish and narrow-minded shit people pull out of their arses in their quest to form opinions. I believe that the greatest postmodern challenge facing us is our inability to apply what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination (1959). Mills described the sociological imagination as the capacity to shift from one perspective to another: from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to evaluation of the national budgets of the world; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. Simply put, the sociological imagination is the capacity to view issues from a wider perspective -- inclusive of divergent points of view.

This lack of a sociological imagination is killing us – literally speaking.

We blame “a nation of idiots” on the election of an idiot; lazily ignoring the massive propaganda machine that idiot is tied to. We blame borrowers in what is the greatest financial scam in our nation’s history, ignoring the decades of deregulation and dismantling of government insight that paved the way, not just for the subprime meltdown, but also Enron and every other corporate malfeasance, since the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s.

In fact, it is a common practice of conservatives to set up government agencies for failure (via taking away funding) and then blame any failure, not on the cause (often lack of oversight—deregulation), but the very agencies they set up to fail. We ignore the fact that a gun gives people -- many unstable -- the power to inflict destruction like no other instrument. Sure pencils don’t make people misspell words, but let me see how many people you can shred with one pencil as opposed to an automatic rifle.

::blank stare::

The genius of the conservative movement lies in how they have convinced you that a regressive rather than a progressive tax structure is better for you (they call it “tax relief”). It’s how they convinced a number of you to go along with trickle-down economics -- an economic theory advocating for upward shifts in wealth and income no credible economist has ever endorsed.

As cognitive linguist, George Lackoff, has shown, our opinions are most often driven by the beliefs, or better put -- by the metaphors -- we live by (2006). Conservatives have exploited this fact for some time and that is partly the reason why people voted for Bush II or still see Palin as something other than warped. Most importantly, it is why you vote against your own economic interests. Conservative operatives discovered that people vote their values, not on the issues. Therefore, if you can frame, say, “family values” in a conservative way, you have co-opted the most important metaphor we all live by -- families.

Progressives have labored under the false notion that reason or issues should come first. Yes, issues are important, but people vote on values (frames) – people make decisions based on emotions  -- and if you can’t connect with people on values, you will never get your agenda on board. Let us take the following facts as an example:

During the Iraq War, an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted a timetable for pulling out our troops. On economic policy, most Americans support stronger government regulations to protect citizens. On trade, polls consistently show the public is very suspicious of the free trade agreements that have hurt the middle class [2]. On health care, surveys consistently show that about two-thirds of those asked desire a government-guaranteed universal health-insurance system -- even if that means higher taxes.

If, as polling data consistently shows, the mainstream is more left of center, then why aren’t these issues on the table for public discourse? Part of the answer lies in the reality that the issues have not been framed adequately. Part of this lack is the result of a lack of resources and access. Powerful interests invested in undermining progressive policies, have unlimited media access – indeed they often own much of the media. One of the ways issues are framed is through repetition. Jon Stewart from The Daily Show has made a career out of showing hilarious video clip compilations of right-wing pundits and leaders repeating the same emotionally charged words over and over. 

Far right-wing politicians use this technique consistently. Santorum frames his attack on women’s reproductive rights as a life and death moral struggle. His expressed and constantly repeated belief or frame (echoed 24/7 on mainstream news media cycles) is that as a society we are locked in a crusade against those who wish to persecute Christians. His key words include “reckless,” “immoral,” “dangerous,” and his overriding metaphor is one of war – the war of “good” vs. “evil.”

This is a very effective way to express and embed an idea. The words come with frames of reference attached. Those frames in turn latch on to and activate deeper, subconscious frames. When repeated every day, the words serve to reinforce deep frames by actually strengthening neural connections in the brains of listeners. Even if you are “smart” or consider yourself a latte-drinking, NPR-listening, sophisticated liberal, this onslaught of frames will have an impact on your thinking. At the very least, these frames serve to move the “center” of the political landscape to the far right, in the process relegating progressive ideas tom the margins of the national dialog. In other words, progressive ideas and policies are not even up for discussion and whether you agree with them or not, we are all the poorer because of it.

In that way, I can stand up on a stump and yell out catch phrases such as “family values” or “tough on crime” and immediately in your brain a barrage of conservative-framed issues appear. I can blurt out, “tax and spend” and immediately conservative frames come to your mind. And this is how public consent is manufactured (Herman & Chomsky, 2002) rather than agreed upon in a conscious, democratic manner.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

References

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2002). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media (reprint ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. (click here)

Lakoff, G. (2006). Thinking points: Communicating our American values and vision: A progressive's handbook. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (You can download a PDF version of this book for free by clicking here)

Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination (reprint, annotated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

---

[1] While the government sponsored mortgage giants were certainly not blameless, Federal Reserve data shows conclusively that it was private mortgage brokers, not Fannie and Freddie, who drove the subprime housing bubble:

·         More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

·         Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

[2] Public opinion polls suggest that Americans are deeply suspicious of free trade agreements. A September 2010 NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, for instance, found that 69 percent of respondents believe the deals cost more jobs than they create, compared to only 18 percent who believe the reverse.

Sunday Sermon [Karma and Evolution]

Hola mi gente...

I haven't been writing for myself at all these past few weeks. I am immersed in my my job and it's taken all my time. Once I get my myself more grounded, I think I'll have some interesting posts to share.

When the historical Buddha asked us to examine our relationship to the elements as a path to the realization to the awareness that our body has no separate, independent existence, he was encouraging us to become scientists of the self. His instructions were based in part on one of his era’s principles known as the law of karma.

In Sanskrit, the word karma means “to do” or “to make,” and refers to the fact that every action is followed by consequences. As I have written before, in common modern usage karma has been corrupted to mean “payback” and has become synonymous with retribution. This is a faulty and misinformed concept of karma.

The Hindu law of karma, which was current when the Buddha lived, was concerned mostly with an individual’s actions in the world, and how the consequences of those actions would affect that person’s destiny, even in future lives. For example, if one person hurts another, that sets up whole series of events that ends in the first person experiencing pain. People today like to say, “Everything that goes around, comes around.” ::sigh::

The Buddha added a completely new dimension to this law by emphasizing that karma is also a psychological conditioning process that operates in this very life. He recognized that our thoughts as well as our actions have consequences and that those consequences take place in our own mind.

The Buddha advised us not to try to tease out all the specifics of the entanglement of our karma, saying it was imponderable. We could never isolate or measure all of the events and processes that have produced this particular here and now. What is important is to see the fact that nothing arises independent of causes and conditions. Equally important is that we become aware how unwholesome states such as hatred and greed create suffering. What happens when we do this is that we begin to see ourselves and each moment as embedded within all of creation.

Karma has nothing to do with other people getting their "payback."

All of this got me thinking (always a dangerous thing) and I came upon a series of photographs of the development of the human fetus. I was taken immediately at how it seems as if the development is a reflection of our evolutionary history.

Note: for the religious quacks that refuse to be convinced of evolution, please tell me you don’t believe the next time a vaccine created through the science of evolution saves your whacked out ass.

Looking at these photos, I came away thinking that the scientific story of evolution can offer a new angle on the idea of reincarnation. Life itself seems to reincarnate in form after form, with new forms of locomotion, perception, or types of consciousness. In fact, the human condition can be seen as our shared incarnation, part of common “evolutionary karma.”

Evolutionary science is even showing us some of the faces of our previous shared past. You can see, twitching away on a Petri dish, a living example of past life as a single-celled organism. In a water-breathing fish, you can imagine a version of yourself in a previous life, swimming through the single ocean that once covered the earth. You can perhaps more easily recognize yourself as a great ape, or as a Homo Habilis in the Stone Age.

But what struck me was that our shared lives could be even more easily recognized by looking at individual development in the womb. Think about it: within a nine-month period we develop from a single cell organism to a complex mammal, keeping the adaptations we might need and discarding those that are unnecessary, such as gills, and downsizing others, such as the acute olfactory region of the brain, since smell is no longer as essential to our survival as humans.

In the book, What Is Life? Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis put forward the depth of our inheritance: “We share more than 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees, sweat fluids reminiscent of seawater, and crave sugar that provided our ancestors with energy three billion years before the first space station had evolved. We carry our past with us.”

The notion that we have previous lives in the evolutionary past can extend beyond biology, into the realm of elemental forces and cycles. After all, the entire earth was once a cloud of gas, and later cooling into a molten mass. Were we not part of those too? The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in The Heart of Understanding, “As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. And I was a rock. This is not poetry; it is science. This is not a question of a belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on earth.”

The concept of life evolving is not foreign to Buddhism, whether it be told in legends of reincarnation, or as the interconnection of all things in the universe. And perhaps most importantly it is expressed through the core belief in the possibility of transformation in this very life.

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization...